Three days with no water and electricity—odd how little it bothered me. In fact, it was both amusing and instructive. A psychosomatic spot quiz. The irritation lasted only a few minutes. My dad’s motto, “Expect the worst, and when the good comes, it feels better”, has become meaningful with age. However, I experience a profound sense of detachment at both ends.
Of course, the dogs and cats noticed nothing, which dawned…
“First the house, then the garden . . .” seems to be an inescapable truth of home ownership. Some folks pretend that the garden holds greater sway, pride of place or center stage. However, wake them at 3 A.M. with the question which is more important. They’ll confess their sins. When the kitchen, toilet, easy […]
My latest godson recently visited me. One morning while making home versions of McMuffins—little turkey sausages between oat-floured English muffins, with smoked Gouda slices added to one, alfalfa sprouts to another, little 4-year old Henry looked over to me from his chair-chair and asked, “Uncle George, where are the strawberries?” “I have some nice ones,” […]
Claude Hope was my professional mentor. He was pressed into this service while in his 50s by my father with whom he had worked for many years. Claude was one of the founders of the PanAmerican Seed Company, after working in Costa Rica for already nearly two decades. B. Y. Morrison had sent him down […]
I’ll never forget the colleague, a lady plant breeder, who, while inspecting row after row of late season petunia trials for signs of botrytis resistance, looked up from her stud records and sighed, “I just love being pregnant – if I could, I’d be pregnant all the time”. She revealed on another occasion – I […]
Mediterranean societies view trees as rare and prized possessions. As a result they are seldom found in towns and cities except as monuments or landmarks. Orchards and forests are cultivated away from cities and vice versa. Cemeteries are cleared, as are most sacred places. By contrast, trees thrive in Northern Europe even in the densest […]
Named after ‘Impression Rising Sun’, a painting by Monet, impressionism revolutionized painting to an extent he neither anticipated nor welcomed. “I am in it (the movement) but I seldom see my colleagues . . . the little chapel has become a school that opens its doors to any hack.” A truly inspired and extremely rare […]
Once I visited a military museum at Saumur in France, housed in a castle there. Its main collection was of saddles—every example of whatever man has fashioned to seat himself on a horse was on display, from almost all the armies in the world, old and new, north and south, east and west. I was […]
At Duke’s Nicholas School of Environmental Science, researchers blow CO2 through stands of trees to determine the positive effect—if any—of global warming. Thus far, it isn’t conclusive that there is a benefit from any increase in carbon dioxide—a theoretical boon for trees. Some experts speculated that tree health would be the only silver lining of […]
The floating Savior heard the pleas. Cool weather arrived Friday afternoon like a soothing daydream—a bit of Lompoc right here in the heart of Pennsylvania’s Delaware Valley.After the shipping lanes from Great Britain and France were blockaded by the Germans in WWI, the US horticultural seed industry (vegetable, flower and herb seed) struggled to find […]
