For six months President Obama has been struggling to save the economy, improve international relations and craft a universal health care plan. Last year’s Wall Street meltdown stunned the nation, conjuring up images of a worldwide depression.

Yet, oddly enough, there is a bright spot on the horizon, and, in the President’s case, it’s shining just outside his window. Last March, on the first day of spring, the Obamas planted a relatively small (990 square feet) kitchen garden, at the cost of $200 in seeds. They plan to use the energetic efforts of school children from the neighboring communities for the 8-10 month garden’s life. Research estimates put the average ratio of grocery store cost savings to the equivalent amount of vegetables and herbs produced by a home garden at 1:25. The Obama’s family of five—including Mrs. Obama’s mother—will invest $200 for a savings of $5,000.

Last winter I wrote that I thought the President and First Lady might start gardening in private at Camp David (please see Camp Obama), and then use this experience to help start a personal White House garden. However, I misread their interests in community development. (Although there are still communities around Camp David.) No doubt that I “misunderestimated” their commitment to helping folks—especially the less privileged in DC—battle the recession.

Yet, seriously, there are many other home garden yields as great as money saved, including physical health, a sense of psychological wellbeing, the pure joy of truly fresh flavors, and amusements as colorful as Disney World. Medical research has long established that regular gentle exercise—bending, stretching, pulling—not only prolongs, but also improves the quality of life. In this sense, a garden is a permanent personal trainer-in-residence. As First Lady Michelle Obama demonstrated vividly in her inaugural garden photograph, a determined smile and strong back are worth a thousand words. In addition, the psychic rewards of a life lived intimately with plants has been documented since time began. Gardens have been the birthplace of art, poetry, music, medicine and scientific discovery.

Finally, when compared to store bought produce that has been picked unripe and shipped hundreds of miles over several weeks, a vine-ripened tomato, freshly dug potato, and just picked muskmelon possess flavors that are without comparison. It is primarily for this last reason, which is the “unreason” of pure delight, that gardens have been the image and symbol of Paradise throughout history and in all cultures.

These compelling benefits may explain the surprising statistic that approximately one-third or 40 million out of 120 million American households, engage in some form of vegetable or herb gardening. Nevertheless, industry sales figures suggest that most of these households have gardens smaller than the new one at the White House. Yet, if every one of the 40MM gardeners in America convinces just two friends or neighbors to take up this phenomenally worthwhile hobby, there could be over 100MM household vegetable gardens in 2010.

I mentioned above that the Obama’s garden was modest in comparison to an experienced and enthusiastic home gardener’s production. I have faith that the White House garden will at least double in size by next year, thus reducing the White House grocery bill by $10,000. Imagine the average household creating a 2,000 square foot vegetable garden—about the same “footprint” as a small house or bungalow. Then imagine that smaller and larger families would also join in, either in their yards or local community gardens. Without too much effort, one hundred million households could save an average of $10,000 a year. This would have bailed out the US auto industry several times over. More cogent is the fact that a trillion dollars is the same figure being discussed as the total cost for our nation’s health care reform. Not a coincidence, in my opinion.

My depression-era parents grew up doing chores and walking to school several times a day. Occasionally, in their later years, they would bemoan the sudden appearance of school buses in every neighborhood of my hometown, a small and leafy suburb of Chicago. Even I walked back and forth to school twice a day for a total of four miles for six years. My folks would say, “They could save gas as well as keep the kids from going soft”. I wish they had lived to hear my proposal to the President of the United States for a nationwide movement to create The Trillion Dollar Garden.

A worldly friend gravely informs me luxury is dead. Now that Gucci purses and Hermes scarves are being snatched up by a larger public, he explains, they’ve lost their cachet. Luxury has gotten too democratic. It’s like the line about the restaurant: “Nobody goes there any more: it’s too crowded.”

The new luxury, he tells me is about being pampered, being taken care of. A higher level of service and convenience. Life at the push of a button. Love For Sale.

This, to me, sounds even more repellent than the old luxury. As Sam Goldwyn would say, “Include me out.”

The darkest moment in my life came recently after a relative gave me a 4-day weekend at a renowned spa. Friends told me I’d love it, “Be good to yourself,” they told me.

So I went. I had massages: shiatsu, hot rocks, cranial-sacral; I practiced yoga, meditated, my chakras were balanced, went through the motions of Tai-chi, did breathing exercises; I took exercise classes, strapped myself into Pilates machines; I had a facial, a pedicure, a manicure. I sweated in a sauna; I steeped in a swirling Jacuzzi. I dined on vegetarian cuisine presented like works of art; I sipped green tea. I thought I was dying.

“This Evening at 8:00 P.M.—Bloodletting In The Berkshire Room.”

Whenever I took a break from the sybaritic regime to lounge on the terrace, a velvet-voiced attendant would promptly appear to ask if there were anything I required. With envy I observed the landscaping crew raking and weeding in the blazing afternoon sun. My manicured hands were itching for a trowel.

After 48 hours of pampering, I could take no more. I was reminded of the “Twilight Zone” episode in which a man who has died arrives in the afterlife. He finds himself in a paradise where he can have whatever he wants. There are no obstacles to his pleasures. Finally, he tells a person in authority, he has had enough. He pleads to go to the “other place”. “This is the other place,” he is informed.

In desperation, I called an old friend who happened to live nearby. He was surprised to hear from me; it had been some years. And, he noted, it was 3 AM. “Rescue me,” I implored. He gently asked if I could survive the night. Heroically, if reluctantly, I agreed to wait until morning. Dawn really dawdled that day. What was the sun doing?

True to his word, my friend met me in the spa’s airy lobby at 9 on the dot. My bag was packed and at my side. He took in the scene. The clients lounging like pashas in their terrycloth robes. The whispering, hypervigilant staff. The steaming raku cups of green tea. The modish furniture’s soothing tones of celadon. The orchids serene in their vases.

He pointed to a tasteful taupe silk hanging with Chinese calligraphy. “You know what that says?” No, I did not. “It says, ‘Let’s get the hell out of here’ ”.

Paul Gauguin, the painter, noted in his journal, “Work is leisure.” I agree with Paul. And for me, the converse is also true, “Leisure is work.”

Everyone who gardens or cooks knows the feeling. At work in the garden or kitchen, my spirit is set free. What is discordant becomes harmonious. The out of kilter is balanced. Time? What is time?

Engaged in the task at hand, I feel not as if I am working, but being played like an instrument by a divine virtuoso. My senses are engaged by color, scent and flavor. I am in the blissful junction of recreation and re-creation. This is what it means to reap the fruits of one’s labors. Devotion is the New New Luxury.

Mankind has really been put in its place over the last 500 years.  Why only the other day, back in 1400, the sun orbited the earth; man was God’s consummate work of art; humans were masters of themselves and the domain God provided for them. 

Our secular fall from grace began with Copernicus, who dislodged the world from its celestial catbird seat.  Later, Darwin established that man, far from being the animal kingdom’s pièce de résistance, was a bit like a baboon in sports clothes.  Then Mendel documented the laws of inheritance—so much for free will—and Dr. Freud subordinated what was then left of our minds to unseemly drives over which we have little control.

In the 20th century, technology—the tools that connected us to the earth, the skies and ourselves—assumed a size and complexity too big to fit into what was left, finally, of our brains.  In the 1890s, an intelligent layman could achieve a rudimentary grasp of the scope of current scientific thought. Perhaps no one – scientist or not – fathoms the full scope of technology today.

According to scientist and futurist Raymond Kurzweil, the coming technological-evolutionary quantum leap, known as the Singularity, will erase the line between human beings and technology.  He maintains technology’s exponential progress will result in part-human, part-machine nanobots, with infinitely greater brain power and life-spans extending to immortality—a long life indeed. 

Kurzweil envisions the time, if a body part fails, one need only grab its replacement from the pantry and snap it in place.  Already, lawyers are busy devising the constitutional framework for a post-human future, in view of the shifting nature of what comprises a human being. The classic paradox comes to mind: once the knife’s blade and handle are each replaced several times, is it still the same knife? Once all your parts have been replaced a few times, are you still you?
 
Now a segment of the Green movement presents a fresh challenge to mankind’s place within nature.  Humans, the thinking goes, are one species among the many, a life form co-existing with others, our rights commensurate with those of tics, snail darters, mosquitoes and coral reefs. 

The new environmentalist thinking occupies that treacherous terrain between rationality and romanticism.  It’s highly logical, too, an all-encompassing equation where everything is equivalent to everything else—Communism at a cellular level.

The premise glows with the innocence we forsook when Adam larcenously appropriated an apple from its rightful owner, the tree.  We have yet to get back on speaking terms with the serpent, our unindicted coconspirator.

This dangerous new unnatural naturalism sees the planet as a realm of halcyon purity.  Conversely, mankind is portrayed as a cancer on the planet.  Welcome to secular subhumanism.

The Earth-Firsters are not fools. There are choice elements in their deranged philosophy that merit consideration; such is the essence of temptation. However, their failure is that they undermine their cause with acts of brutality. Theodore Kacinski, the UnaBomber, a PhD with kindred neo-Luddite views, was one such activist run amok, responsible for dozens of injuries and four deaths—a case study of how, contaminated with extreme emotion, logic becomes toxic. 

Evo-lutionaries and animal rights activists feel justified in spiking trees, burning down housing developments, vandalizing laboratories and threatening the lives of researchers and their families. By all means save the Red-Cockaded Woodpecker, but not at the cost of human lives, no matter how few. That way lies madness.

One activist author posits that the planet can support only one billion people–a number surely including the writer, his friends and extended family.  Another activist advocates saving the world through euthanasia, abortion, suicide and sodomy.  However, the truly repugnant part of this story is that these are both tenured professors in wealthy universities. 

In Switzerland, proposed legislation protects the rights of plants. As you roam the Swiss mountains, do not violate the rights of the wildflowers by picking them: an undercover gnome might arrest you. Internationally, the Greener-than-thou brigade scorns hybrid seeds—the 20th century achievement that vastly increased the world’s food supply and rescued billions from starvation—forgetting that nature has been creating hybrids since the beginning of time.

A Yale professor maintains that owning pets is a kind of species colonialism, an exploitative master-subject relationship.  The word “pet” is now viewed as pejorative; if you must hold a creature hostage, call it your “animal companion.”  He explains that when we gaze upon the beauty of a man-made landscape, we fail to apprehend it is, first of all, an exercise in power.

The political views of the Eco-elitists defy easy categorization, if not also comprehension.  Their anti-business stance might mark them as liberals, while their hard-edged fundamentalist views about nature and brittle nostalgia for a lost Peaceable Kingdom are surely conservative.

Perhaps they are little more than one of nature’s newest 21st century hybrids: Progressive-Reactionaries. 
 

Spectacular Japanese Fountain Grass (Hakonechloa macra ‘Aureola’), indeed, but it would be so much less without the Bent Grass (Agrostis stolonifera), an Asian native beloved in the Pacific Northwest and considered a weed in the Atlantic Northeast.  Photograph taken at Heronswood’s original test and display gardens in Kingston.

Get rid of your lawn?  Plant it with flowers and vegetables?  I’m for that!  But not at the expense of my Brother Lawn.  Rather, I wish to add to his beauty, as well as his many years of service.  Thus, “In Defense of Lawns”.

In a New York Times Op/Ed Classic from 1991 and reprinted last month to demonstrate its relevance and timeliness, the best-selling food and environment writer Michael Pollan says:

“We Americans have traditionally looked on our front lawns as nothing less than an institution of democracy.  Beginning in the 19th century, at the urging of such landscape designer-reformers as Frederick Law Olmsted and Andrew Jackson Downing, we took down our old-world walls and hedges (which they had declared to be “selfish” and “undemocratic”) and spread an uninterrupted green carpet of turf grass across our yards, down our streets, along our highways and, by and by, across the entire continent.”

Really?

My guess is most folks have never heard of Olmsted and Downing or, if so, only in passing.  Pollan’s provenance of lawns is news to 99.9% of Americans.  I doubt highly that anyone conceives of his lawn as the “institution of democracy”.  People take pride in their lawns because they are handsome and functional, providing places for children to play, athletic fields, a buffer between the house and the street, a fire break in the western half of the country and a place you can accidentally drop a plate of BBQ ribs or spill a glass of wine without care.  Lawns are fun and look pretty—I believe that is how they are “looked on”.  Their elegance and beauty stir our imaginations rather than politicize our identities.

Pollan continues:

“The democratic symbolism of the lawn may be appealing, but it carries an absurd and, today, unsupportable environmental price tag.  In our quest for the perfect lawn, we waste vast quantities of water and energy, human as well as petrochemical . . .

But the deeper problem with the American lawn, and the reason I believe the White House lawn must go, is less chemical than metaphysical.  The lawn is a symbol of everything that’s wrong with our relationship to the land.  Lawns require pampering because we ask them to thrive where they do not belong.”

No kidding?

As I say, I don’t believe that Americans are aware that their lawns and playing fields constitute an “institution of democracy”. Their conception of their lawns is not stuck in the 1950s, when the apparently traumatic incident took place that Pollan describes in which his “free spirit” father, after being pressured by his neighbors to cut his lawn, mowed only his initials into the two foot high grass.

Over the past 40 years, awareness of the effects of air and water pollution on the quality of our lives has grown.  In response to this, local, state and federal governments have set guidelines and passed laws to limit or ban many pollutants.  For example, phosphates have largely been eliminated from lawn fertilizers.  In addition, Americans have long ago come to appreciate water as a limited (and increasingly expensive) resource—something the rest of the world has never forgotten.  Many alternatives to the “traditional lawn” have sprouted up over the past 30 years.  They involve the use of native species that require less input of time (mowing), chemicals (fertilizers and herbicides, both organic and non-organic) and irrigation.  Currently, there are many alternatives to the so-called “traditional lawn” that are diverse as well as regionally adapted.

Perhaps, over the last 10 years, Pollan and others such as the late Sarah Stein helped to raise folks’ awareness of these alternatives.  However, political correctness doesn’t earn anyone, in my book, the right to tear up the White House lawn.

But what, after all, is this “traditional lawn”?

Pollan continues:

“Turf grasses are not native to America, yet we have insisted on spreading them from the Chesapeake watershed to the deserts of California without the slightest regard for local geography.”

This is a straw man as well as untrue.  The non-native species that are used in lawns aren’t invasive ones that hitched a ride in a cargo container a couple of decades ago, as he implies by lumping them in with controversial or truly destructive invasive species.

For example, we use Perennial Rye and Meadow Fescue at Fordhook.  They originated mainly in Northern Europe and are almost perfect for our Atlantic maritime area, fifty miles inland.  This classic mixture can be found in domestic usage from 30° N latitude at high elevations to 62° N—an extraordinary range.

Another example is Kentucky bluegrass, the quintessential turf grass. It is native to most of Europe, Northern Asia and the mountains of North Africa.  The climates of these regions are similar to the cool humid parts of the U.S. where Kentucky bluegrass has been extensively planted.  It is particularly well suited to many parts of North America.  The early European colonists brought all these grasses to this country over 200 years ago where they’ve become thoroughly adapted.  Such a horticultural success should be celebrated rather than scorned.  What other “foreigners” should we stop growing?  Lettuce?  Carrots?  Beets?  Melons?  Send the cow and the horse packing?  “Back to Eurasia with you!”

Furthermore, there is also the issue of cool- vs. warm-season grasses:

Cool-season grasses are those that develop most rapidly during spring and early summer when cool nights follow warm days.  They are dormant during the hottest parts of summer and begin to grow again in late summer and early fall.  These grasses include timothy, orchard grass, and brome grass—all introduced species—as well as native species such as Canada wild rye, redtop, and June grass.  They do well in the northeast and Midwest but poorly in hotter, drier climates. 

Warm-season grasses are “bunch grasses” that develop most rapidly during summer when warm nights follow hot days.  They include native prairie species such as big bluestem, little bluestem, Indian grass, and switch grass.

Pollan would have us believe that the lawns grown in Connecticut are the same as those grown in southern California.  He tells us that all lawn grasses are homologous across the country.  This is both false and misleading.

The untrue part of  Pollan’s invasive statement is that he fails to mention a large number of lawn and turf or sod grasses that are, in fact, native.  Buffalo grass is one of these (Buchloe dactyloides).  Researchers have developed many cultivars at the University of Nebraska that are suitable for golf courses and home lawns throughout the U.S.  A warm-season grass, it grows well and even forms sod from Alberta, Canada, to northern Mexico.  Furthermore, it is drought-resistant, thus conservative in its use of water.

It’s clear that Pollan doesn’t like lawns, to say the least.  This accounts for his not looking at them very closely.  They differ quite a bit, as do roadside forests of deciduous trees.  In any case, if he doesn’t enjoy lawns and the chores involved with their maintenance, he’s free to live in an apartment, to replace his lawn with a flower,
vegetable or perennial garden.  (Please do!)

However, in other places in his books and essays, Pollan repeatedly suggests that lawns represent a dysfunctional relationship between humankind and nature, and symbolize environmental neglect or, worse, destruction.  Again, this is untrue.

For example, lawns do a good job of sequestering carbon.  A well-kept lawn is not only a pleasure, but also an excellent “carbon sink”.  The photosynthetic process—sunlight turning carbon dioxide into sugar, cellulose and other plant constituents—fixes or “sinks” carbon into grasses, lawns, gardens and the soils that support them.  If anything, a lawn is an ecological flag—even more so, ironically, than a vegetable garden.  A lawn resists soil degradation much better than a veggie patch, which gets torn up each year, decomposing and thus releasing the plant carbons from the soil by exposing roots and debris to microbes.  No more carbon sink—the carbon goes back into the atmosphere.*

While an annual flower or vegetable garden fixes less carbon than the lawn, it is also true that a recreation of a prairie grass meadow, with big and little blue-stems, coneflowers and other long-lived native perennial plants, will fix either more or the equal of a typical well-maintained lawn.  So, certainly, a meadow is as good as a lawn for the environment—maybe even better.  But to suggest that lawns are bad for the environment is nonsense.

Indeed, recent research suggests that lawns are not merely carbon sinks but also “pollen traps”.  This is yet another advantage of a lawn over a backyard prairie.**  In his article, “The Pollen-trapping Power Of A Lawn”, T.L. Ogren states that an average, well-kept lawn removes “far more pollen than it will ever produce itself” as well as “hundreds of millions” of grains from surrounding trees and shrubs, by snaring them in its brushy surface.  Then, after rains and lawn sprinklings, the pollen is pushed down into the lawn even further, making it almost impossible to dry out and become air-borne again.
 
The most obvious problem with home prairie grasslands is, to me, critters—from mice, squirrels and chipmunks to skunks and snakes. And how will you know a trespasser isn’t an opossum or raccoon?  There’s also the issue of insects.  I, for one, love them.  However, I prefer them in the wild or the vegetable and flower garden—not on my porch.  For example, wasps and yellow jackets commonly nest in meadow soils.  Ridding a recreated tall grass meadow of them would be, literally, a pain in the neck.

One example of the prejudice against wild grasses: As I was recovering from being nudged awake, one of several times, during the movie Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, I noticed a reference in the story to the “grasses”—being tall species—of China’s “wild west”.  They symbolized the rude, crude and uncivilized.  Not so absurd, then, that the Chinese adore lawn and turf grasses and reckon that they represent the finer things in life.

The chord “Crouching” touches is probably universal.  Meadow or pasture grass, whence our lawn species originate, is one of the first “biophilic” organisms (to use Edward O. Wilson’s term)—the first life forms we lived with.  No pasture, no cattle.  No cattle, no meat, milk, leather, etc.  Little wonder green grass is associated with heaven in religious art, as in “Sheep May Safely Graze” by J. S. Bach.  Trace your pets, too, back to meadow grass, man’s first best friend.  Indeed, it was likely a key factor in domesticating us.  It certainly makes sense:  Poacae, the universal grass family, was found where we were.

Also, there’s the aesthetic interest.  While I adore the reclaimed farms and restored prairies of my native Midwest, I’ve become attached to lawns, especially large ones. The landscape architect Arthur Edwin Bye was the Rembrandt of the sweeping lawn. Once you see this type of beauty, you never forget it.

Finally, much as I love gardens, fields of crops and formal city parks, I’m most fond of golf courses.  In my childhood they were mysterious—even a bit scary.  They came as close to a dragon’s lair as I wanted to get.  But now I adore them.  Each is unique and some are dazzling.  All do at least a fair job of revealing the essence of the surrounding landscape or cityscape.  And, except for those requiring carts, you always get a good walk.  Some in the Southwest are dreamily beautiful, like something out of a Star Trek scene.  Marty Sanchez Links de Santa Fe is a perfect example, and public to boot.

Perhaps, as his father was stuck in the 1950s, Pollan is a bit lost in a 1970s view of chemical lawns.  Pity, because he’s an effective spokesman when he is not making erroneous statements in his Romantic, quasi-Wendell Berry mode.  I rather wish he’d adopt a Wallace Beery mode and tumble around with his kids on the White House lawn. 

*Specifically, tillage decreases soil organic carbon levels over time.  Lawns of long standing, like that at the White House, are highly productive and are effective sinks of atmospheric carbon.  That is atmospheric carbon (CO2) is incorporated into the roots and leaves of grasses.  In a study of golf courses (see Argon. J. 94:930-935), where the oldest was 45 yr old and the newest 1.5 yr old, non linear regression analysis of compiled historic data demonstrated that total C sequestration continued for up to 31 yr in fairways and 45 yr in putting greens.  The most rapid increase occurred during the first 25 to 30 yr after turf grass establishment, at average rates approaching 0.9 and 1.0 t ha-1  yr-1 for fairways and putting greens, respectively.  Note that the most actively managed areas (putting greens) sequester the most carbon.

**Thomas Leo Ogren is the author of Allergy-Free Gardening.  He can be reached at his website,

Lawn As Margin (Fordhook Farm)

Lawn As Partner (Fordhook Farm)

Easter reminded me of another miracle—eggs.  Let me explain.  There may be no food more effective on a cost basis.  Here in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, a dozen eggs goes for about $3.00, or 25 cents each, and there are grocery stores everywhere you turn.  If you have two a day, you’re spending 50 cents.  Ground beef is about $4.00 a pound, which a family of four will go through in a day, or $1.00 per person.  Therefore, ground beef—while tastier—is twice as expensive.  This is one of the secrets of the restaurant industry.  If you get a breakfast trade going, you have a “gusher”.

Personally, I think the taste and versatility of eggs are even more miraculous than the price.  I don’t need to flavor them at all if they’re soft-boiled, and just a tiny bit if they’re fried, scrambled or “shirred” with milk as the English do.

Unlike ground beef, a dozen eggs will keep a couple of weeks with little effect on flavor.  You can’t get any fresh meat to last as long.

Also, an old Englishman friend of the family introduced me to “eggie” when I was a child.  It’s about anything in the refrigerator, sautéed and then mixed with a couple of eggs.  After a holiday, such as Thanksgiving, this can become a week-long feast.

So, along with vegetables in my much touted 1:25 ratio, some of the basic foods are still quite a bargain if you get the hang of it.  Milk remains at the near-miraculous level of about $2.50 a gallon, which is a godsend to a young family of four.

Add an egg to your soup for supper and you can “live large” on three a day.

I am going to compare the approximate costs of “family activities”, and therefore the potential savings, of a six-month home gardening warm season, and a routine of garden-event based experiences during the same period.  These costs are for a family of four.

The idea is that if you don’t have an “active” garden, your family spends a surprising amount of time engaged in entertainment activities outside the home.  On the other hand, if this same family decided to forego these activities over the same period of time, they could both save money, and also discover a new side of life.  These home- and garden-based activities may not be as much fun, at first, but they would probably be more healthy in terms of physical, emotional and spiritual wellbeing.

Let’s suppose that during the six months from about May 1 to October 1 a family of four pursues the following average number of activities:

Therefore, a family of four could likely spend a total of $5,200 during the six months of the warm season of the year engaged in shopping ($600), eating out ($1,000), ball games ($300), Amusement Parks ($300), and vacation ($3,000).  Total:  $5,200.00.

Now let’s cover the alternative version of these events held at home in the garden:

Total out-of-pocket costs for a “stay at home warm season” for a family of four is about $1,500, or just a little over 25% of the “Go Out” routine.  Net savings:  $3,700.

Clearly, in addition to the cost savings of a vegetable garden running at a savings of up to $2,500 for a 600 square foot garden, foregoing mostly non-essential spending on out-of-home amusements and activities could save a family about $3,700. Use the garden as a second focal point—after the house—for the family.

Let’s say I’m too conservative and round up the non-food savings to $4,000.  That’s a total savings of $6,500 in addition to eating well and having fun.  Then, next, let’s say we cut out only half of these non-essential events.  The family would still be saving $2,000. That is almost 75% of the amount that the family would be saving by eating home grown produce rather than eating store bought produce. Yet the family could still go on five shopping trips, five nights out to dinner, etc., etc. per warm season.  For those in the South and Sunbelt, the “warm season” in the garden could be year ’round, thus saving even more money, and possibly changing your domestic way of life.

Notice that none of these changes interfere with golf outings, judo, karate or ballet lessons, church and civic activities.  They simply replace a few discretionary income leisure pursuits, and, in the process, save an extraordinary amount of money.
 

I was surprised to learn recently that Sears Tower was being renamed.  What an obsession we Americans have for renaming buildings that have achieved historic and superlative status.  Does anyone think folks are going to call it anything other than Sears Tower?

It started me wondering about our monuments and institutions.  Old churches and libraries crumble and fall apart.  In many cases they weren’t well built in the first place.  Government buildings move to neighborhoods in the city’s “outer ring”, leaving giant American Gothic hunks to rot downtown.  America eats its old.  But it doesn’t let them get much past young to begin with.

Yet it makes some sense.  We aren’t Europe, where many 1,000 year old churches and town buildings are still going strong.  It isn’t merely a case of lust for the tourist trade, either, as folks often say.  Europeans preserve the past:  it is a matter of tradition.  Just as it takes many generations to create stable towns, and many more to cultivate and refine their institutions, it also takes a force of nature to destroy them, as the earthquake did in central Italy last week.  The Europeans don’t do it themselves.  On the contrary, they built our civilization.

We not only eat our young and old, but we do it with a certain gusto.  The newspaper businesses are crumbling as surely as old, dry-rotted, inner city schools.  We fail to see the “localism”—ironically much touted and championed by aging hipsters nationwide—disappearing before our eyes and being replaced by a “national” media that we stare at, slack-jawed, day after day.
 
In Seattle, the best of the two newspapers evaporated last month.  That’s because no local newspapers are viable.  We’ve finally become a nation, united under AOL, Google, Yahoo, and the TV tube.  It’s pretty disgusting, but so are a lot of things in the process of being made, such as legislation and sausage.  We’re finally becoming Europe, where they have mostly national newspapers and magazines, and only occasionally truly local ones—the opposite of our past and recent present.

What we lack are the steeples.  Mammon rules our cities, and is making some small progress even in Europe.  However, give us a few more centuries and I believe we’ll be about where Europe is today in terms of culture, refinement and preservation of our heritage.  Indeed, we might even get there sooner as far as our private gardens go.  Just ask The Garden Conservancy.  They need perhaps only 100 more years to become truly established.

 New Plant Frontiers
Parts 2 & 3

Here are the middle sections of my speech for today, April 3 and tomorrow, April 4 at 1:30 P.M.  Also, we have the hellebore expert and new plant explorer Simon Crawford speaking at 11:00 A.M. both days on the timely subject of the Lenten Rose.  Even if it’s a bit rainy, wear your rain clothes, come see our woodland hellebores, hear our speeches and buy some exciting new plants.  Food and hot chocolate are available.  Gate proceeds go to The Garden Conservancy.  So please come and hear the finale of my speech and the entirety of Mr. Crawford’s.

Part 2 – In And Out The Door

The second illustration of the primary principle being the location and position of the customer, can be found in the little known “unseen half” of horticulture, which is its indoor ornamental part.  Indoor horticulture, that is not concerned with hydroponics or cultivation of greenhouse vegetables and herbs, can be divided into two main categories.

The first category is cut flowers which is a huge industry and, so to speak, of one piece, or on its own.  In vegetables this would be like the onion industry or the potato industry.  Like them, the cut flower business is so large that it dwarfs all other parts of ornamental horticulture combined, has a vertical structure and independence that makes it its own category, and is located mostly overseas.  In other words, it runs itself, and often the players act like “captains of industry”, which is an unusual behavior in horticulture, since in general it is fragmented and comprised mostly of rural families.

However, think about the customer.  The buyer is usually female and, ultimately, the end user is almost always a female.  The product is both perishable as well as highly fragile and is placed carefully in a fragile vessel in a room, usually in the winter when the air is dry and light levels low.  Its life is always very short in comparison to all other parts of horticulture.  Yet, conversely, it makes an enormously powerful impression and is associated with great but short-lived passion.  This is a truly unique, specific and quintessentially niche market.

The other great part of this “unseen half” of horticulture is the pot plant market.  Except for a relatively small percentage of the Deep South, as well as a small amount sold during the summer, the overwhelming majority of pot plants are indoor plants.  What is interesting is the contrast with cuts, even though they are both kept indoors.  First, this market is extremely fragmented at all levels—from production to consumption—in comparison to cut flowers.  Why?  The many distinctions in taste as well as usage on the consumer level can be explained by the fact that pot plants live a long time in the home.  Therefore, they become for most folks an indoor garden.  Consumers develop a personal,  gardenesque relationship to pot plants.  They actually get to relate to them over time.  Each type of pot plant possesses a subtle and quaint quality that softens the home, much as a garden softens a yard.  They are an elegant touch of civilization in what is, after all, a boxy, sterile indoor world.

So, in contrast to outdoor gardening, the context of this indoor horticulture varies little.  It is a world of rooms that are dry, warm, and, since it’s usually winter, dark most of the time.  Now, compare this to the outdoors.  The outdoor garden varies tremendously—especially in comparison to the indoors.  Also, there are profound variations from street to street, county to county and state to state.  Plus, over time, there can be tremendous changes in any garden’s physical environment.  So I point these things out to underscore the great importance of looking very closely at the location and condition of the customer.

Part 3 – Backwards And Forwards

This brings us to the discussion of the new frontiers in plant breeding:

My predecessor, David Burpee, owned and ran the company from 1915—at age 22—to 1970, when he was 77.  Therefore, he reigned for 55 years, 5 short of the sacred number of 60 in China, where his wife, a missionary’s daughter, was born and raised.  He’d have liked to reach 60 for sentimental reasons, but he’d had a long run that covered four wars, including two global ones, a major depression and the entire two decades of the post WWII boom.  He lived and consulted full-time for the company until his death in 1980 at age 87.  For this reason of his long life in horticulture—nearly that of a Chinese emperor—I follow his advice closely.  He has inspired me to look to the heavens for future plants.

Not so fanciful as it seems:  the ancient Hindus, Chinese, Egyptians, Persians, Greeks and Romans—all named many of their plants for heavenly bodies, celestial phenomena and meteorological events.  The Greeks and later the Romans tended later to name them also for their deities.  Only lately have we adopted the habit of naming our plants for their discoverer, a nearby town, river or valley, or their children.  The future that Mr. Burpee saw in the 1960s was interplanetary hybrids—literally “Man In The Moon” marigolds, indeed!  He anticipated last month’s launch of the Kepler telescope satellite, which will explore 24/7 for three years an area the size of your hand extended from your arm in the direction of the constellation Lyra.  There are estimated to be over 150,000 suns in this relatively small section of the sky within the range of the telescope.  If just one percent of them qualify to have a chance of having a solar system similar to ours—which is not so unlikely—then over 1,500 candidates for a planet similar to earth exist in just that fraction of the sky.  These are good odds for finding life similar to ours:  one earth like planet in 150,000 chances.  One in 150,000 chances—in the direction of Lyra—a relatively small constellation itself, and one of several hundred its size in the earth’s night skies, or what we so quaintly call “outer space”.

The brief time from the Wright Brothers to the 1969 moon landing is a testimony to the essential power of technology.  This quantum leap was due to huge breakthroughs in applied physics, which were fruit of about 100 years of physical science beginning in the early 1800s—so about 150 years—a blink of time in American history.

But how unique?  Consider the domestication of plants and animals.  Many believe these were fairly rapid changes, that societies quickly adapted and also extended these new technologies—the ox, horse, wagon, dogs for night protection, cats for granary protection.  Extremely useful technologies—because they were mostly the result of the technology of selective breeding.  Consider even the psychological meaning that the wild goat possessed.  The “scapegoat” was no abstraction—the actual animal was required.

As were crop improvements—an ancient journey with truly revolutionary and life-changing transformations along the way:  wheat, rye, oats, rice in the tropics of Asia and corn in the tropics of Americas, herbs such as onions, garlic and the rest of the Allium family—subjects of such power to influence that there were festivals and dieties related to them in ancient Egypt for over 3,000 years.

The apple—unrecognized if you saw it in the wild and very unpalatable to us.

Here’s a preview of the first half of my speech to be given this Friday and Saturday, April 3 and 4, at 1:30 P.M.  Come hear the rest of it!

Part 1, New American Sun Garden

I’m going to talk today about the future of plant breeding from the unique perspective of someone who has been in the industry and had a front row seat to cutting edge flower and vegetable breeding for over 30 years.

The number one rule in plant breeding is that you are creating a plant for a specific garden, which is a literally unique space and time, which is to say, in the precise place and during the exact time that the customer wants to enjoy it.

Put a simpler way:  the context of plant breeding is the home of the consumer.  Therefore, it is the home of the consumer that gives plant breeding its meaning and either its rightness or wrongness.

Here are a couple of illustrations to make this point.  First, there are in America—in the entire United States—approximately 5 million brand new single-family homes with substantial yards in the middle of what was once either very recently a farmer’s field or perhaps, long ago, an abandoned meadow or simply an expanse of barren land.  Add these to the similar millions recently built, or built since the 1960s.  Millions and millions of yards, and potential gardens, with absolutely no shade other than the amount cast by the house at dawn and dusk, and then only if it’s two stories high.  Ranch houses cast virtually no shade in a yard.

Also, we are including here a large part of the North American continent that is subject to a tropical type of climate during almost half of the year, and in a substantial part of this area, well over half the year is hot, sunny and subject to swings in relative humidity—in other words, a sub-tropical climate.

So the context of the breeding of new plants for this particular consumer’s home is that this person has absolutely no shade.  The yard and garden bakes in the summer sun.  This poses a number of challenges and opportunities, the most obvious being a vegetable garden.  It also brings up the most profound questions in landscape design, and it is not an obvious one, just as it is not an easy one to answer:  Where do I put a tree?  Think about it.  Imagine it.  The answer initiates the entire process of a “blank page” garden design.  It is especially profound for someone who has a yard of 1/4, 1/2 or 2/3 of an acre in the middle of nowhere, so to speak, with no trees.  Many of our rural North American ancestors  knew where to place them—they’d line them along the windward side of the farmhouse to shield it from the blowing winter cold.  Up in western Canada they actually place them in a spoiler or wind shear formation surrounding three quarters of the house.

This situation can become complicated by what is called a homeowner’s association or a community that was planned to have only certain types of landscapes in the yards, as well as “transition areas”, a euphemism for the spaces where the houses have been built.

In other words, it may be that you aren’t allowed to plant a tree.  However, you may be allowed to plant miniature shade trees and shrubs.  Another effective structure is fencing.  Fencing and trees have a lot in common.  In fact, in the history of civilization they have often been in association and sometimes one and the same.  I believe that, like walls, fences are at the heart of civilization.  However, especially in today’s world, they need trees to grace them, so to speak, to soften them, to decorate them.  Personally, I love chain-link fence, as odd as that seems to many people.  The reason is simple:  I can see through it.  Vines love it as well.  However, a fence may also become a shade structure in and off itself.

So the new shade garden of today for many Americans is extraordinarily different from what used to be called “the shade garden”.  In the 50s a shade garden consisted of 20-30 foot oaks and elms, ashes, beeches and maples, with enormous canopies, as well as many smaller trees towering over a yard, or yards, in a neighborhood that stretched through town after town throughout the northeast as well as many parts of the urban south and even in the old cities of the Midwest and west.

Not true today.  This is what I mean by the context of breeding being the home of the consumer.  A classic example is impatiens.  Today’s impatiens have to hold up under partial to full sunlight.  However, they were bred originally for part to full shade, and they originated in the deep shade of tropical jungle riverbanks.  There are few places shadier in which flowering plants can evolve.

New physical space equals new context.  And the new physical place of many new homeowners, as well as future homeowners, is in the Midwest, the plain states, the inland west and the vast and treeless southwest.  Therefore, from breeders of trees and nursery plants all the way to the most petite and dainty plants used for groundcovers and edging beds, today’s plant breeders are faced with brand new challenges.  We must create shorter trees with enhanced canopies; new shrubs that are more sun tolerant than ever before; and herbaceous annuals and perennials that not only tolerate sun and heat but also, because of the remoteness of water in cornfields and abandoned meadows, tolerate much lower levels of water.  This is a new environment, as was the leafy, forested suburbs to the city-dwellers who began migrating to them 100 years ago.

An interesting thing about the New American Sun Garden:  it is a reiteration on a microscopic level of the early settlement of the Midwestern and central plains states—a huge area roughly between the Mississippi Valley and the Rockies and from Canada to Mexico—that is predominantly treeless.  A few small woodlands follow the larger river valleys here and there, but they are swallowed by an ocean-sized space of strong winds, extremes of rain and drought and little else but grasses, which when seasonally burning, destroy all woody shrubs.  Therefore, short and green (or “wet”) trees evolved but had no value to settlers who had to import trees from East, West and even overseas. Virtually all their tall trees adapted to become shorter.  So, we can imagine our backyard treeless meadow or cornfield sub-division as the great plains states—whether low plains of Iowa, Kansas and Nebraska or high plains of Colorado and Wyoming—writ very small, like a hobby scale model.  So, if you face this situation, don’t feel bad:  you’re part of a continental landscape fraternity.  What the early settlers of the nation had to do collectively, you have to do individually.

There’s a brief moment in early spring—usually in the first week—when a perfect freshness unfolds.  The balance of light tilts to favor the “out of doors”.  Clean air streams inside.  Fordhook’s 60 acres of forest, meadow and gardens flash in the sun.

I enjoy the “species” quality of spring.  By July the jumbled, generic woods seem incoherent and mute in comparison.  Now I can savor tree structure and delight in the rare, ephemeral forms of the shrubs.  Even roots seem to appear and dance around like ghosts.  So much life!  So vivid are the forests and every single tree.

Water is a constant:  in air, sky, wind and mist.  It permeates the soil, slickens the trunks and stems, and slips underfoot.  Rainstorms come fast and hard and finish slow and gentle, as if sad to be going.

Winter, like summer, had such a static quality—almost numbing the senses—formal and masked with snow.  Spring dances in and out so quickly, like a dart of green light.  Perhaps this is why the goddess capers about the other seasons, in and out, here and there.

Notice when people smile, their personalities appear?  Making them unique, specific, individual—apart from the masses?  Until the smile, nothing but Homo sapiens.  Thus are the transitional seasons to me, and especially newborn spring.  I get to know Fordhook most in the fall and spring, each year new bits, and a deeper understanding.