J. P. Morgan, the celebrated financier, famously observed, “If you have to ask the price, you can’t afford it”. I’ve always viewed this quote as a sort of anti-proverb along the lines of “You can’t be too rich or too thin” and “Living well is the best revenge”. These are members-only bromides to comfort the […]
The house where we’re staying is located on California’s central coast, which has a subtropical, Mediterranean climate characterized by warm, dry summers and mild winters. It never gets cold here, and in my limited experience along the coast, it never really gets hot; the air temperature is rarely above 75°F. But the sun is intense. […]
This story begins earlier this year, just as the very first crocuses peeped from the frosted ground. One cold bright morning, George Ball, the Proprietor of W. Atlee Burpee, the gardening company, discovered a curious-looking green envelope in his mailbox. He noticed the pages gave off a distinct bouquet: verdant, earthy and curiously intoxicating. The […]
Wilson Ramsay recorded this moving version of the traditional song “Motherless Children”. I say “traditional” only because, regardless of who wrote it first, the song has passed through many hands. Although Ramsay’s is my favorite, its influences can be heard somewhat in the recordings of Blind Willie Johnson and Reverend Gary Davis. Johnson was a […]
New president of the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society, Drew Becher, had some large and magical shoes to fill—those of Jane Pepper, who transformed the PHS, both its annual indoor flower show and its urban horticulture project, into the nation’s largest and most effective. Jane Pepper’s leadership was also larger than life and spanned most of her […]
Flowering plants are the insects of the plant kingdom. They dominate every terrestrial environment except the northern coniferous forests, and they make up almost 90% of all plant species. It’s no wonder then that most people think of little else when they think of plants. But their older, less prominent cousins, an example being the […]
The Internet has rapidly changed the way we do everything from banking and booking reservations to seeking advice from fellow gardeners. Certainly, it is a very convenient place to retrieve information and share ideas. However, there is a danger to the rapid exchange of unverified information, which few seem to mention: the spreading and accepting […]
Ever since Europeans began colonizing North America about 400 years ago, apple has been an important crop, used fresh or cooked and as cider and farm animal feed. In 1905, S.A. Beach, of the New York Agricultural Experiment Station at Geneva, published The Apples of New York, in two volumes. This book exhaustively catalogues and […]
Organisms (animals, plants, or microbes) living outside their historical natural ranges are termed “exotic”, and only rarely is this applied as a positive attribute. But importing exotic species is as old as human travel. Most gardens are teeming with exotic plants, and at least half of all woody plant species offered in U.S. wholesale grower […]
Often sports critics and detractors of general pop culture trace the gladiator-like quality of professional sports back to decadent Roman times. But this is only partly true. Let us consider American football, which has sickened me deeply for the past 48 hours, and I do not even watch TV. The American circus played the greatest role […]
