We live in a time that merits its own version of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, Charles McKay’s classic 1841 study of human follies and frenzies, such as witch hunts, alchemy and bursting financial bubbles. Our current repertoire of fallacies is rich in conspiracy theories, apocalyptic prophecies and alien abductions.

One such delusion is now in full bloom. The movement to legalize medical marijuana is proceeding apace without significant care or consideration on the part of the government, the medical and scientific community, or the public.

With California leading, fourteen states have now legalized medical marijuana, with legalization under consideration in 11 other states. This rampaging weed of a public policy seems eerily immune to the kind of scientific testing and review routinely accorded to the regulation of food, medicine and over-the-counter drugs. You would think that marijuana — classified as a schedule I drug, one with a high potential for abuse and “no currently accepted medical use” by federal law — would get special scrutiny before it’s approved as medicine: you would be wrong.

With medical marijuana, the public and policy-makers alike have thrown caution to the smoke-filled winds. California’s medical marijuana laws are a hodge-podge, changing from county to county, like something dreamed up by Cheech and Chong. Today there are 1000 marijuana dispensaries in Los Angeles alone — a greater number than all the city’s Starbucks, 7-11s and MacDonald’s combined. Far from being clinical, some shops feature carnivalesque hucksters out front to lure new clients. Pretty much anyone claiming a headache can get a prescription. State lawmakers seem to have learned nothing from California’s experiment.

I do not propose denying medical marijuana to those in chronic pain from cancer, AIDS or other ailments. But as a horticulturist, I worry that these patients are using a garden-grown substance that offers dangers more significant than the relief it affords. They are subjects in a loopy social policy experiment.

Marijuana’s value as pain relief, as well as its overall safety, deserve investigation. Right now the scientific findings are far from conclusive. The AMA has sensibly urged the federal government to loosen restrictions that impede serious research.

Yet, the very public that wants its food grown organically and sustainably and flees from corn syrup, sugar, butter and salt as from a plague, blithely overlooks pot’s uncertain provenance. They seem indifferent to where their pot comes from, who sows the seed and grows the plants and where, and what manner of fertilizers, herbicides, pesticides and growth stimulants are used to enhance it.

Today’s pot is far stronger than the weed that gave boomers a halcyon buzz in their youth. Seeking relief for pain from a few puffs of medical marijuana can result in a doubling of your heart rate, anxiety, panic, hallucinations and psychotic episodes. Some help!

While there is scant evidence to support marijuana’s medical benefits, there is plenty confirming its dangers, findings substantiated by significant increases in marijuana-induced emergency room visits in the last 15 years. And pot messes with your head: significantly impairing short-term memory, verbal skill, judgment and perception. Anyone who’s talked to a pothead will testify to these effects.

Statistics on pot are bummers. Pot-using teenagers have poorer grades and poorer attendance. Of those arrested, 41% of adult men test positive for pot, 27% of adult women. Six to 11% of fatal accident victims test positive for THC. A painkiller, indeed.

Since pot’s potency can vary dramatically, patients have no guidelines for dosage, so it’s hit or miss, you might say. This problem, and many of medical marijuana’s other perils, can be effectively addressed by marinol, an approved prescription medicine that offers calibrated doses of pot’s key THC isomer.

The medical marijuana debacle deserves serious attention from the Administration, the Courts, Congress and the FDA and AMA. What are they waiting for? Unchecked, this latest extraordinary popular delusion will have serious social and medical consequences.

Most scourges of our native trees were inadvertently introduced to North America. Think of chestnut blight; it wiped out the American chestnut throughout its entire range in about 25 years. And Dutch elm disease virtually eliminated the American elm and changed the look of American cities in a similar period of time. Both diseases are caused by fungi that were unintentionally imported on wood intended for furniture manufacture.

Gypsy moth (Lymantria dispar), which defoliates about 2 million acres of hardwood forest in any given year, is a different story. Gypsy moth is native to Europe, but in the late 1860s, artist, amateur entomologist, and French émigré E. Léopold Trouvelot imported gypsy moth to his home outside of Boston. Only a few years earlier (1862), Lincoln had established the Department of Agriculture (now USDA); so even then, in the midst of the Civil War, there was an awareness of the need for a controlling authority over, among other things, importation of exotic animals and plants.

However, Trouvelot was quite accomplished and no doubt could have obtained (if he did not and if one was required) a permit to import gypsy moth. He intended to breed them with native silkworms to develop a disease-resistant strain that he could use to launch a commercial silk industry. Trouvelot eventually had as many as 1 million caterpillars in cultivation. Unfortunately, some escaped.

Soon Trouvelot lost interest in entomology and concentrated on astronomical illustration. His work became well known for its detail. He produced as many as 7000 drawings and lithographs (See for example http://www.lib.umich.edu/divine-sky-artistry-astronomical-maps/drawings.html; verified 22 May 2010.) and published 50 scientific papers. A crater on Mars bears his name. Trouvelot returned to France in 1882. That same year the first gypsy moth outbreak occurred at Medford, MA, on the street where Trouvelot had lived.

Today, with no hope of eradication, we "manage" gypsy moth. Management strategies are based on the insect’s life cycle and biology. Its life cycle is relatively simple, involving four developmental stages—egg, larva (caterpillar), pupa, and moth (adult)—in one generation per year.

In late summer, female moths lay masses of eggs. Larvae overwinter in the eggs and hatch as caterpillars in spring. It is the caterpillar that is destructive. It prefers oak, aspen, and willow but will feed on almost 600 species of trees and shrubs. Some trees are resistant—dogwood, ash, locust tree, yellow poplar, and some maples, for example. Evergreens are generally resistant, but blue spruce and white pine are not. The caterpillar is thus "polyphagous", and caterpillars live to eat; smaller young ones feed during daylight, while older ones feed under cover of night. The gypsy moth expands its range primarily by "ballooning"; young caterpillars spin a silk thread that is caught by wind; they are usually carried no more than 300 feet. This stage lasts about 7 weeks. In early summer, caterpillars enter the pupal stage and develop into moths. Moths emerge from their cocoons in 10 to 14 days. The moth itself is short lived (about 14 days) and eats nothing; its biological function is to mate and reproduce.

Population dynamics of gypsy moth are unusual, going through boom and bust cycles. The pest may exist at low numbers for many years, but over one or two generations, its numbers can climb rapidly—an "outbreak". The population then collapses just as quickly. During these episodic population explosions, whole forests can be defoliated. Healthy trees usually survive single defoliations, but several years of defoliation in combination with other stresses such as drought or pathogens are lethal. These same population dynamics are seen in Europe, where the insect is native.

Small mammals (for example, mice) feed on gypsy moth eggs and are largely responsible for keeping gypsy moth numbers in check. Several insect parasites also prey on gypsy moth. But what tips the balance and causes an apparently stable population suddenly to explode is not known. Outbreaks tend to be regional, though, and because of this, it seems likely that weather events or some other broad, general influence may upset an otherwise stable biological balance and initiate an outbreak.

Crashes in gypsy moth populations are better understood and seem to be caused by the rapid spread of two gypsy moth-specific pathogens within the crowded, outbreak population. One of these is a virus and the other a soil-borne fungus that is highly virulent during wet, humid conditions. Under non-outbreak conditions, neither pathogen exists at a high enough level to check an outbreak.

Since it escaped from Trouvelot 140 years ago, gypsy moth has spread to only 30% of susceptible U.S. habitat. USDA Forest Service is charged with managing the pest and has concentrated on minimizing the rate at which the pest spreads—the Slow the Spread Program (STS), was funded by Congress in 2000. The overall strategy, conducted in cooperation with state DNRs and local municipalities, involves quarantine and suppression in infested areas, eradication in the pest-free areas where isolated gypsy moth are found, and suppressing the rate of spread in the transitional areas between infested and pest-free areas.

STS suppression efforts focused along the 1000-mile leading edge of the gypsy moth infestation zone include the states of Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Ohio, Virginia, West Virginia, and North Carolina. The primary tactic is aerial spraying with an insecticide composed of Bacillus thuringiensis var. kurstaki (Btk), applied in May through June when young caterpillars are present. In 2009, 440,000 acres were treated. Btk is a naturally occurring soil bacterium that kills caterpillars when they ingest it. It has been used as an aerially applied insecticide for at least 30 years and is considered safe to humans, pets, live stock, and property. But it is controversial because it is not specific to gypsy moth; it also kills any other moth or butterfly caterpillar that eats it. Gypcheck, another insecticide that’s used, is specific to gypsy moth caterpillars. Gypcheck is based on the gypsy moth-specific virus that is so virulent in gypsy moth outbreak populations. However, Gypcheck has been used only where endangered or threatened moths or butterflies are present, since, it is difficult and expensive to make.

Mating disruption is a strategy that is particularly well suited for low-density gypsy moth populations. It utilizes pheromones, chemicals that insects produce to communicate with each other. Gypsy moth females attract males to them by releasing a sex pheromone when they are ready to mate. Aerial applications of a synthetic gypsy moth sex pheromone mask the female’s scent and confuse males so that they cannot find females. Moths are at the end of their life and die without mating. About 100,000 acres in Virginia, Ohio, Illinois, and Wisconsin were treated with synthetic pheromone in 2009. The pheromone has no effect on humans or other animals and is not long lasting in nature.

Despite these efforts, gardeners and homeowners still encounter gypsy moths, and there are simple ways to reduce their impact. Look for egg masses in late summer through spring; they usually contain 100 to 600 eggs, or more. They are tan, roughly tear-drop shaped, and about 1 to 1.5 inches across. They are laid in protected places such as under tree branches and loose bark. In residential lots, they are also found on manufactured objects (lawn furniture, fences, grills, sides of houses, boat trailers). Egg masses found after early May have probably hatched. Gypsy moth can cause skin irritation; use gloves when handling egg masses, caterpillars, or pupae. Egg masses should be scraped into soapy water infiltrated with an emulsion of water and vegetable oil, or microwaved for a minute or two. Simply crushing them will not kill all eggs.

Gypsy moth caterpillars appear in midspring and are easy to distinguish from other common leaf-feeding caterpillars (See the following link: http://www.dnr.state.mn.us/invasives/terrestrialanimals/gypsymoth/id.html; verified 22 May 2010). They’re initially quite small but grow to 1.5 to 2.0 inches long. Older caterpillars have coarse, black hairs and 11 sections with colored spots; the first five pairs of spots are blue and the last six are red. They do not produce webs or tents as do webworms and tent caterpillars.

Insecticides, both biological and synthetic, can be sprayed in early spring if caterpillar numbers warrant it. The most common one, the Forest Service’s choice, is Btk, which is sold under various labels (Foray, for example). Check with county agricultural agents or garden stores for recommendations and spraying schedules. Certified arborists will spray for gypsy moth also.

Mechanical barriers work well in small suburban lots but are not practical for larger areas. "Sticky" barrier bands target young caterpillars that have fallen from trees or that have been transported by wind. These should be installed in early spring when the young caterpillars are hatching. One method is to wrap duct tape around trees at 5 to 6 feet above the ground and cover it with a sticky compound such as "Tanglefoot", a commercial product, or petroleum jelly. Caterpillars trying to climb up trees to feed will be caught and can be scrapped off into soapy water or a sealable bag. This type of barrier also works for other caterpillars such as tent caterpillars.

Older caterpillars are more mobile than young ones and crawl from tree to tree. They hide from predators such as birds during the day and are attracted to bands of fabric such as burlap placed around trees. These bands can replace or supplement the sticky barrier bands. They should be installed in early to midsummer. The cloth strip should be 12 to 18 inches wide and long enough to wrap around a tree completely without a gap. The cloth is secured to the tree trunk with a piece of twine that is tied around the cloth’s center; the cloth is then folded down over the twine to cover the cloth’s bottom half. These bands should be placed above sticky bands at 5 to 6 feet above the ground. Caterpillars that hide under the flap of the band can be captured and killed in soapy water. When an infestation is high, bands should be checked every day in the afternoon.

Look for pupae as well as moths in late summer. Pupae are dark brown, about 2 inches long, covered with hairs, and are found hanging in sheltered spots such as branches or in leaf litter. Female moths have white to cream-colored wings, a tan body, and a 2-inch wingspan; they do not fly. Males are smaller, dark-brown, and have feathery antennae. Pupae can be crushed. Male moths cruising for females will be attracted to and caught by ordinary commercial pheromone traps.

Over time, barring some technical or natural breakthrough, the pernicious gypsy moth will infest all of the hardwood forests in the USA and Canada. It may well change the composition of these forests. The best we can do is reduce its spread and moderate its effect. The Forest Service STS program has been quite successful. It has reduced by 70% the Gypsy moth rate of spread from its historical average of 13 to 3 miles per year. Gardeners can do their part too by recognizing this pest, knowing its habits, and killing it whenever they find it.

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 Reeves Jarvis, herself a woman of spirit, had advocated for the creation of a Memorial Mother’s Day to honor the significant role of mothers in their families, churches and communities. In her native West Virginia, she had created Mother’s Day Work Clubs to address local issues of poor sanitation and epidemic diseases. During the Civil War, Jarvis’ mére urged the Mother’s Day Work Clubs to tend to the wounded of both the Union and Confederate soldiers. She was the real deal.

The younger Anna Jarvis, having achieved her goal of a Mother’s Day national holiday, was soon appalled by the commercial debasement of her noble cause. This was not the Mother’s Day for which she and her mother had militated. “I wanted it to be a day of sentiment, not profit,” she declared. She disdained the purchase of flowers and greeting cards as suitable maternal homage. Greeting cards, she said, were “a poor excuse for the letter you are too lazy to write.”

In 1923 the doughty Ms. Jarvis launched a lawsuit against New York Governor Al Smith over a Mother’s Day celebration. When the suit was dismissed, she publicly protested, was arrested and charged with disturbing the peace. This determined and feisty woman, as well as her mother, should be remembered today, beacons of integrity and fortitude in the sea of greeting cards, chocolates, flowers and restaurant dinners.

Mother’s Day is now observed across the nation by the ceremonial ka-ching of cash registers and swiping of charge cards. In terms of consumer spending, the holiday is second only to the Christmas-Hanukah-Kwanzaa juggernaut.

Americans are expected to spend $126.90 on Mother’s Day gifts this year, on average, with total spending likely to reach $14.6 billion. The breakdown? 1.9 billion spent on flowers, 2.9 billion on restaurants for Mother’s Day dining; 2.5 billion for jewelry for Mom. Another seven billion, give or take a billion, will be divvied up between Mom-inspired purchases of clothes and accessories, gift certificates, spa services and personal electronics (Hey, what mother doesn’t want an iPhone?) And those greeting cards so execrated by Anna Jarvis, the mother of Mother’s Day? Total sales of $671 million. Ka-ching!

Mothers—and Mother’s Day—deserve better. A woman, your mother, risks her life to bring you into the world, and to thank her you take her to Red Lobster? She nurtures and guides you from infancy into adulthood—and she gets a bouquet of commercially grown flowers? She transforms your family house into a home, and you reward her with earrings?

Mother’s Day gifts will never—can never—have a tangible value commensurate with a mother’s love, wisdom, sacrifices and hard work. What’s missing in the Mother’s Day trove of flowers, jewelry, nice restaurants and high-tech gimcracks is something more profound and more important: symbolism.

Symbolism speaks to the soul, engages the imagination, and provides lasting inspiration. You won’t find it online, in a department store or boutique. You can’t buy it, and it’s not for sale. There’s only one way you can get it or give it: you create it.

This year, for Mother’s Day, honor your mother as she deserves to be—create a garden for her.

People knew what was up in Neolithic times. Ten thousand years ago, there were annual celebrations honoring the Mother-Goddess, who was worshipped around the world as a symbol of fecundity and renewal. People made sacrifices to her. The Mother-Goddess gave birth to agriculture, and with it, culture and society. I wonder if they called her Mom.

A Mother’s Day garden mirrors the motifs of conventional Mother’s Day offerings—but revealed in their pure, original, authentic splendor. In the garden there are flowers and fragrance, beautiful things to see, delicious things to eat. The garden itself is a sanctuary, a spa for the senses. You could look at it as a restaurant, where your fellow diners are butterflies and hummingbirds.

The garden represents a sublime reflection of mothers and families. New life arises here, provided with a compatible habitat (e.g. the flower bed), nurtured into growth and bloom, and furnishing the seeds of coming generations. Are we not all seeds, and our mothers master gardeners? Yes, we are, and yes, she is.

Brothers and sisters, for our Mother’s Day offerings, let us replace products with produce, Red Lobster with red, ripe tomatoes, earrings with ears of corn. Let’s convey our gratitude, not with greeting cards, but with a message inscribed in flowers, fruits and vegetables, redolent with flavor, fragrance and color.

The garden connects us to the earth, the elements, the seasons, the past and future, the sun and stars, the life of the planet, the very origins of life. Now that’s a gift worthy of Mom.

Ms. Jarvis would, I think, agree.

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 day James E. Hansen, a youthful and idealistic NASA scientist, appeared before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, chaired by population control enthusiast Senator Tim Wirth of Colorado. Hansen had an alarming story to tell: the global warming of the Earth’s atmosphere had begun, caused by human-made carbon dioxide. According to Hansen, the long-range forecast called for worse droughts and forest fires along with heavier rains and floods than ever before.

The Senators gathered in Dirksen 366 were inclined to believe him. The temperature in the Capitol that day rose to 98°, and the hearing room itself was a steaming cauldron. During his conclusion, Hansen ceremoniously mopped his brow, the senators soaked in their shirtsleeves, and the precursor to the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was created.

The sauna-like hearing room was itself the result of man-made climate change—and the man who made it was Senator Wirth. To help bolster Hansen’s testimony, the Senator’s staff scheduled the hearing on what local weather statistics had indicated to be the hottest day of the year. Prior to the meeting, he ordered his staff to enter the room the night before and open its three large windows in order to place so much stress on the building’s air conditioning system that it shut down. While Hansen’s assertions might later be contested, the climate that day agreed perfectly with him.

Senator Wirth’s mischief reflects a larger social trend that I call “manmade personal climate change”, or “MPCC”. This kind of climate change requires no experts. The phenomenon is so apparent, fundamental and omnipresent, only a non-expert could see it. As Goethe observed, “The hardest thing to see is what is in front of your eyes.”

Consider your own “personal climate” and the dramatic changes your private environment has undergone over the past several decades. Since the 1940s, two key factors relating to our environment have accounted for “MPCC”: clothing and central air conditioning.

The tee-shirt’s ubiquity dates from World War II. American youth has taken to wearing tee-shirts as part of their informal uniform. Originally an undergarment to keep a person warm, the tee-shirt became an outer garment that allowed sailors and soldiers in the tropics to keep cool. The skimpy garment, now worn year-round, has a triple effect—making you feel colder in air-conditioned buildings, hotter once outdoors and unconsciously aware of the contrast between indoors and out.

The second factor is chilled indoor air. Like tee-shirts, air conditioning became widespread following World War II. One first encountered air conditioning in movie theaters and bars, especially in the South and Southwest, regions of tremendous post World War II population growth. Soon “AC” was everywhere we were: houses, work, cars, even gigantic factories where large windows were once deemed adequate to handle the summer heat.

Today Americans increasingly reside in treeless suburbs ever more prevalent in the sunbelt. For example, Arizonians live half the year in air-conditioned lockdown—waking in 70°, driving in the 70° climate of their car, working in their 70° office and retracing the journey at 5:00 P.M. If they go out, it isn’t outdoors, but to an air-conditioned restaurant or movie theater. The Arizona Diamondbacks play in Chase Field, a fully air-conditioned ballpark bathing over 48,000 people in a man-made cloud of artificially cooled vapor.

In the United States during summer, the climate—the real climate—might indeed seem anomalous. Nature itself feels artificially hot to one who is artificially cooled. Our response to the notion of man-made global warming is that we increasingly experience the outdoors as a warmer environment.

Over the last half-century we’ve developed a new, profound and subtle sensitivity to outdoor temperatures during the balmy seasons. This unconscious receptivity is complemented by the conscious psychic satisfaction from believing in man-made global warming.

I do not dispute climate change. The controversy is over the level of human influences. “Manmade Personal Climate Change” may add an overlooked dimension to the debate over man-made causes. It may nudge the public into contending more seriously with them—if only by a degree or two.

The above blog entry appeared in The Providence Journal op/ed section on Sunday, April 25, 2010

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.

That energy, be it rising prices, shortages, or new sources, is constantly in the news should be no surprise. Our civilization would grind to a halt without energy; the universe and life itself, in fact, would cease. Since the middle of the last century, we’ve used nuclear fission to generate energy. For several thousand years, we’ve harnessed rivers and streams to turns wheels to grind grain and now to turn turbines to produce electricity. We are currently exploring and utilizing “green” energy sources—wind, thermal, and solar. But all are mere dalliances compared with the energy harvested today by plants and that housed in the fossil fuels captured from our Sun 300 million years ago in the Carboniferous Period.

Astrophysically speaking, the Earth is in a “sweet spot” relative to the Sun, not too close and not too far away. Light intensity drops sharply with increasing distance from the Sun (decreasing with the inverse of the square of the distance). Mars, for example, is quite Earth like and just 1.6 times farther from the Sun than Earth, but it receives not quite 50% of the Earth’s solar radiation.

Every living thing on Earth is a biochemical machine that requires constant energy inputs to survive and thrive, and life on Earth evolved to exploit solar energy. It’s unclear when exactly the ability to harvest the Sun’s energy evolved, but by 2.4 billion years ago, the concentration of oxygen in Earth’s atmosphere had risen dramatically from a ten-thousandth of today’s concentration to perhaps a one-hundredth. This is known as the “Great Oxidation Event”. Photosynthesis clearly must have evolved earlier than this, possibly as far back as 3.7 billion years ago, as the fossil record suggests.

In the simplest sense, photosynthesis is harnessing sunlight to drive the conversion of inorganic carbon (carbon dioxide) to organic carbon (sugar, chemical energy). The process requires in addition to sunlight and carbon dioxide, a light-harvesting mechanism. This is accomplished by pigments embedded in membranes. In plants, chlorophyll is the light-harvesting pigment; it’s chlorophyll that makes plants green. Chlorophyll is contained within the membranes of specialized bodies (chloroplasts) in plant cells. The energy captured by chlorophyll is used to remove electrons from a substance such as water (a reductant). The power of these electrons is then used in the reactions that turn carbon dioxide into organic compounds. In the process, oxygen is released as a by-product.

The predominant form of carbon on Earth is inorganic, mostly in the form of carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide, both “greenhouse” gases. This carbon is derived from atomic collisions deep within long-dead, giant stars and spread across the universe by supernova explosions. Today’s Earth contains in the neighborhood of 38,000 billion tons of inorganic carbon, and at the beginning, there was of course more. All this carbon and the potential energy locked within it created strong selective pressure for our carbon-based, life-form cohorts to find ways to use it. Photosynthesis was one way, and by means of photosynthesis, a portion of the primordial carbon reserve has been converted to the chemical energy that supports life on Earth. There are some 8000 billion tons of living biomass on Earth (ourselves included), and photosynthesis is essential to maintaining this.

Commonly, we think of photosynthesis as being the domain of plants alone. But when photosynthesis first arose, there were no plants; there were relatively simple, primitive organisms only. Diverse groups of bacteria and marine archaea (a group similar to but distinct from common bacteria) are representatives of these. In these groups, photosynthesis evolved independently. There are four main biochemical pathways that use different enzymes but share the same basic mechanisms, and there are subpathways within the main pathways.

Cyanobacteria (blue-green algae) are photosynthetic bacteria (not archaea) and are thought to be largely responsible for the Great Oxidation Event; so they are ancient. Of all the photosynthetic pathways, theirs is dominant. It is the same as is used in chloroplasts in plants and algae, the most prominent and successful photosynthesizers. Chloroplasts are in fact evolved cyanobacteria cells. They are thought to have resulted from an “endosymbiotic” relationship in which cyanobacteria were engulfed by protoplant cells, accepted certain favors, and in return supplied their hosts with a continuous stream of chemical energy (organic carbon).

For the purposes of the Earth’s living things, solar energy is limitless. But capturing solar energy, converting it to chemical energy, and redistributing it is not free. The first law of thermodynamics says that energy can be neither created nor destroyed. A portion of the solar energy involved in photosynthesis is stored as sugar; the rest is dissipated. The total amount of energy—before and after photosynthesis—though remains the same. It is the second law of thermodynamics that dictates and constrains how much energy can be conserved, and any process that uses, conserves, or transforms energy is constrained by this law. This means that there is an energetic cost associated with these activities. Photosynthesis is efficient in comparison with mechanical devices, but in the process of harvesting and storing energy, most of that energy is lost. It turns out to be slightly less than 10% of the energy harvested is stored as chemical energy.

“Nature abhors a vacuum” is often attributed to Rabelas, the French monk and satirist. Regardless of who coined the phrase originally, the notion is plain to see in evolution. With the advent of photosynthesis, another group of living things emerged to exploit those that exploit the Sun—the herbivores, who sopped up the organic soup and thrived. After the herbivores were established, came creatures to prey on them (predators like ourselves). That’s as far as the sequence of energy dependency goes. As the erstwhile solar energy moves through this food chain, from photosynthesizer to herbivore to predator, energy is lost—roughly 90% at each step. If 1000 units of energy are captured and stored through photosynthesis, only 10 remain by the time it reaches the predator. So think twice about the viability of gigantic science fiction creatures like Godzilla.

Our efforts to use solar energy to produce electricity are constrained not only by the physical laws but by space as well; there are only so many places that solar panels can be placed. For us, utilizing solar energy will probably never be much more than a supplement to a supplement. Plants, algae, and the other photosynthesizers, in contrast, cover most of the Earth and much of the sea; they support and sustain all life on Earth. But then they have spent billions of years perfecting their craft.

Soon here in the Northern Hemisphere, it will be summer. Plants will reach for their arc of growth. As you begin work in your garden—planting, weeding, fertilizing, mulching—consider that a sense of privilege and honor is perhaps in order to have the opportunity to propagate and care for these organisms that support us and have maintained life on Earth for so long.

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 the largest supplier of fresh tomatoes for American groceries and the food service industry. Within weeks of 2010’s Big Chill, as tomatoes grew ever scarcer, prices jumped. Tomatoes, retailing for $1.36 a pound a year ago, are now commanding prices over $3.00 a pound.

Grocery chains—even in Florida—now rely on Mexican imports (long reported to be the source of 2008’s salmonella outbreak) to supply their produce departments with tomatoes. Wendy’s, the fast food chain, no longer automatically garnishes its burgers with tomato slices: customers have to request them. Fine restaurants have dramatically cut the size of their tomato salads.

The January cold wave, reaching into 48 states, did briefly unite the nation’s fractious body politic into a united (cold) front. However, for the nation’s tomatoes, their consumers and connoisseurs, this was the winter of their discontent.

Tomato lovers still shudder as they recall last summer’s Great Tomato Blight of 2009, when soaking rains, cool temps and overcast skies doomed all garden tomatoes. Mournful tribute was paid to the glories of the tomato, as the Blight became front page headlines, the stuff of TV news segments and op-ed opinionating.

Thus, last summer’s pent-up demand for the savory red fruit has been frustrated by this winter’s southern freeze. Ten months of tasteless tomatoes; “Big Boy” is crying uncle.

Yet the media attention paid to last summer’s crop failure reminded us that the home-grown tomato is not merely a rite of summer, but an inviolable American right of summer, along with cold beer, baseball and convertibles.

My friends, The Great Tomato Crisis represents a great opportunity for all Americans, which I can sum up in three carefully chosen monosyllables: Grow your own.

Raising your own home-grown tomatoes will yield basketfuls of fresh, vine-ripened, ruby-red, firm, succulent, plump, flavorful, fragrant, juicy, nutritious, health-giving, fleshy, jaw-dropping, delicious, epicurean, mouth-filling tomatoes.

Your empire of tomatoes is your private refuge from the notional, vapid and sorry tomatoes on offer in your grocer’s produce department. The economics and logistics of commercial agriculture have conspired to create the retail tomato, a tomato in name only.

This tomato wannabee, bred to be of a size and shape that makes for easy packing and shipping, is prematurely plucked weeks early, to accommodate the coming voyage by truck, where it is bathed in carbon monoxide. Prior to its commercial debut in the produce department, it is gassed with ethylene to help bring out its color. Presto! Blame not the store-bought tomato for its pasty taste, juiceless interior and papery texture. It never stood a chance.

Among the juiciest benefits of growing your own tomatoes—be it in a backyard garden, a patio container or community plot—are the mind-spinning savings you will harvest.

Let’s run the numbers. Mediocre store-bought tomatoes retail for $3.00 a pound. One typical home garden plant produces 40-50 tomatoes in a season, each weighing a pound or so. Reckoned in grocery tomato prices, a single plant produces between $120.00 (a yield of 40) and $150.00 (a yield of 50) worth of tomatoes. A packet of 30 seeds retails for $4.00. On average, 25 of the packet’s 30 seeds grow into robust plants.

Hence, your $4.00 seed packet produces tasty returns ranging from $3,000.00 to $3,750.00—a return on investment of 750-to-1.

The Great American Tomato Garden is open to all of us: foodies, salad savants, nutrition nabobs, culinary connoisseurs, fitness faddists, vitamin votaries, freshness fetishists, flavor freaks and free radical-bashing antioxidantalists. And, lest I forget, we gardeners cordially welcome our nation’s voracious capitalists, hungry for the juiciest profits ever.

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 has been in North America since at least 1916, when it was found at a nursery at Riverton, NJ, not far from the W. Atlee Burpee Company. It is thought to have entered the country several years earlier as eggs on a shipment of iris tubers.

As with many exotic (nonnative) species, and particularly invasive ones, Japanese beetle has few natural enemies here, and presented with a favorable climate and an abundant food supply, it has thrived and has become established. It is now a serious plant pest and a threat to lawns, gardens and agriculture in general.

Japanese beetle is usually spread to new locations as eggs or grubs in soil surrounding nursery plants. Adult Japanese beetles are often found around airports, presumably transported by cargo planes. Since its introduction, despite quarantines, Japanese beetle has spread to most, if not all, states east of the Mississippi River and into parts of Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, Nebraska, Kansas, Arkansas and Oklahoma. There are two known pockets of infestation in Colorado, one near Denver and the other in Palisade area on the West Slope, suggesting that the Rocky Mountains are not an insurmountable barrier. Studies predict that Japanese beetle will become established in all states bordering the Gulf of Mexico.

There are a number of control strategies that can reduce beetle populations and feeding, and there is lots of information available on the internet (see for example the following USDA site: http://www.aphis.usda.gov/plant_health/plant_pest_info/jb/index.shtml) and through county agricultural agents and garden shops. Most control recommendations rely on long-term, multifaceted approaches focusing on combinations of chemical, cultural, and biological practices. There is no simple (and effective) one-shot approach.

More knowledge is better than less, and any control strategy should be based on the dynamics of the beetle’s life cycle. In the Northeast in June, adults emerge from the soil, where they have overwintered as grubs. They then feed, mate, and lay eggs until a killing frost. The peak of adult beetle numbers is July and August. Eggs are laid in the soil after a few weeks of feeding and mating. A female can lay 40 to 60 eggs during her life. Eggs hatch in July and the resulting grubs feed on the roots of grasses, sometimes causing dead patches in a lawn. Grubs are fully grown by the end of August. Older grubs are quite tolerant to drought and high moisture.

When the soil cools to about 60°F in the fall, grubs move deeper underground, and most overwinter at 2 to 6 inches below the surface. When soil temperature rises above 50°F in the spring, grubs begin to move up into the root zone, feed for 4 to 6 weeks, and undergo pupation (the transformation from grub to adult). Adults emerge and the cycle repeats itself.

There are a number of synthetic insecticides that target different points in the beetle’s life cycle. There are also “biorational” insecticides derived from plants or other natural sources that have modes of action different from conventional insecticides; these are considered to have lower risks to humans, wildlife, and the environment. Conventional and biorational insecticides have a place in a control strategy. Consult local county agricultural agents and garden stores for recommendations.

Among the cultural practices that are utilized to reduce beetle populations are habitat manipulation and trapping. Japanese beetle feeds on almost 300 plant species, but it will feed on some plants only moderately or not at all. The composition of plants in a lot or garden can thus have a significant influence on the attractiveness of a property to Japanese beetles. This may be cold comfort to those in highly infested areas with mature landscaping, but beetle plant preference should be considered when replacing woody plants and in what herbaceous ones are grown. See Tables 1 and 2.

Traps are commonly sold in hardware stores and garden shops. They are baited with beetle pheromone or floral scent. They are remarkably effective in attracting beetles. Observing the beetles at traps, it’s easy to see that the beetles are not very good flyers. Beetles bounce off the sides of the trap, overshoot it, or simply congregate on its side, mating, sunning, or clambering over each other. For every four beetles that a trap attracts, only three are captured. My belief is that a trap attracts more beetles to a property than had one not been used; the net effect is more beetle damage. Traps should never be placed near plants that beetles favor.

In its native habitat in Asia, Japanese beetle is not as destructive as it is here. A long-term control strategy that makes good sense is determining and promoting Japanese beetle parasites and pathogens. USDA has introduced several exotic insect parasites of Japanese beetle. These have shown varying degrees of success. There are also nematodes and bacterial pathogens that are effective in checking beetle populations and that are relatively easy for gardeners and homeowners to use.

USDA entomologists imported (1920s and early 1930s) an Asian wasp called spring tiphia (Tiphia vernalis) that is parasitic to Japanese beetle. These wasps attack beetle grubs. In the spring after mating, the female burrows into the soil looking for grubs. When she finds one, she attaches an egg to it. The egg hatches and the larva feeds on and eventually kills the grub. The wasp larva overwinters in the soil in a cocoon from which it emerges in spring to start the cycle over. Spring tiphia were released in Connecticut between 1936 and 1949. Recent surveys show that the wasp is present in every Connecticut county and is attacking Japanese beetle grubs.

Another parasitic insect imported from Asia by USDA is Istocheta aldrichi, a tachinid fly. In North America, tachinid flies are an important group of insect parasites. In Asia, Istocheta aldrichi specifically parasitizes adult Japanese beetles. The fly attaches its eggs to the thorax of the beetle, and the larva hatches within 24 hours, bores into the beetle, and begins to feed.

This fly was introduced to New England at about the same time (1922) as spring tiphia. It is established in much of New England and is found on 20% or more of Japanese beetles tested. In Japan, I. aldrichi is the primary biological control agent for Japanese beetle, but in New England, it is not well synchronized with the beetle’s life cycle and tends to emerge earlier than the beetle. In more northern areas (Maine, for example), where I. aldrichi emerge later, synchronization appears to be better. The fly may thus be a good candidate for introduction in the North Central states.

Active research is continuing with both of these insects, and efforts are being made to establish the fly in new areas. To my knowledge, there are no commercial sources of either. But these are living insects with distinct needs and requirements. It’s probably most efficient for an agency such as the USDA to release and establish them on a community-wide basis.

Several nematodes (microscopic parasitic roundworms) are effective against Japanese beetle larvae. These nematodes burrow into the grub and proceed with their life cycle, reproducing and ultimately killing their host (the grub), at which time more nematodes are released into the soil. For maximum effectiveness, nematodes are applied when the grubs are small (about 2 weeks after the beetles appear, late June to early July in the Midwest) but can be applied until frost. The two nematode species that are most effective against grubs are Heterorhabditis bacteriophora and Steinernema glaseri. The nematodes do not persist well in the soil, however. Preparations of live nematodes of both species are available commercially and easily applied with a watering can or a garden-hose spray apparatus.

Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) is a naturally occurring soil bacterium that produces an insecticidal protein. It was made famous in the 1990s when the gene for the insecticidal protein was genetically engineered into corn and cotton. There are many strains of this bacterium that are pathogenic to specific insects. There is no specific Japanese beetle strain, but the protein from several strains is active against Japanese beetle grubs. A powered formulation applied to a lawn like a fertilizer is generally available at garden stores or through catalogs.

The most widely used and effective natural control for Japanese beetle larvae is the native North American bacterium Bacillus popilliae. It causes a disease called “milky spore” because of the characteristic milky appearance infected grubs exhibit. The bacterium was first registered for use on Japanese beetle grubs in the USA in 1948. When grubs ingest the bacterial spores, they become infected and die and as many as 2 billion new spores are released into the soil. The bacterium, and hence grub-disease potential, builds up in soil over time (2–4 years). Milky spore disease is effective in suppressing beetle populations. This too is widely available and is spread as a powder on lawns.

The short story is that Japanese beetle is here to stay; sooner or later, it will probably infest all 50 states and much of Canada. We must adapt to it. USDA and other agencies continue to explore control strategies. For the gardener or homeowner, the most effective strategy will be long term and rely on combinations of chemical, cultural, and biological practices. Good luck.

Table 1. Plants resistant to adult Japanese beetle feeding (Source USDA).

Table 2. Plants susceptible to adult Japanese beetle feeding (source USDA).

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 wars, especially in the Northern Hemisphere, have combusted into being in springtime, the season of insurrection and resurrection. From Bannockburn to Culloden and from Waterloo to D-Day, battles have bloomed in springtime sunlight.

It seems perplexing and ironic that spring, with its panoply of tulips and newborn lambs, should be so hospitable to bloodshed. Folklore erroneously links spring with human sexuality and fecundity (ergo Easter bunnies and eggs), but it is autumn, not spring, when opportunities for youthful couplings flourish. Love and romance traditionally blushed in autumn (wild oats were sown at harvest festivals), maturing around the vernal equinox, giving rise to the season’s tradition of weddings. Stravinsky captures the smoldering, flaring turbulence in “The Rite Of Spring”.

In the realms of human and biological life, spring is far more apt to be the scene of conflict rather than of peace. In contrast to the other seasons, spring is uniquely violent and confrontational. Like the asymmetry of many wars, the non-linearity of the earth’s orbit seems to catch us off-guard. For most of the year, strife is nature’s norm; only with the arrival of the dark, cold days of deep winter does it pause to catch its breath and nurse its wounds.

We might regard war as one of mankind’s enduring achievements, one that originated with the emergence of our species. But nature has been a theatre of war for the planet’s 6 billion years of existence. Life—human, animal and plant—is a byproduct of an ancient worldwide war waged between protean life forms. The combatants were simple, primitive organisms, myriad groups of archaea and bacteria. The stakes were the ability to harvest sunlight, the greatest prize in cosmic history.

The “Great Photosynthesis War” commenced when early bacteria were attacked by predatory protoplant cells. The combat, lasting millennia, resulted in a treaty, a classic compromise between the protoplants and the bacteria, and chloroplasts were the outcome. With their introduction, the “nation” of organic carbon was born, and quickly spread across the face of the earth. Sunlight was the primordial war’s deciding factor. No doubt the crucial moments in the biological battle came in spring, when, as today, the sun reaches toward its highest point—the longest day.

Military history is rife with springtime scenes of dawn battles. The light is better and lasts longer. In the dark of night, or drear of winter, it is difficult to see, much less hit an enemy. In war, night is best utilized by keeping your enemy awake; the origin of psychological warfare commenced by disturbing the dreams of generals, so that, come first light, the sleep-shorn commanders would be less commanding, yawning the day’s battle plan to their weary troops.

From the standpoint of strategy, initiating the battle at dawn allowed for a longer day, and commensurately more carnage: such is the calculus of war. As it was in the microbial beginning, one side wants what the other possesses. We seem to have learned little from our understanding of plant evolution’s symbiotic outcome. Diplomats and generals should study biology.

The dynamics of man-made wars, ancient and modern, are a distant mirror of the establishment of symbiosis in living organisms. This ancient bacterial war that led to human life is reenacted and memorialized each spring by the arrival of the first green shoots of spring. It was only a few billion years ago that the First Earth War exploded across the primordial seas, a marine conflict that resulted in what scientists call The Great Oxidation Event, and which caused in turn that phenomenon we call life.

This spring as we admire our emerging plants, waxing with energy, let us remember our shared paleobotanic ancestors. Let us calm our raging tempers and still our quickening blood. As the world’s great religions assert, within the specter of war resides the glow of peace, whether we are in meditation, at the sacrificial altar or before the cross. We can, as we stand in the light of day, choose the good or the evil, life or death, the sword or the plowshare.

Grab a hoe.

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 disease in Ireland, precipitating a huge wave of Irish immigration to the United States. Since then, America’s Irish immigrants and their descendants have contributed mightily to every field in this country: politics (two presidents), law, industry, science, scholarship and the arts.

The Irish people—and their tragedy—have likewise had an extraordinary impact on the potato. The history of the potato—or to call it by its technical name, Solanum tuberosum—begins in the northern Andes, the mountainous terrain spanning Peru, Ecuador, Colombia and Venezuela. For millennia, the potato was a staple food for the region’s indigenous Inca. By the time the Spanish explorer Francisco Pizarro arrived in 1532, the natives were growing a diverse and multicolored assortment of the 200 potato varieties. Like today, potatoes thrived in the elevated regions of the subtropics, where the climate resembles a cool Canadian summer.

Europeans failed, at first, to grasp the potato’s culinary and commercial promise. To the European mind, root crops were somewhat—how do you say?—less estimable vegetables than their aboveground herbaceous cousins or grains. It was Europe’s superstitious common folk who comprised the anti-potato crowd, while French and Italian aristocrats prized the potato as a delicacy, and “earth truffle” and “earth apple”. Court ladies adorned their hair with tiaras of potato blossoms in their hair, a decorative flourish due for a revival.

Back in South America, the Spanish conquerors saw another kind of potential in the potato. Far from being a delicacy, they saw in the compact, long-lasting and nutritious tubers the perfect slave food—a single potato providing sufficient fuel to sustain a native miner an entire day. Colonial British spies took note: marveling at the potato’s productivity and potential as a food source. Before long, the English operatives relayed the news—and doubtless tubers as well—back to England.

Ireland was Britain’s original colony. Seventeenth century English and anglo-Irish landowners saw the spud as the ideal crop to feed the Irish peasants who labored on their estates under conditions akin to slavery. Potatoes, the estate owners rightly reckoned, were cheaper to grow and process than grain, while Ireland’s cool, cloudy summers provided the optimal climate for the potato to thrive. Introduced in County Wicklow around 1640, it was only a few decades before the large, lumpy type of potato became Ireland’s dominant food crop, especially in the populous south. Ninety percent of the Irish depended on the potato as their primary means of subsistence and livelihood.

The adoption of the potato in Ireland gave rise to one of history’s dark ironies. Until the fatal blight, Irish peasants thrived on their diet of fresh and earthy potatoes, on average consuming five to ten pounds per day. The British, meanwhile, disdained the potato, one of nature’s perfect foods, sticking to a nutrient-poor diet of aged meats and processed grains, such as flour.

The introduction of potatoes caused a dramatic spike in the Irish birth rate. In 1800, Ireland’s population was four and a half million. When the Great Famine began, in 1845, Ireland’s populace numbered 8 million. The diet of potato and dairy products improved Irish health so that, the Irish literally dwarfed the English, the sturdy Celts growing into the “Irish giants” of fact and fiction. The increase in Irish stature, strength and numbers were accompanied by a dramatic decrease in the country’s infant mortality, with six to ten children in the average family.

Originating in a remote valley in Mexico, a pernicious strain of the fungus Phytophthora infestans set sail for Europe with devastating effects. On landing, the resulting disease, called blight, traveled quickly throughout western Europe, beginning in 1845. During the unusually cool, overcast summers of 1846 and 1847, the fungus’s prodigiously infectious spores rode the moist winds. As many of the several dozen potato cultivars in use were related, the fungus ravaged the crops in Ireland and across northern and central Europe. Poland, for example, was only somewhat less hard hit than Ireland. The land-locked Poles starved en masse, while the Irish had had some access to the seas.

The potato, once a godsend for the Irish, became their country’s curse. The Great Potato Famine killed over one million Irish through starvation and disease: more than 12 percent of the population. The acute food shortage and grim prospects caused millions of Irish to emigrate to North America, in search of a better life, surely, but also simply to survive. By 1900, Ireland’s population was down to 3 million, from its peak of 8 million in 1840.

Desperate to explain the wave of destruction, growers and farmers blamed themselves, the soil, the British—even Satan. Part of the most prosperous country in the world, the Irish had solid reasons for holding the British to account. British landowners continued to export grains and livestock from their Irish lands, even as their tenant farmers were dying en masse. A half-hearted British initiative to import American corn to Ireland only slowed the death count, corn lacking the potato’s exceptional range and richness of nutrients.

The 1860s saw a spectacular rebound of Ireland’s potato crop, after Irish and British agriculturists discovered the remedy: breeding new plants from the potatoes that had survived the deadly blight. Out of Ireland’s laboratory of death and misery, tragedy begot triumph. Historians regard the Great Potato Famine as a pivotal point in the evolution of scientific agriculture, helping lead to work like Mendel’s study of garden peas in the 1860s, the science of genetics, and modern agriculture.

In How the Irish Saved Civilization, Thomas Cahill convincingly contends that Irish monks conserved the roots of western civilization. The Irish deserve recognition, too, for their role in conserving one of the world’s greatest food crops, and the horrific sacrifices and suffering that preceded their discovery. On St. Patrick’s Day, let’s remember both the tragedy and triumph of the potato’s epic history in Ireland.

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 for the new president Drew Becher. In any case, The 2010 Philadelphia Flower Show is an exceptionally welcome spring pleasure for the public—and I suggest you go this weekend if you haven’t yet. It is worth every penny. Besides, the funds go to the worthy cause of greening urban landscapes across the state. Consider the ticket cost an investment in beauty.

Certainly, beauty is abundant to a degree unusual compared to years past. Two reasons: the lighting was improved and the show’s theme was ideal for a flower show—Passport To The World, resonating with gardens both past and present. Since the show touched every region of the world, it was never boring. In fact, it was uniquely stimulating. A great theme is a powerful tool for designers.

Highlights include a perfect South African exhibit that included a transcendently beautiful giraffe, impressive lion, fantastically constructed parrots and an astonishing series of African tribes. The American Institute of Floral Design in Baltimore won “Best In Show” and “People’s Choice”—well-deserved slam-dunks. This exhibit is the best I have seen in many years.

New Zealand might lack a bit of uniqueness in their native cultivar selections, but way more than makes up for it with a lush and deeply satisfying display of plants, shrubs and trees that perfectly captures the nation’s strong garden spirit. New Zealand should be on every gardener’s “bucket list”. The highlight, to me, was the large, exotic, hot-water and bright bronze sculpture of a weird lizard-like fish amidst the intense plant displays, all perfectly well lit.

I admired the playful work of the folks at Schaffer Designs. They created my favorite last year, an undersea Mediterranean god’s fantasy world, like a hallucination of your favorite 1960s Italian restaurant grotto. This year they tackled the Arctic with “Polar Fantasy”, a multi faceted and dynamic design with a thoughtful nod to climate change. However, the design’s the thing here—and Schaffer pushes the florists’ materials envelope like no one else at the show. It’s both beautiful and strange—a great combination.

Another favorite was Irwin Landscaping of Hockessin, Delaware’s “Atlantic Highway—Maine to Florida”. My kind of small exhibit: dynamic and fun. The theme is a softball to the Irwins, who bash it out of the park. It features a hilarious lobster with Italian pepper claws (they do look like them), and a crazy alligator x fisherman hybrid with an amusing shrimp on the line. Terrific!

B+ exhibit area displays include Outerspaces of Paoli, Pennsylvania’s simple, elegant and sexy spa; Doylestown’s Mark Cook Landscaping and Contracting’s perfectly proportioned azaleas set about an oddly twisted garden shed that looks like an empty fairytale foster home for trolls. Ponds and Gardens of Limekiln (Glenside, PA) make a droll beer garden come to life, edged appropriately with many cultivars based upon the great plant collectors of early 20th century Germany. The pond adjacent to the “bierstube” does not fit well, but everyone else likes it, so there you are.

Solid “B”s include Moda Botanica’s shipping containers—a daring treatment of the cutflower trade’s ubiquitous but unknown world: the flowers’ journey from field to shop. It is well done here, overdone there, and superb in one inspired section: a winding lattice-like “escape” of brilliant scarlet/orange edged gloriosa lilies scampering through the rough looking graffitied, box-car-like exhibit. Indeed, like the gloriosa lilies, the entire display gives new meaning to the phrase “over the top”. Check it out.

Another solid “B” was the seductive bamboo grove by Michael Petrie Handmade Gardens, he of the strange and wonderful painted trees last year. Intentionally dark, in a dark hall, the hidden cultivar displays set beneath the handsome bamboo are sensational, but difficult to see with the weak flashlights provided in plastic buckets at the entrance. The “night” effect was, therefore, a bit flat. Could have used an LED full moon overhead. I wanted to like it more but my eyesight is not quite good enough, especially after becoming adjusted to a well-lit show.

No mention of the main exhibit hall is complete without Jane Pepper’s “well-wishes” display from her native Scotland. Sweet, whimsical and made with love, it is a delightful and uplifting design, meticulously well executed, and a fitting testament to a classy professional and great leader of the PHS for 29 years.

In the “middle” area, where non-profits mingle with judged specimen displays and both surround a new, deluxe PHS information, display and question desk, the stand-outs include The Mid-Atlantic Horticulture Therapy Network, with their simple, clear and well-staffed booth; Camden City Garden Club’s excellent plant displays and Campbell’s Soup tank (ha ha); W.B. Saul High School’s strikingly handsome Statue of Liberty; and Temple/Ambler’s excellent, informative and interestingly constructed urban ecology exhibit. Finally, Bartram’s Garden at the Fairmount Park’s display showed the many Philadelphia native’s greatest treasures from his exploration trips.

The flower and plant judging areas include some spectacular Begonias this year, as well as Clivia and a few breathtaking Cacti and Orchids. All of the entries were very well grown—a tough job in this unusually dark, harsh winter.

Very little, alas, was new in the Market Place. Hand-made honey soaps and artisanal vinegars are no longer new. Potpourri drives this dog off his gut-wagon every time, and I also walk briskly by what I call the “angst sculptures” of shiny, happy families.

On the other hand, there are several local rare plant nurseries, such as Agro-Plants, and something called the “Texas Tomato Cage” nearby Landreth Seeds’ booth, and a wide and deep table of mainland Chinese knick-knacks like those I used to see in Chicago flea markets as a boy. I felt nostalgic. I am an old-fashioned Chinatown junkie, so to speak. I could swim down a river of cheap little wooden toys.

Also, it was nice to see our friends at Cobrahead Tools and duBarry of Ireland boots, my favorite leather Wellingtons and a bargain, believe me.

Last, but not least, the Samba dancer was so good she gave me a wild case of vertigo.

Can’t wait for next year!

If you haven’t gone, GO. It lasts through tomorrow and all day Sunday.