They don’t make Mother’s Day like they used to. Signed into being with Woodrow Wilson’s 1917 Presidential Proclamation, the U.S. Mother’s Day holiday has been tainted with rampant commercialism almost from its inception. Anna Jarvis, a stalwart Philadelphian, had made the holiday her mission since her mother’s death in 1905. Her late mother, Anna Maria […]
Climate change is too important to leave to the experts. For years now, partisans on both sides of the climate issue have flung graphs, glaciers and hockey sticks at each other, generating as much heat as greenhouse gases, but little consensus. For most Americans, climate change arrived on Thursday, June 23, 1988. This was the […]
Since the beginning of April, I’ve been keenly aware that the days are rapidly getting longer. Like a spool unraveling. The Sun rises and sets farther north. Now even in the upper Midwest on the first day of spring, the Sun feels positively hot on your face. Plants have sensed this too and are bursting. […]
My fellow Americans, our country is facing a tomato crisis. In the prolonged and unexpected cold snap in early January of this year, 70 percent of Florida’s tomato crop was wiped out, leaving traumatized fruits to rot on the ground beneath shriveled vines. With a weekly harvest of 25 million pounds of tomatoes, Florida is […]
In my yard, it’s no longer possible to grow cherries to harvest because the flowers and nascent fruit are devoured by Japanese beetles (Popillia japonica). Roses too, a favored food, are decimated. I had never seen a Japanese beetle before 10 years ago. That was when they first arrived in my area. But the beetle […]
Spring comes as the earth quickens its pace toward the cosmic explosion of that young star we call the Sun. Physicists reckon the Sun is merely one of the infinite shards of the Big Bang that took place 14 billion (or so) years ago. Spring’s explosive past makes it only fitting that so many historic […]
Among the earliest visitors to their gardens each year are Americans of Irish extraction. Undeterred by the blustery wind and cold, shovels in hand, they are observing the proud tradition of planting potatoes on St. Patrick’s Day. Many Americans know how the failure of the potato crop between 1845 and 1852 caused mass starvation and […]
Sometimes everything falls into perfect harmony. Like a safecracker opening a massive vault, the management of America’s best and largest flower show pulled off a huge score, as much a tribute to departing president Jane Pepper as to the maturing skills of the recently appointed Sam Lemheney, the show’s director. And perhaps it augers well […]
Most of the time, the garden is a quiet place, an idyllic refuge from the madding crowd. The loudest noise is usually the gentle buzz of bees or hum of hummingbirds on nectar-gathering sorties. Once in awhile, though, a controversy will alight amid the flowers and vegetables, the garden gloves come off, and, before you […]
It is difficult to grasp the scale of destruction, death and horror visited upon Haiti by the earthquake that shook the island country on January 12th. The estimated death toll–upwards of 200,000–is staggering; if the United States were to have a disaster with proportionate casualties, the loss of life would top 6 million. Military and […]
