The Delaware Valley can rightfully proclaim itself the capital of American public gardens. Our region is home to an unrivalled collection of world class gardens and arboreta, remarkable for their quality, distinctive personalities and specialties.

The fortunate residents of the Philadelphia region, can, by travelling a short distance, find themselves in other worlds. One might visit Longwood’s stately formal gardens, tour the fanciful themed gardens of Chanticleer, explore arboreta of the first rank like The Scott Arboretum of Swarthmore College, wander Bartram’s Garden, the place where American botany first bloomed, or muse in the serenity of Shofuso, the Japanese house and garden in Fairmount Park.

These are just a very few of the many splendorous public gardens in our area. The budget-smart travelers – or non-traveler – planning the summer’s “staycation”, take note; your family can look forward to a summer filled with exceptional landscapes brimming with botanical treasures. The wonder of gardens is their ever-changing nature: to paraphrase Heraclitus, you never visit the same garden twice.

Today the Philadelphia-based American Public Gardens Association is convening the annual conference of its 500 member organizations from across the country, which includes public gardens, arboreta, historical landscapes, zoos and farm gardens.

The membership represents a dazzling range of the garden experience: formal gardens, arts and crafts gardens, rock gardens, swamp gardens, water gardens, Zen gardens, tropical gardens, ethnobotanical gardens, topiary gardens, rose gardens, rhododendron gardens, desert gardens, palm gardens and altogether wild-looking gardens that merge with natural habitat. With varying landscapes, specialties and personalities, America’s public gardens offer a 360-degree view of horticulture.

As the curators and preservers of our botanical legacy, the association members’ collective mission is to at once look back into the past, forward into the future and focus on the everpresent present.

Right now, the stewardship of public gardens is coming to a fork in the garden path. Declining attendance and shrinking support from cash-strapped states and municipalities have garden administrators looking for new ways to entice the public and boost paid admissions.

There is a tendency – a temptation – to make the gardens friendlier and more accessible to the general public by introducing new features and events that are termed “outreach.” One can almost imagine long tendril-like green arms reaching lovingly, longingly out of the garden in the hope of enticing new and more visitors.

Over the past few years, various public gardens have increased educational programs for children and adults, introduced concerts and cafes, showcased art exhibitions, expanded gift shops, made themselves available for weddings and private parties, and introduced bicycle paths. (Look both ways before you inspect that rare hydrangea!). In a quest for timeliness, gardens have introduced informative programs about global warming, endangered plant species, water conservation and ecology.

While one may admire the garden administrators’ doughty entrepreneurial spirit, I think there is a better way to go about things. Making the gardens more like the rest of the world is not the primrose path to success and solvency. Instead of having the gardens move towards the public, I think it better to move the public towards the garden.

The greatest opportunity for preserving the gardens, increasing the number of visitors and boosting financial support is to convey to the public the singular experience the gardens offer. What some may view as the drawbacks of public gardens – their otherworldliness, quiet noneventfulness and near-non-existent news value – I believe are the very qualities that will ensure their success.

I frequently visit public gardens with friends who are new to the experience, and, as we meander about the gardens, my companions seem to undergo a kind of transformation. They walk more slowly, they speak more quietly, and sometimes fall contentedly silent for long stretches. They seem to be floating through the landscape, alighting here or there to study a plant or take in a perspective.

My friends have become entranced by the garden’s “genius loci” – the spirit of the place. As we depart the garden, my friends seem to exist in a new climate – a climate that would be scarcely enhanced by a gift shop, café or basket weaving class.

We who inhabit the gardening world need to do a better job of communicating the incommunicable – the transcendent experience that a public garden affords. Ever since ancient Greece, display gardens have served as “sacred space” – places to dream, reflect and rediscover ourselves. Recreation, indeed.

In our secular, stressed, noisy, information-drenched, multi-tasking, sound-biting, time-stretched era, our public gardens might be the next big thing.

This article appeared in this morning’s Philadelphia Inquirer.

I don’t know why the previous inhabitants of this house kept the yard so wet. “Over watered”, I noted when I originally saw it. But it’s since occurred to me that the purpose might have been to suppress the gophers and preserve the lawn while they were attempting to pass the house off to us. Gophers don’t like such wet conditions and may have been staying next door.

My first encounter with gophers was the morning after having set out some parsley plants. As dawn broke, I went out to inspect my crop. Some plants were missing entirely, others had been pulled part way into the soil, some were leaning sickeningly askew, and one lay on its side, its roots gone entirely.

My first assumption was that gophers were little more than the dandelions of the West. You tend your lawn and garden, irrigating and planting, and you coincidentally create a perfect habitat for them to make mischief.

But I misunderstood them. Dandelion, an exotic from Eurasia, grows well enough on its own, but it really thrives in human-made landscapes—lawns, gardens, road medians. Gophers were here long before we were; they have survived in North America quite well without us since the late Pleistocene, which ended only about 12,000 years ago, about the time that humans are thought to have crossed the Bering land bridge. They may exploit our lawns and gardens, reforestation attempts, and crops, but really they don’t much care what we do. It’s their territory.

Gophers are found in most U.S. states and the southern Canadian provinces. In North America, there are some 16 distinct gopher species and many subspecies. These North American gophers (family Geomyidae), as is true of their kin elsewhere, are subterranean, herbivorous mammals that spend virtually their entire lives underground in burrow systems. They are known as “pocket gophers” because of fur-lined pouches in their cheeks in which they store food, while digging or foraging. They excavate extensive burrow systems that are composed of a main tunnel with lateral branches that end in a fan-shaped mound with the entrance sealed by a plug of soil. Mounds are generally the first sign of the gopher’s presence. Tunnels are usually 4 to 18 inches beneath the surface, but gophers also construct dens and larders that can be as much as 6 feet below the surface.

Pocket gophers are sometimes confused with moles. But moles are smaller, lack pockets on the sides of their cheeks, and are insectivorous. Moles are also much less invasive (and destructive) and forage by pushing the soil aside, rather than tunneling through it. For the most part, moles remain on the surface. Gophers move vast quantities of soil (as much as 4 tons per year). A single tunnel system may in total be as much as 200 yards in length.

Gophers feed mostly on the plant roots they expose in their digging. But they also eat tubers, corms, stems, and leaves of herbaceous plants and grasses. Some young shrubs and trees are eaten, and young conifer plantations and reforestation sites can be devastated by gophers. Sometimes entire plants are pulled into the tunnels, as was depicted in the movie Caddy Shack.

Gophers range from about 5 inches long to as much as 1 foot, and they weigh anywhere from a little more than an ounce to a couple of pounds. Males are larger than females. Gophers are solitary and highly territorial. They are most active in spring when the males seek female companionship by digging into the burrows of females to mate. Gophers are mature at about a year. In colder climates, females have one litter a year, but in warmer climates such as mine, females may have two or more litters in a year with as many as 12 offspring. Gestation is around 3 weeks.

My gophers are probably Botta’s pocket gopher (Thomomys bottae), named for Paul-Émile Botta, a naturalist who studied gophers and other mammals in the West in the 1820s and 1830s. My first inclination was to ignore them. When I went out in the morning, I would smooth down their mounds; they never even noticed. Then I began to fall through the surface into their tunnels. When I planted trees and found gopher mounds in the watering depressions I had constructed, I knew the gophers and I could not happily coexist.

My first control measure was to attempt to poison them with the baited oat seed that the previous inhabitants had left. After a time, little patches of oat grew up where I had applied the bait. As far as I could tell, the gophers never bothered with the bait.

Next I hired the “Gopher Guy” whose ads promised to “get them on the run”. His technique (poison) was effective only for 3 weeks or so, after which the telltale gopher mounds appeared again. And in light of that, the gopher guy was expensive.

Searching the internet, I found a system in which propane is pumped into the tunnels and then ignited—no more tunnels, no more gophers. Great for an alfalfa farmer maybe, but I don’t have a pickup truck to carry the propane tanks and pump apparatus. However, I did buy a 60-foot flexible plastic tube designed to have one end attached to a car exhaust and the other inserted into a gopher tunnel. The idea was to asphyxiate the gophers with carbon monoxide. It didn’t seem to have any effect on mine, though.

At the local hardware store, I was told that to control gophers I need to trap them. And in fact this has proved the most effective remedy. But it’s not for the kind hearted. Gopher traps do not quickly (and painlessly) snap the animal’s backbone as does the standard mouse trap. Deployed gopher traps have a pair of opposing spikes that impale the gopher when it trips the trap, sometimes killing it quickly but more often not so quickly. I conceal my activities from my children and don’t speak of them to my wife. And trapping gophers does no more than decrease their numbers. If neighbors are less diligent than you are, the gophers simply move in to the unoccupied digs from next door.

I see no long-term solution. My plants will be less vulnerable when they are larger. And I’ve abandoned the idea of a carpet of grass in most parts of the yard. I will make paths that weave through islands of mulch that support plants, and maybe I’ll move to where there are no gophers.

I know: it sounds like an expensive dinner item in a fancy Chinese restaurant menu. Really fancy. After my travels through Asia, I can imagine such a dinner item.

However, the subject is a new arrangement of Densaburo Oku’s glass and metal fish sculptures. We decided to bring them closer to the viewers for this, our 135 th anniversary of W. Atlee Burpee & Co., the owner of Heronswood Nursery. We expect a lot of guests on Friday, August 19 th and Saturday, the 20 th at Fordhook Farm in Doylestown, PA. So we fished them out of their former sites deeper in the garden’s beds. Also, we brought them together in a “school”, just as they would be in the ocean. Then we chose to have them swimming around the center of the garden where we have two coral-like clay sculptures by Steve Tobin. Fish often lurk in coral reefs so it seemed to make poetic sense, as well as add a more surreal element to the core of the peaceful garden.

Here’s a selection of photographs by Mary Kliwinski:

I adore this mask-like image. It seems like a goat or reindeer as much as a fish. A dancer in a performance of ‘The Rites of Spring’. Densaburo Oku’s art with metal and paint is a fine match to his glass art, which is hidden in this photograph. Each piece of our Fordhook Farm art collection has a horticultural reference of some kind. The fish skeletons symbolize the Native American use of fish guts as fertilizer. They’d dig a hole, drop in the entrails—sometimes the bones or heads as well, depending on the crop or the soil—fill in most of the dirt, sow the seed (corn, beans, squash, etc.), then lightly cover it. The roots would eventually reach a vein of ripened fertilizer, well-integrated into the surrounding soil—a motherlode. Off to the races.

One of my favorites. The spine is made of cast glass cable transducers strung along a metal stem. Attached to each are the “bones”, which are cast glass that is allowed to draw out from a loose mold. Oku also mixes pigments into the molten glass to match the metal head and dragging fin-like parts. Sometimes he puts in glass eyes—sometimes not. I agree; in this case the dark, large eye contrasts well with the colors of the head.

At first I was bothered by the rust—“What’s happening to my investment?” Then I remembered—another time—that art is an absolutely horrible investment. Sort of a knee-jerk reaction. Still it bugged me. But a few years later I realized that—like real fish—it was aging around the mouth—the same place you often see scars and other injuries or simply signs of age on large ocean fishes’ faces. While this may sound like a rationalization—and may partly be—it isn’t, at least not to me. My fish are almost twelve now. And keep in mind, it has been not only outside the whole time, but “out of water”. So I cut it a lot of slack.

Side view. Here Oku is using a gorgeous white ceramic style of glass.

Here they are—approaching the “coral”.

This jolly-headed one is coming up to the opposite side of the grassy pool.

Another view. Lots of weed problems already this year.

“Mr. Shark”. I love him very much.

Close-up.

In the back is the row of remnant pines from the old days that still separates the “working” part of the farm from the “domestic” (gardened) part. The only difference now is that both places are working parts—the older is phase one or “alpha” row trials, while the traditional family home is pre-introduction test, or “beta”—phase two. Each phase lasts about 1-2 years before a cultivar is chosen for the catalogue.

This was Densaburo Oku’s first massive fish. It is about eight feet tall. The head is made of cast-off parts from a metal fabrication plant near Allentown. The special glass is a kind of obsidian. There is one chipped bone but you hardly notice it. This was my first Oku fish. It is so massive that we thought it best to be vertical. It looks like it would be “planted”, and has a slightly corn stalk-like appearance.

Marvelous photo of one of our fish gliding out of a little jungle of Penstemon digitalis ‘Mystica’, looking somewhat like seaweed at a carnival. This sense of fun and play is at the heart of the Happiness Garden. This image captures the spirit and meaning of “happiness”.

Close up. Glass eye works here.

Gazing down at us from about 10 feet high is Daisuke Shintani’s “Untitled”, which is made of crude or raw (sometimes called “black”) iron. That is the “tree”. The eyes are composed of both cast and blown glass and each is thoroughly unique. Each has a personality. The kids at Delaware Valley College decided to use one as a senior class trophy about ten years ago. Somehow it turned up at our doorstep one day a couple years later. Bit like a science fiction movie.

Also gracing “Happiness” is one of Eric Finnerty’s first bronze busts of Rhea, the mother of Zeus. She was a Titaness. Divine giants or “super gods”. (Please Google her for the whole story.) Finnerty does several extraordinary things here: first, the bronze is made of hundreds of cast bronze plant parts, each of which was bent to shape the form of the head, neck, et al. Behind her right ear is a woodland orchid—exactly which we do not know—cast in bronze. The face, ears, neck, nape and shoulders are made of individually cast fern fronds, again which exact kind we do not know. Her hair is composed of deciduous leaves, again all cast bronze, many of them from beech trees, but others unknown. Finnerty used several patinas and washes in the process in order to give the hair, skin and orchid parts distinct colors.

The other achievement is his use of his model, an Afro-Asian woman. The Greeks and Romans were well-known for using Germanic and Nordic captives for their figurative sculpture. Not only were they larger and more muscular than the Greeks and Romans, they were “foreign”, alien—from another world—appropriate to portray deities. Finnerty is “playing” with this historical reality by bringing it into the present.

Close up. Finnerty uses the same model for all of his portraits of Rhea, varying only in the “line” and through the use of various plant parts. Very intriguing work.

Exotic and weird. All of the elements are from tropical plants. The mushrooms add a strange twist. A favorite of children.

Detail; all bronze!

Though neither fish nor sculpture, this Oriental Poppy might as well be, now that everything is cooking here at today’s bloggie.

Think it might have inspired some artists? I certainly do. Note the early Spring bee—this is from mid-May—bottom left.

Back to the ocean. We haven’t moved this happy fellow yet. Not sure we want to disturb him!

A glass and cast bronze sculpture by Daisuke Shintani, the artist who made the eyed tree. A philodendron leaf, cast in bronze, rests on a metal Romanesque pillar I bought locally. Off the leaf pours a dollop of rainwater made from both blown and cast glass in a complicated process at which Shintani excels. There is also a drop already fallen on a rock, also cast in bronze, that rests on the ground. Peaceful artwork that uses the space and context well.

Close-up on detail of the total effect.

Back to Shintani’s untitled eyed tree. This is the first sculpture I ever bought. I used to spend a lot of time evaluating research trials or inspecting production crops. Such work involves looking closely at plants, even staring at them at times. I visited an artist’s studio and there it was—a plant staring at me. Big one too!

Close up of the top eye.

Off goes the bird to another sculpture, no doubt.

And back to work we go. Such a roller-coaster spring here in the Mid-Atlantic region. Typical in form—lots of ups and downs—but extreme. Incredible abundance of pollen in a short period of time. But the wide swings of stresses will make for a revealing look at the experimental plants when they meet the first hot blasts of the coming summer, about a week away.

Recently I bought a small collection of large trees and shrubs from a group of local nurserymen and conifer enthusiasts.

Over twelve years ago, after purchasing Fordhook Farm, the core of the old historic Burpee estate, from the family, I brought in a series of garden designers and landscape architects—some local, some distant, some famous, some obscure. They were all fascinating. Each walked the entire 60 acre estate with me, pored over old maps, plans and drawings and we spent hours talking.

At the end of the day—or evening in a few cases, I would tell the professional landscape designers, architects, et al, “Thank you!” One week followed another and the phone began ringing. “No” was all I said, to paraphrase The Band. I had nothing to say. The place was perfect.

The original farm that became Fordhook Farm was shaped out of the wilderness in the 1750s. The headquarters and homes for the workers—and presumably, but not necessarily the owner or proprietor—were grouped in and around the present buildings and gardens.

“Why improve on this?”, I thought to myself. I have added several dozen small trees to the top meadow and a dozen or so more in both the Great Lawn and new deep shade garden that slope down from the verandah to the ravine. Also, I planted several large specimens to accentuate empty spaces, as well as a small oak grove to remind me of my childhood in Glen Ellyn, Illinois.

Come visit—by appointment only until our Fordhook Harvest Festival August 19th & 20th. Until the festival, just call 215-345-1766 and schedule a visit with Linda Cassidy. (No need for advance notice to attend the festival.) We resume “appointment only” visits until the late fall. But it is a working farm. Visits require scheduling. Thank you.

A rare variant of Fagus fastigiata, the upright-branching form of the European Beech. It has just been planted, hence the guy wires. At first, its shape is somewhat reminiscent of the French poplars that symbolize hands cupped and raised up in prayer (you see them all over Southern Europe, but a brief moment later it announces itself as a uniquely different tree. Poignant yet dynamic, this tree is powerful—indescribably full of life. I see it several times a day and enjoy it especially in the middle of the day.

These is a new pair of “Weed” groups by Steve Tobin. Steve is an old friend. I talked with him about this project before he started it, so we feel connected over them.

Being an enthusiastic gardener, Steve asked me about weeds one day. I told him that, first, weeds had to be alien to the domesticated space (not wanted or “appropriate” as well as truly “alien”). Second, they had to be invasive, which piqued his curiosity. I went on about rampant growth and aggression that appears in all species—survival-of-the-fittest style. Steve thought this was particularly interesting.

Last, weeds have to be undesirable in an aesthetic way. I believe this. Why would I not enjoy them? Aliens are commonly accepted and even beloved; aggression and invasiveness equals vigor if its excesses are controlled by active gardening, and so weeds must somehow not “please the property owner”. We argued a bit over this, and I conceded that this third definition is subjective, but always required. Or, as I say, why not love them? This aesthetic definition of weeds thoroughly intrigued him.

Steve called me one day to tell me he’d completed a series of “Weeds”. I was astounded. It was love at first sight. Placement of them became a matter of movement, form, context and—most important—space. I lost a magnificent old pine (that sung beautifully in the wind) to a violent late winter storm. I used to gaze at it from my study and listen to Mahler. That great a tree. Now it is replaced by these “Weeds”, and I could not be happier.

Here they are with the Carriage House in the background. The pair are like pillars that frame the path between the top and bottom of the entire property, along with a pair of pines that actually function as such, on each side of the farm road about twenty feet away from these new sculptures.

Here they are, one behind the other, with the front group showing off a “mutation”. Again, I introduced Steve to some ideas and books. He responded amazingly by incorporating a symbol of a mutant form of a weed. It is a “flower” on the end of one stem—the only part in the total group of over twenty “Weeds” that displays a stainless steel plate. No doubt for a stainless steel bee!

The previous generation of weeds in the meadow behind the Happiness Garden, with a few of the new trees. This is one of the more amusing groups. Some have likened them to Calypso dancers.

Dynamite view of them by the excellent photographer Mary Kliwinski, who shoots all of our art and specimen trees.

Weeds with black steel root in background.

Weeds from behind with Happiness Garden in back.

Black steel root with new trees.

More new trees with main house, angle to the southeast. Nice.

My “Last Year at Marienbad” tree collection that is in the once empty meadow. (Plus the black root.) Others have called it a “chessboard”. I’m having fun.

Steel root with “Sprouts” and the first root Steve ever made. It is bronze and predates the enormous Trinity Church sculpture by ten years or so.

Another angle.

Huge weeds near the recently installed parking lot. The taller one reaches 25 feet high.

Another angle

“Oz”, I call my giant weeds.

Another angle

Shorter of the two tall ones—very aggressive these weeds—with the forest line.

Here is our ancient Field Oak with the steel root. In the old days the workers rested beneath it and drank barley tea that they had brewed at home the evening before, let cool overnight, brought to work in thick ceramic jugs in the morning, and kept cool in the tree’s shade. A breakroom/lunchroom, 19th century style.

Three nice views of new trees.

Sprouts and root. The sprouts are fashioned from remnant iron and steel beams that Steve acquired from the closing of the steel mill in Bethlehem. (Read “Crisis In Bethlehem” for a stunning account of this industrial and social tragedy.)

My favorite shot of the “Sprouts”. The hawks absolutely love this sculpture. I think it both hides them while they hunt with their eyes, as well as provides them greater closeness and surprise.

A detail of the bronze root in a well composed shot by Mary Kliwinski with new trees mid-ground and the steel root in the background.

Later blogs from the late spring will include some “overhead” shots, the Seed House and more rare conifers. Please stay tuned.

In today’s battered real estate market, tiny shoots of green are not only pushing up through the ground, but also pushing property values, if not sky high, at least back up to par, especially for those preparing to sell their homes.

Curb appeal—the catnip of home buyers everywhere—can be defined as the physical, visual context which gives a house its meaning, turning it into a possible “home”.  Therefore, the elusive picture-perfect charm of a dream home consists mainly of the plants, shrubs and trees surrounding it.

The last dozen years has seen an explosion of interest not only in gardening but also in scientific research confirming the literally defined economic “interest” of plants—the specific increase in wealth stemming from home gardens and landscaped yards.

Amazingly, the positive impact of plants and gardens on wealth extends far beyond the vegetable patch.  Although by now most folks know the phenomenal savings reaped from homegrown herbs, fruits and veggies, very few people have heard of the effect gardens, shrubs and trees have on house values, ranging from a 5% to 20% increase in total property price from a well designed front and back yard.  This means that a $400,000 house can appreciate up to $480,000 with the addition of a well-designed landscape.  Sprucing up a couple of garden beds and borders, and adding a few ornamental trees doesn’t cost nearly $80,000.  Gardening pays.

Indeed,  no other “home improvement” investment comes close.  In fact, landscaping and gardening are the only expenses to exceed a 1:1 ratio of dollars spent to dollars earned.  Everything else—from new windows to refinished flooring, from sunrooms to a kitchen makeover—loses money when evaluated at resale.  Wheelbarrows full, you might say.

Whether a bower of Freudian domesticity or merely a prosaic expression of “curb appeal”, this uncommon fact is hiding in plain sight.  Returns on investment in a few decorative trees, a border of shrubs and perennials and a grape arbor or asparagus patch can return 250 to 300%—up to triple your money. Certainly, one never loses:  gardening is the fabled “sure thing”.  What other financial play comes close?  Even rare wine, much less the proverbial new rare wine cellar, doesn’t approach these increases in value.  As for new carpeting, swimming pools, patios, “great rooms”, et al, they put the “pit” in money pit.  Like a new car, their value drops about one quarter as soon as they are completed.  One should enjoy them—like the Lamborghini and the rare wine.  However, in the case of a domicile, if prospective buyers want a finished basement or the currently chic “outdoor kitchen”, they want to build them to their own scale and taste, not someone else’s.  You would do better to paper your walls with dollar bills.

Furthermore, gardens and trees not only possess a generic, universal appeal, but also pull at deep-rooted—or better put, hard-wired—evolutionary  heartstrings.  Recent research confirms that we evolved with plants at our side:  they both sheltered and nurtured us.  Spend a bit of time and money on a garden designer to help you plug into your green DNA.  You cannot go wrong.

Who knows?  After making your yard a piece of paradise, you might decide not to sell.

For the first of two Open House weekends, we received nearly 1,200 guests over the two days, Saturday and Sunday. Much fun was had by all. In spite of forecasts, Saturday brought gorgeous late spring weather—sunny, breezy and comfortably cool. Sunday was cooler and lightly overcast, but bright enough to see the many delicate blooms, vines, leaves, sprouts, tendrils, shoots, tepals, petals, bracts, stalks . . . you get the idea.

Here is the main house, featuring a handsome verandah with a small two-tiered border garden in front. The tree at left is a huge and attractive American Linden, while the large holly at right, filthy as all get-out, is a condition without remedy. I can’t help but love it.

The Seed House was built in 1890 and used to clean, sort, grade by quality and dry down seeds of nearly 2,000 taxa for the 45 years or so that it functioned, before the first big move to California—Lompoc to be exact—before World War II. Folks always ask about the windows. They helped light penetrate the interior where the senior members of the farm staff (who had earned sit-down jobs) worked at long tables carefully sorting, cleaning and grading. Broken or aborted seeds were selected out first, for example, regardless the species. But it is complex, close-up work and, while older folks are fine at it, they might have vision problems. Also, since dry seeds are covered with flammable husks and chaff (think cotton boles), you don’t dare bring in artificial lights, even the sparky old-fashioned bulbs. So it was a uniquely designed building, constructed deliberately for a 750 acre seed farm. Now we use it for storage—too costly for tours (insurance, etc.)

Two tour groups, one clock-wise and one counterclock-wise, starting from the base of the magnificent old eastern sycamore. Also, filthy McNasty, as we say back in Chicago. My poor gutters attest to this genuinely spectacular tree’s copious and viscous debris. Alas, always the bitter with the sweet!

Yours truly praying for a large turnout. Actually, I am leading a group of about 50 visitors. We put on these events in order to make folks aware of the many possibilities of their plants in their yards by evaluating how we explore those in our dozen or so gardens. We have full shade, partial shade and full sun. Way behind me—in front of the cars—is a new sculpture called “Weeds” by Steve Tobin. New to the property is the Fagus fastigiata or European Beech, a forty year old specimen being steadied by guy-wires in the middle distance. I adore it.

Me again. Here behind me is a very nice American Beech. The “twin pines” are the customary pair of white pines planted by newlyweds. In this case it may well have been one of the founder’s two sons and his bride. Entrance tent is behind the crowd, in front of the “catch all” house. In the distance the entry driveway. Across the street is the picket fence surrounding the grounds of Delaware Valley College, founded by Rabbi Joseph Krauskopf on a suggestion from Count Leo Tolstoy, the first Jewish agriculture school in the world, circa 1896.

I am pointing to the Steve Tobin sculptures near the entrance. Note the lovely viburnum along the creek that flows under the small stone bridge where the guests are walking. Once a wooden bridge, the fire department made me rebuild it in stone to handle their massive trucks. Ashes, Maples, Beech and a Gingko in the middle distance.

I am explaining the new (2 year old) deep shade garden down in the ravine where the two small creeks on the property meet. Verticality is the feeling we lacked, so we created a forest garden—very cathedral-like.

We climb up the Great Lawn toward the main house. Some guests beat me to it. The “Burpee Army” is one plucky bunch of garden enthusiasts, I guarantee you. Note the lovely new upright beech once again, at right and behind the house. In twenty years, it will look extraordinary.

Our research director Grace Romero giving garden advice to members of her tour group. In the sloping background is the second creek, which rises to the surface at the old “ruin” of the roofless springhouse.

Grace Romero again at the Veranda Garden. Behind the creek is the cathedral-like area where I was touring my group. You cannot see it. The entire 60 acre property has over a dozen such “hidden” gardens.

Grace is always very interactive with the visitors, here at the Spring House Garden itself.

Grace walking down past the springhouse and along the creek. This time the several bridges are made of wood. Notice the Viburnum ‘Summer Snowflak’ (shrub in background), Miscanthus ‘Morning Light’ (grass), ferns and daylilies and Petasites (big leaves on the left side).

Dave Smicker our head gardener gives a tour of the first “Heronswood” garden here at Fordhook. This was where we first detected a serious need for adaptation beyond the friendly confines of Kingston, Washington, a warm, wet zone 8. Now the research programs are better in four locations than in only one.

Dave Smicker and his tour group again. Note the Seed House in the background. Also, the second pair of “twin pines” on the opposite side of the Seed House. Undoubtedly, it was planted for the second son and his bride.

Product Managers Venelin Dimitrov and Chelsey Fields demonstrating bean and pea towers, as well as tomato cages. (“Cages aux foliage”!) This is in the raised bed area of our heavily fenced deer proof vegetable test garden.

Vegetable (and strawberry!) test gardens facing east.

Facing south, across the street is an old part of the legendary college—rough stone buildings that they do not know what to do with. Note the neat rows and beds. Come back! August 19, 20, 21—harvest time, plus a whole new array of summer flowers.

Nearly all scholars agree that the invention of agriculture 10,000 years ago was the wellspring of human civilization, innovation and creativity.

Not so Jared Diamond. The geographer and author of “Guns, Germs and Steel” famously declared agriculture’s adoption the “worst mistake in the history of the human race” and a “catastrophe from which we have never recovered.”

We might dismiss his contrarian claptrap as an attention-getting, professor-bites-woolly-mammoth gambit. Yet his conceit is recycled frequently by authors who should know better.  Indeed, some environmentalists and impressionable college students drink the Kool-Aid.  Dr. Diamond is a Pulitzer Prize-winning, best-selling guru.

The dawn of farming—mankind’s domestication of plants and animals—arose around 8,000 B.C., following the 250-million yearlong night of prehistory. The practice of agriculture was introduced in the Middle East, emerging around the world over several millennia.

Before domestication, the life of our prehistoric forebears was a relentless quest for food and shelter. The nomad desperados, never sure of their next meal, were ever at risk of becoming lunch for lions.

Providing a measure of control over their food supply, agriculture allowed people to organize and plan as never before—collaborating to irrigate, plant, and harvest farmland and safeguard and breed livestock.

Nomads no more, people could stay in one place, build houses and create settlements that grew into villages, towns and cities. Surplus grain and livestock catalyzed trade and allowed societies to embark on strategic projects—civic and religious buildings, fortifications, roads and bridges—that yielded no immediate benefit.  Thus, a notion of the future—and a new sense of consciousness—developed like the very plants and animals themselves.

Culture grew out of agriculture.  Consider Sumeria where year-round farming began in the 6^th millennium B.C.  A short list of Sumerian firsts includes the development of writing, the first schools, first historians, first pharmacopoeia, first clocks, first arch, first legal code, first library, first bicameral congress, first epic literature and first love songs.

Since then humankind has harvested endless innovations: the great religions, marvels of science and technology, democracy, philosophy, the printing press, space travel, masterpieces of art and architecture, hot and cold running water and the internet.

Diamond points out agriculture’s negative side effects. The rise of farming, paradoxically, provided people with a less nutritious diet (heavy on carbs and starches). Crowded cities and long-distance trading brought new maladies. Societies became stratified by gender, wealth and status, and people worked far more than their nomadic antecedents.

But Diamond overlooks several factors.  Agriculture’s rise coincided with an increasing global population that could not be sustained by the hunter-gatherer lifestyle. Improvident cave-dwellers had polished off much of the earth’s megafauna.

Diamond shrugs off the perils—drought, famine, cold, disease, predatory beasts—bedeviling our nomadic ancestors. In place of what the philosopher Hobbes called the “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” life of prehistoric folk, his rosy view comes closer to the “primitive communism” described by Marx and Engels.

It was likely communism of the Stalinist kind, with prehistoric Uncle Joe never sparing the club to ensure the submission of his terrified brood—practicing what historian Richard Hofstadter termed “Darwinist collectivism.”

The dawn of agriculture revealed new horizons of knowledge, interaction and self-expression. To blame social inequities on agriculture is folly. Prehistoric human life was social Darwinism’s golden age.

Who would trade the glories of 10,000 years of human culture for the eat-or-be-eaten semi-conscious demi-life of prehistory?

Professor Diamond apparently would. I see him now—Diamond in the rough—leading his entourage in ambushing a rhinoceros and encircling wild boars. In their surplus leisure time, the hunter-professor assures his shivering captives that, predators and frigid nights notwithstanding, this is la dolce vita. I imagine, too, the mute reply etched in their taut, weathered faces and flinty eyes, “What a catastrophe—the worst mistake in the history of the human race”.

The morning of April 29^th, I was up with the birds—and 2 billion of my fellow earthlings—to watch the British royal wedding.  The newlyweds were radiant; the event sparkled with romance and pageantry.  But what snapped open my sleepy eyes were the too-brief glimpses of the royal parks, gardens and lawns.

I was impressed with the royal gardening, how the imposing palaces are themselves happily wedded to their settings.  In my imagination, I strolled the gardens, inhaling the scent of flowers and tree blossoms; lost in reverie.  I forgot about the nuptials and attendant hoo-hah.

The 19^th century art critic John Ruskin proclaimed, “Though I have kind invitations enough to visit America, I could not, even for a couple of months, live in a country so miserable as to possess no castles”.

If Ruskin could visit the States today, he might not find castles up to his exacting tastes.  He would certainly encounter plentiful castle wannabes in the enormous houses that populate our suburban landscape.  If these colossi fall short of being castles, they likewise fail to be homes.

English is one of the few Indo-European languages with a word for “home”.  Except for “love”—its kissing cousin—“home” possesses more resonance and radiance than any word in our language.

“Home” is a metaphor for all we most prize: love, warmth, nurture, privacy, intimacy, cosiness, comfort, companionship and festivity.  The commonplace, “There’s no place like home”, is uncommonly true.

An overlarge residence forsakes the qualities that make a house a home.  A too-big house is scaled, not to the physical or functional requirements of its residents, but to a simple and compelling notion: the bigger the better.

Just as small is not necessarily beautiful, big is not perforce better.  The advantages of size are offset by commensurate risks, as demonstrated by sprawling corporations, schools and bureaucracies of all kinds.  Bigness carries a lot of baggage.

Musing about American mansions, I’m reminded of Biltmore House, William K. Vanderbilt’s humongous gilded age faux chateau in North Carolina.  Writing to his friend and fellow author Edith Wharton, Henry James observed of the 175,000 square foot pile, “It’s like a gorgeous practical joke—but at one’s own expense, if one has to live in solitude in these league-long marble halls”.

When scale goes wrong, as it does so lavishly at the Biltmore, and to a lesser extent in the homes of suburban grandees, the first casualty is the human factor.  The structure’s exaggerated size diminishes rather than enhances the stature of its inhabitants—who appear to disappear in its vastness. Too often the great big house sits in its lot forlornly—a super-sized flying saucer flung into a landscape to which it bears no relation.

Right now, owners of big houses have challenges enough.  As house prices plunge, fuel and food prices skyrocket.  Attributes that made the house seem like a wise purchase—its impressive dimensions and imagined resale value—are now albatrosses dangling from the owner’s aching neck.

How might one bring balance, harmony, scale, integrity, beauty and magic to the modern manse?  Can the owner’s dream house become a place of dreams?

It can be done.  A garden gives a house proportion, warmth and continuity with its surroundings.  Not a formal geometric garden, but a garden that proceeds from a house like a breath, lending color, shape, animation and pleasure to the scene.

Appropriately, British architect Edwin Lutyens and garden designer Gertrude Jekyll performed this very transformation for UK estates—bringing garden and house together and, thus, to life, for royals and royal wannabes in the late 19^th and early 20^th century.

With such reintegration of house and garden, the residence begins to dream and take root in its verdant setting.  The structure’s height and width are moderated; angles softened, edges blurred—geometry yields to poetry.  The now welcoming house loses its tinsel grandiosity, and assumes a quiet and inviting grandeur.  You won’t have a palace, or a castle, but something better.  You’ll have a home, and a fairy-tale romance all your own.

Dawn is breaking now by 5:30 on California’s central coast. I like to see the day start from high up in the hills, and don’t like the heat of the Sun, so I try to get my walking done early. [Photo 1: Ceanothus spinosus flower at dawn.] Besides I have children to send off to school and work to do. I go walking maybe 6 days a week. But this early light is new to me. Back in December, I walked by the light of a headlamp for much of the hour and a half or two hours that I was out.

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Walking in dark canyons with sometimes rushing water and sometimes fog or mist can be unnerving. Deep down people are afraid of the dark. I am. It’s mainly the unknown, what lurks that cannot be seen in the darkness—our own fears. The Buddhists tap into fear by spending nights alone in the charnel grounds where people are cremated to appreciate the transience of life perhaps or to shock themselves to illumination.

I’m not afraid of ghosts; the face of my fear is large predators (mostly four legged, the two-legged ones less so). Really, I know there’s far more real danger in stumbling off a precipice. But in conversation, someone’s wife’s friend has always spotted a mountain lion while she was hiking; I have yet to meet anyone who has actually seen one for herself. But it must happen. And people are indeed attacked. The knowledge of the possibility is enough to give substance to the fear. But statistically I know too that the chances of being attacked by a mountain lion rival winning PowerBall or being hit by a meteor—it doesn’t happen.

The fear lives, though, and sometimes when my pack rubs against a branch or my footstep sounds more hollow than I expect, I turn off my light and stand motionless and listen, or I’ll turn to look behind me to see if I’m being followed. I know it’s silly and that I’ll find nothing, but I know also that a mountain lion would dispatch me before I knew it had happened. A bright flash of light deep behind the eyes as my neck snapped would be all.

French geomorphologist and ethnologist Jean Malaurie recounts hunting with Inuits in winter in western Greenland up by Elsmere Island before the U.S. airbase at Thule was built in 1950. The Inuits could see white-furred fox against the white snow in the dark of the moon well enough to shoot them. As far as Malaurie was concerned, the Inuits could see in the dark. I cannot and, at least part of the year, must live with the dark if I want to walk early. And, to be truthful, I love the dark; when I first see that the days are getting longer and the nights less, I feel a sharp pang of regret. Still, as the light of day breaks, I’m relieved. The canyons are just canyons and the chaparral is just itself. Usually, I’m high above the canyons by that time anyway. [Photo 2: Hills in early morning. Photo 3: High up. Photo 4: Looking down.]

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These walks get me up in the morning and give me a chance to see the sequence of seasons through the lives of the plants in this area. Sometimes I take pictures.

Just now spring seems to me to be ended, but the colorfully named farewell-to-spring (Clarkia bottae) is pretty much at its peak. It is found in the chaparral where I walk along the margins of washes in somewhat protected spots. [Photos 5,6,7,8: Farewell-to-spring.]

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Some plants like large-flowered phacelia (Phacelia grandeflora) and Frémont’s death camus (Zigadenus fremontii) that in mid-February were just beginning to flower are now looking a little shabby. [Photo 9,10: Large-flowered phacelia. Photos 11,12: Frémont’s death camus. ]

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The California poppy (Eschscholzia californica) that until the last week looked as bright as ever is fading as the remnants of the last rains evaporate from the surface soil. Photo 13: California poppy.]

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And the crimson pitcher sage (Salvia spathacea) that also began flowering in mid-February looks stately in its maturity [Photo 14: Young crimson pitcher sage. Photo 15: Mature crimson pitcher sage.]

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An invasive, naturalized bindweed (Convolvulus arvensis) aggressively colonizes burn areas, where shrubs such as toyon (Heteromeles arbutifolia) that are adapted to periodic wildfires grow up from rootstocks and begin to flower once again. [Photo 16: Bindweed close up. Photo 17: Bindweed covering a hillside. Photo 18: Toyon flower buds.]

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Bush or sticky monkey flower (Mimulus aurantiacus) has begun to flower in the last few weeks. These are orange colored flowers that are supposed to look like grinning monkeys (I’m not sure I see it), and they attract hummingbirds. The genus name comes from the same root as that for the ancient Greek theater tradition in which everyday occurrences were extemporaneously mimicked (think mime). I see monkey flowers in a range of habitats from moist sheltered locations to shalely dry ones. [Photo 19,20: Bush monkey flower.] Mimulus is a big genus with lots of showy flowered plants. In this climate, they make good garden plants too.

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Back down in the canyons, canyon sunflower (Venegasia carpesioides) grows; it’s also found in moist, sheltered or north-facing spots higher up, generally below 3000 feet. It seems to flower virtually all year long, looking in January only somewhat duller than now. Another plant found ubiquitously (in canyons and chaparral) is poison oak (Toxicodendron diversilobum). It grows well almost everywhere I see it, and I think it is far more vigorous than its eastern cousin poison ivy (T. radicans). [Photo 21,22,23.]

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I’m usually hurrying, often partially running, by the time I get down to the canyons again. In the morning light, they’re lovely and cool, and there’s nothing unnerving about them [Photo 24: Water fall. Photo 25: Canyon floor at stream crossing.]

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Enjoy the rest of spring.

In the famous art song “Where’er You Walk” by Handel, the branches of trees bend to provide shade for the singer’s beloved. I had a similar experience last week. I was inspecting the first flowers of my Magnolia tree, when one of the lovely blossoms beckoned me over, with a soft and delicate voice but surprisingly urgent tone.

It summoned, “Mr. Ball! Mr. Ball!” I answered, “Yes?” “I know you welcome us—and all other flowers—in the spring, adore us in the summer and mourn our poignant beauty in fall. We have even seen you—through our latent winter buds—as you sit gazing at your imported houseplant while the snow falls in the dark evenings. We know you love us deeply, which is why we choose you to be our champion in these troubled times in the flower world. You humans domesticated us—and you need to take better care of us. Pull that bench over because I have much to tell you.

“Mr. Ball, you humans puzzle us deeply. On the one hand, we celebrate your existence from birth to death, with marriage in between. One of our clan, Gypsophila, also called Baby’s Breath, is named for the first breath a newborn draws. When your species comes of age, young men and women decorate themselves with us—in hair, hat and lapel.

“Briefly, men soften and pick us and give us to their lady friends, while the more demonstrative of them clench us between their teeth while they play guitars!

“I shall pause and let you consider our smitten troubadour clenching a plastic flower stem. I assure you he would gag. One hundred million years of co-evolution between us and humans tells us so. Remember: we domesticated you too!

“Or imagine our lover presenting his lady a nosegay made of acrylic polymers. Would you like to guess the length of this romance? Or imagine a bride tossing a plastic bouquet to the hopeful unbetrothed.

“Once we were mighty. We led you into battle. We symbolized the promise of salvation and eternal life. As Christians approach Easter, they look forward to the flowerless churches during Lent abounding with live blooms symbolizing the Resurrection.

“We represent life—from birth to reproduction to death. We have been giving you beauty, as well as inspiring you to create it yourselves, since you began to walk. Yet, now, you walk away from us.

“In your homes, our images are everywhere: imprinted on plates, tea cups, couches, linens; engraved in silver; carved in wood. We are endlessly portrayed in paintings, architecture, jewelry, tapestries, murals, ceramics and every other form of visual pleasure. We are strewn throughout poetry, song, legends and stories. We are enshrined in nearly every religion. If an alien were to pay a visit to our verdant planet, he would assume humans worshipped us. If only this were the case!

“You, Mr. Ball, know this, of all mortals. As a seedsman, you know that we are the alpha—the summit of botanical creation. Without us, no seeds. Without us, no fruits or vegetables. Without us, no life.

“We ask you to proclaim this, Our Flower Bill Of Rights.

“We, the Flowers, to form a more colorful and fragrant world, demand that humans stop using flowers fashioned from plastic—that non-renewable material so quintessentially unlike us. Stop flying us all over the world. You grow us in exotic locales. We’re picked too young—the insult of insults in our world—and stuffed in a box by virtual slave labor.

“Grow us locally. If not your own back yard, use solar energy to fuel new US greenhouses. Breed us for North America’s cooler temperatures—we can take it! We’ve been living outside a lot longer than you have.

“We gave you your first happiness—color. We gave you, through our fruit, your second happiness—taste. We love you and work tirelessly for you. Yet, these days, except for your churches and a few holidays here and there, you ignore us. You even ask the grieving to avoid our comfort and consolation when a loved one dies. But we flowers have been scientifically proven to raise human spirits. We are nature’s anti-depressant!

“Mind the consequences: the flowers of weeds don’t care about you. Weeds will smother trees, even me, your beloved Magnolia. Avoid a war with weeds. As your ancient ancestors knew, you’ll lose, which means we—your friends and allies, the domesticated plants—will lose too.

“So, humankind, please grow us, pick us and use us for your rituals of life. Ensure that your descendents celebrate their lives with our beauty and meaning. And we promise to return each spring.

Signed,

The Domesticated Flowers of the World.