During the mid-nineties I shuttled between Philadelphia, Chicago, Frankfurt and Cairo at least a dozen times. For pleasure, Cairo won hands down. From ’94 to ’97 I spent about four months in and around Cairo trying to launch a vegetable division of a corn seed company. Alas, without success. However, I became acquainted with some of the most interesting and friendly people on earth. Nothing beats a European education, and…

Last night ‘The Illusionist’ put me to sleep. But I bolted up when the orange tree fruited without flowering. I imagined nearly a half-dozen people across the world shaking their heads in displeasure. Years ago Anne Raver wrote a nice article about movies that screw up garden-related details.I long for the old days (“when movies […]

Several years ago I tried to find our town’s trash dump. Turns out there is no such thing. I called the Bucks County commissioner’s office. None in the county. I searched on the internet. What a mess! The nearest place I could take some exceptional “trash”—non-essentials of deceased relatives that I wished to throw out in a ritual manner—was over 25 miles away in New Jersey. Too tired to drive…

From 1977 to 1979 I rented a small apartment on the 2100 block of North Kimball Avenue in Chicago, Illinois. This neighborhood, Logan Square, was a mile or so south of Albany Park, an easy city walk from one of the greatest concentrations of ethnic Poles in the world. Only Warsaw has more Poles than the city of Chicago. Their language, manner and food are everywhere.Poles move around, and are…

It’s not a coincidence that people between the ages of 40 and 70 years comprise 90% of gardeners. Gardening takes—and gives—time. Time spent, invested, and enjoyed. Like a house, a garden is meant to be inhabited. Hours savored, not minutes; weeks satisfied, not days; years fulfilled, not months. To garden is to live. The origin of the word, “season”, is “the time to sow seeds”, from which the meaning led…