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.

America’s rich are now under greater scrutiny than at any time since the era of muckrakers and Robber Barons. What the rich are guilty of, it seems, is making money and being rich. It is certainly true that wealth is concentrated in relatively few hands, with just one percent of the country possessing 34 per cent of the country’s wealth. 

Conservatives say this concentration derives from reaping the rewards of enterprise and ingenuity, and prudently and ably husbanding the results. Leftists complain of special interests, undue influence, insider trading, self-dealing, accounting sleight-of-hand and foreign bank accounts.

I agree with everybody!

However, what interests me about America’s rich is whether we, the public, are receiving an adequate return on our investment in them. As suppliers—and now in some cases owners—of their fortunes, we are entitled to some assurance that the rich are worthy of it, and that they benefit from them. I fear we have created a culture of the undeserving rich.

“The rich are different than you and I,” wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald. Could it be that mediocrity and dullness are their most distinguishing features?  After all, Bernard Madoff drove a cheap Korean SUV to his arraignment.  He wore a down jacket, corduroy pants and a nondescript, “migrant worker” baseball cap.
 
John Ruskin, the celebrated art critic, had no interest in visiting the United States. Why would he? The country was, he lamented, without castles.

Where are America’s palaces? Where are its follies, mazes, fancies? The great homes of Newport—famously called cottages—resemble giant double-wide trailers with pillars. This playground of the great industrialists looks as if it were conceived by a tool-and-die maker with a classical education.

Our awe on seeing America’s great houses—if we feel any—comes from imagining the size of the heating bill, rather than any sense of pageantry or grandeur. Little wonder Walt Disney looked to Spain for the palace that symbolizes Disneyland.

It is true that some American financial and industrial dynasties have amassed great art collections. Treasures of European, Asian and primitive art now fill our museums, and for this we are grateful. Yet for a Gilded Age tycoon to buy a Botticelli, or his present-day counterpart a Basquiat, is hardly a triumph of the imagination. It requires as much imagination to purchase a Vuitton purse, or book a table at Le Cirque. Means, not imagination, are what is required.

Furthermore, American dynasties are impoverished not only in their art and architecture. Where, we ask, are the creative innovators and eccentrics? Where, for that matter, are the great diarists and letter writers?

Never shy of looking to England for inspiration, our rich have overlooked that quintessential trait of the English: character. Their literature is filled with treasures created by those of nobility and wealth. The Earl of Clarendon, Sir William Temple, Charles Darwin, Jane Austen, Sir Francis Bacon, Sir Horace Walpole, William Beckford, Lady Louisa Stuart have created works remarkable for their brilliance and refinement.

France’s privileged have produced Madame de la Fayette, the diarist Saint-Simon, the Marquis de la Fayette, Madame de Sévigny and Marcel Proust. The Austrian aristocracy produced the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (“We should remember that every buyer is also a seller.”) and his brother Paul, the greatest one-handed pianist of all time. Russia’s nobility has donated Vladimir Nabokov, Ivan Turgenev and Count Tolstoy—who was also a great gardener.

America’s dynasts have produced only a handful of creative prodigies. Few names come to mind. There are the novelists Edith Wharton and Henry James, the architect Stanford White, James McNeill Whistler, Francis Parkman, the botanist Oakes Ames, poets Robert Lowell and James Merrill, futurist Buckminster Fuller—a  constellation that orbits around Boston. 

It might have been a good idea, in ages past, for plutocrats to import, not painting, sculptures, medieval abbeys or objects d’art (“Darling, not another Sèvres vase!”), but artistic and scientific creators.

Think of how our country was enriched by refugees from Nazism and Communism. This parade of émigrés transformed the landscape of American culture. They include Einstein, de Kooning, von Neumann, Hannah Arendt, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Rudolf Serkin, Jan Valtin (who was chased by both the Nazis and the Communists). Give us your brilliant, your inspired, your geniuses yearning to be free! Human capital doesn’t come much richer than this.
 
If American grandees have come up short with remarkable individuals, they have been exceptional at creating and supporting … institutions. America is unique in the multitude of universities, museums and foundations created by private individuals. People from around the world marvel that private individuals and families—voluntarily, willingly—devote their time and money to improve life around them. 

Our gilt-ridden one-percent endows the chairs of professors who not only disdain their benefactors, but deconstruct them.  They support universities that preen themselves on rejecting their patrons’ children’s applications for admittance.  The problem with our rich is that they’re not merely idealists—they’re socialists.

Those with a strong distaste for the existence of the wealthy, take the long view.  The axiom “Shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations” is infallible.  By the third generation or so, pride of possession is overtaken by a sense of unworthiness worthy of the most fervent anchorite.  Internal gilt, so to speak. Will to power devolves into will to failure.  Drive has given way to decadence, after a too-brief stopover in civilization.  Why despise the rich when they will eventually despise themselves?

We have yet to hear cries of revolution, with demands to confiscate the wealthy’s bland booty.  Should that day come, we Americans might ponder our dull, colorless, dutiful rich as an indispensable part of our country’s cultural ecosystem—something like a coral shelf—and let them be.

We can assure ourselves they aren’t having any fun.

Around this time of year, I love to watch “Wild Palms“, the ultimate spring flick. The great character actor Robert Loggia can’t catch up with the pace of his imagination, which takes a devilish turn. It’s about life’s quickening quality—never catching up with itself—and our innate frustration with comprehending, much less understanding it.

I like spring—it’s scary without being terminal. The poets agonize over not their imminent death, but their impending immortality. “I face my approaching life with fear”, so to speak. Camus’ great lesson of “the terror of responsibility”. Or T.S. Eliot:

April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.

“The Waste Land”

Similarly, we gardeners race to catch up with our plants and, as I tried to suggest in “Spring, Volume One“, never quite reach their liquid light speed. Though we come exquisitely close. I’m reminded of how the juggler wakes up in the morning in “The Seventh Seal“—opens his eyes, somersaults, kisses his baby, juggles, in more or less a few seconds.

I enjoy also spring fauna—the wide eyes of looming creatures behind bushes, between trees. Or at the windows begging us to come out and wondering what we’re doing inside. (Isn’t there a 20′ tall bear sculpture somewhere in the Northwest standing outside an office building, peering through the windows into the lobby?) Quite the opposite of fall and winter: “The lambs are at the door”.

Spring is an apocalypse of miracles. The casino of Paradise reopens and the sun hits the jackpot. Aces of light with a joker wild as a March hare.

I propose a new science: seasonology. It explores the conception and birth of all life—independent of evolution or creation. Think of it as a vocational school for creatures: animals, reptiles, fish, plants and the bugs and protozoa that love them and are, in season, loved by them.

A University of Utopia. St. Francis might’ve approved.

The ultimate stimulus plan is here. Here is a process that is simple, comprehensive, wide-ranging. It illuminates what has been obscure, catalyses dormant energies, reveals new and splendid possibilities.

Welcome to spring. Let us escape the dank, dark recesses of the recent past, propel ourselves into the light and bask in its revivifying dazzle. Let’s take advantage of the fresh, brighter light to look about us, and into the months ahead.

Spring is the ultimate change-agent, transforming our landscape, our climate, our lifestyle and our moods. It is a cause with multiple and marvelous effects, micro to macro.

Every culture has retained symbols, rituals and customs inspired by spring—such a crowd of them that we lose sight of their original, deeper and richer significance. Spring’s power to renew, refresh and nourish is symbolized by the Easter bunny, the basket of multicolored eggs, art and literature, religious holy days and pagan rites.

With the Easter Bunny’s permission, I’d like to explore the season of which he is such an able mascot, and briefly extricate it from its panoply of iconography and ritual.  Besides, I doubt the Easter Bunny would be an effective advocate of my model stimulus plan.

In paintings, the seasons are portrayed as women, hands enlaced, dancing in a circle. I’m not sure how this works in practice, as each season moves to a different tempo. Summer is a calypso, autumn a waltz, and winter a somnolent dance—a tableau vivant without the vivant. Spring, as everybody knows, blithely scampers in and out of view, a green capering blur.

Henry David Thoreau wrote, “I would consider it occupation to observe the passing of the seasons.” A commendable notion, but he would do better to participate in the passing of the seasons. They are highly interactive environments.

As modern, wired creatures, we are, most of us, just a few generations from our agricultural roots. Our ancestors worked the soil, sowing, growing, harvesting. Their calendar was comprised of seasons—which originally meant “sowing time”—and the rhythm of the seasons was the rhythm of their lives.

Our present sense of time is an artificial, manmade innovation. Until the mid-1800s, the United States had no time zones. Each town maintained its own time, calibrated to sunrise and sunset. Only with the advent of the railroad, mighty colossus of the industrial revolution, was time segmented into a master plan, the better to schedule trains by. Now, in the age of the computer, our pace of life has outpaced, if not sanity, civility. We have hopped aboard a treadmill moving at a faster rate than we can sustain. Time is no longer local and configured to us, but alien, and congenial only to the microchip.

The source of our current financial travails is all too human in origin. It was man’s ingenuity that created financial instruments whose implications and consequences were unforeseen by their creators, buyers or the marketplace at large.

These works of financial wizardry are the result of cold-blooded, mechanistic thinking—not so different from Stalin’s vision of the individual as a “screw in the machine.” A cold-blooded effort to “squeeze value” from assets whose underlying value is predicated on people—nature, that is—is just the sort of market fallacy that arrives with grandiose shifts in technology and markets. Like manmade time zones, these deals are arbitrary and unnatural, their collapse inevitable.  However, let’s examine the shift of the cosmos and, like the ancients, see what we might learn from it.

As a plant grower, I see spring in shades of green. The life of plants, to me, provides an excellent model of how to revivify our ailing economy.

Spring’s stimulus plan works as follows. The earth, in its elliptical cycle, pivots so that the northern hemisphere tilts increasingly towards the sun. Winter solstice, in December, marks the time when the light from the north is at its lowest ebb in our hemisphere, the light gradually increasing and days lengthening until Summer Solstice in June when the light reaches its apex. The Vernal Equinox in March marks the midpoint, and the arrival of that extraordinary thing we call spring.

Spring each year is no less than a revelation, revealing energies and possibilities that have lain dormant in the winter. The rising and ever-brightening light has astonishing effects on plant, animal and human life.

The light reaches into the earth, signaling to dormant seeds that there are openings in the canopy conducive to growth—upward mobility, so to speak.  The seeds’ sensory machinery allows them to know of disturbances to the topsoil from the stir of rain and seeping water. The seeds’ underground slumber enhances their sensitivity to the light’s arrival, and dramatically increases their ability to germinate.

Spring’s longer days catalyses a protein called CONSTANS, triggering a change reaction that results in flowering. It is offset by yet another protein–known to its friends as FKF–that regulates flowering.

As the plants emerge from the ground, they become eager partakers of the some 1,017 joules of solar energy that bathe the earth each second. Plants harvest up to 95 percent of the energy from the light they absorb. Sunlight morphs into carbohydrates in one million billionths of a second, making sure that the solar energy isn’t dissipated as heat. To achieve this nearly perfect efficiency, plants use a kind of quantum computing, to transfer energy from molecule to molecule in a wavelike motion to achieve photosynthesis.

Light triggers this process that makes life on earth possible, giving nourishment to animals, humans, insects and all manner of microscopic creatures.

Since our current economic crisis and recent winter of discontent have been entirely manmade, I propose we learn from the cosmos, spring in particular. It has much to teach us, if we will only look.

I wonder sometimes how spectators felt as they exited the Roman Forum, having observed, say, a Christian eaten by a lion, or two gladiators battling to a bloody death. Did they depart with hearts aflutter, exultant spirits and a bounce to their step? Did they head off to a tranquil taverna and bask in the glow of the day’s revelry?

The Roman spectators, I imagine, felt ghastly–as if part of themselves had been consumed by the lion, or conversely, they themselves had engaged in cannibalism. I imagine that they were enveloped in a dank cloud of shame and self-recrimination–the climate that holds when our lowest natures have been evoked.

I think I know the feeling. Today our media has become an electric Roman Forum, where notions of decorum and dignity have been supplanted by coarseness and brutishness.

On CNN, Fox news and MSNBC–all ostensibly dedicated to informing the public of the news of the world–one is treated instead to a daily carnival of grotesques, a daily food fight of ill-considered, ill-expressed opinions delivered with a shout. It matters not whether the views reflect those of the right or left. Bill O’Reilly, Keith Olbermann, Sean Hannity and Rachel Maddow all convey the same message: talk, don’t listen; defame, don’t defer; discord trumps discourse.

The American public has followed these talking heads into the Tower of Babel that is the new media. Glance at the readers’ online postings affixed to an article at the Washington Post or any major online media outlet, and the same willful crudeness and misapprehension is everywhere in evidence. Hiding behind the anonymity of a screen name, impervious to the consequences of their rudeness, I can hear America whinging.

It used to be said that Americans were rude when young, and polite when grown up. Europeans, by contrast, were polite children who grew into rude adults. I do not think that matters–or manners–remain that clear-cut today.

To the contemporary mind, manners can seem like an incursion on democracy, an arbitrary, restrictive code imposed from without that stifles expression and spontaneity. In this view, manners are inauthentic, insincere contrivances employed to indicate class or status–a velvet glove with which to club the less sophisticated into submission.

Some confuse manners with etiquette, its close relative. Writing thank you letters (Napoleon wrote,: “A letter not answered in five days, answers itself.”), properly setting a table and correctly serving tea are all fine things. One might observe all these niceties with utter fidelity and yet never rise to the magnificence of manners.

True manners are far from a cultural ready-made; they are in fact a triumph of the imagination. They stem from an understanding and respect for the feelings of others. They are the Golden Rule in action: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” Too Biblical? I offer you Confucius, “Do not do to others, what you would not have them do unto you.”

The Republic of Manners is altogether democratic. Manners are oblivious to considerations of income, class and education. As any reader of history knows, Royalty and Aristocracy have supplied us with boors of legendary crassness and brutality. As any observer of mankind can attest, people of slender means, possessing little else, can be rich in sublime manners and unbought grace.

Which brings us, naturally, to the garden. The Garden of Eden, we recall, is where sin was born, when Adam and Eve defied God’s injunction and ate of the Apple of Knowledge. “In Adam’s Fall, we sinned all.” Bad manners are the bitter fruit of this mother of all faux-pas.

The garden also represents a perfect testing ground for manners. Here, so unlike cyberspace, every insult, every sin of omission and commission becomes a cause with palpable effect. Act thoughtlessly or impetuously and the effects of your action are readily reflected in the health of your plants and flowers. Nature is exacting in matters of etiquette; ignore this fact and your garden will devolve in a wasteland. The garden is not just a refuge from civilization; it is civilization’s sanctuary.

Thus, I give you The Garden Of Manners—as simple and effective a pre-school as these economically troubled times allow a young family.  A Victorian writer wrote, “Let us repair to a cool place of retreat at the point of interrogation.” In these parlous times, let us pay heed. Ladies and Gentlemen, shall we take a look about the garden?

A garden is so forward-looking that it resembles sometimes a family or a business enterprise.  I’ve even heard someone liken it to a crystal ball, making it surely unique.  Seeds are literally prophetic:  tiny crystal balls.  Within 12 to 18 months, you’ll have exactly what was foretold.  This makes gardeners a strong surviving force—we call it the “Burpee Army”.

Life is made up of gardenesque things:  nest eggs, shareholdings, seed money, hedge funds, college funds, ancestral roots and family trees.  Youth is soft and flower-like, maturity a great passion and fruition, and old age handsomely wrinkled and evocative.

At first glance, all is growth in a garden—there’s no thought of ripeness or harvest.  Sooner or later, mistakes occur. We sweep them aside quickly to start over.  Nutrition and above all steadfast care determine health and happiness—anything will grow.  A tiny grain will produce a weekly basket of produce; a large seed, sound root or stocky bulb—a bushel.

Risks?  In a word:  “weeds”.  In the household, the big weeds hold the most danger:  new furniture (fatal at most prices), the second or third car (especially a young adult’s), the longed-for appliance or luxury or replacements thereof, the “big deal”—be it land, second home or proverbial relative’s investment tip.  Do none of them.

The most precious essentials are often the very smallest:  toiletries, socks, a hat, scarf, a haircut, a new suit, dress or coat, the daily bill for utilities—no small matter—and building maintenance.  Bread and water.  Speaking of the latter,  I have a very good recommendation for those hooked on soft drinks, juice or anything else that, over time, costs a lot of money as well as wear and tear. Mix tap water half and half with club soda.  The dullness of the still and harshness of the carbonated are magically replaced by a perfectly balanced, infinitely refreshing drink.
 
I can also help you with cream and butter—don’t eat it.  Replace butter with a decent olive oil and a warmed breakfast baguette becomes interesting.  Drop the cream from your one cup of coffee or tea.  Don’t wimp out.  And drink “George’s Magic Water” until you think you’re going to float away.  You’ll be amazed how soon it becomes normal.  You’ll save money and live longer.  It’s the “raw vegetable” of breakfasts.

Our “crystal ball” here at Heronswood, The Cook’s Garden and Burpee illuminates the next year of about ten million gardeners.  Unfortunately for us I’m afraid, folks are cutting back their ornamental gardens, not replacing dead plants or filling bare spots.  Pardon the pun, but no new growth apart from existing plants.  I hope this is a mere pause. It’s a pity folks don’t have fresh beauty in their lives.  Flower gardens are an inexpensive grace, a cheap luxury.

In contrast, at Burpee and The Cook’s Garden, we’re awash with early orders of herb and vegetable seeds, transplants and fruit bushes.  Also, while many of the “high end” flowers are lower than expected, easy-to-grow cultivars that often decorate a vegetable garden—sunflowers, marigolds, zinnias and nasturtiums—are up.  Cutting gardens are almost as popular as vegetable patches, while petunias, begonias and impatiens—the large annuals and tender perennials that fill sculptured beds in the front yard—are even with last year, i.e., no increase.

My father told me that in the Great Depression most people had little or no money to spend.  Folks on the edge of society dropped off.  My grandmother kept extra soup for the hoboes who tramped by their nursery looking for work.  The Elgin, Joliet and Eastern (the “EJ ‘n’ E”) train tracks nearby bent sharply, so the trains would slow down and a few men would see the glass houses in the distance, jump off and climb the hill to the house.  Grandma would feed and eyeball them while Grandpa interviewed them.

It’s hard to imagine that this was less than four generations ago.  The horticultural “crystal ball” sees only about one or two years ahead.  But I’ve seen the future, and it’s millions of bumper crops of vegetables, strawberries, raspberries, blueberries, grapes and tall flowers, as well as a few thousand newly planted rare shrub and perennial borders scattered about like precious gems.  Saving is the new spending.  Dental care is the new decadence.  Food, clothing and shelter are the new priorities.  Vegetable gardens are the new swimming pools and hot tubs of tomorrow.

INDIAN SUMMER

For pleasure during the cooling nights of late summer and fall, we offer a harmonious blend of cultivars for potager and flower beds. The following shrubs, annuals, vegetables, herbs and perennials combine beautifully with some particularly fine fruit.

Heronswood’s research director, Grace Romero, is carefully searching for late fall and winter aromatic and cold-weather blooming shrubs and small trees. So stay tuned for a future Peaceable Kingdom, Part 4.

Recently I was interviewed about “American gardening”.  I recalled my thoughts at “Virtual Horticulture“.  However, the reporter pressed me about major trends and fashions.  What’s the hottest plant?  Trendiest perennial?  Most popular vegetable?

I tried, to no avail, to tell him that gardening is utterly decentralized—so much that it’s impossible to make generalizations, choose favorites or pick winners.  Never has America been one entity; it will always be a “crazy quilt”, as long as there are vast, almost endless stretches of earth with folks popping up here and there and weather blowing across it.  The earth spins, Mr. Reporter.

But he wasn’t buying, and he was wrong.  The tiny horticultural shards scattered across the landscape remind me of two other social activities:  education and medicine.  And even they aren’t as fragmented or “micro-variable”, as I like to call it.

Education is thoroughly site-specific, from your mother’s knee to the local high school, where kids graduate about the time they become legal adults.  The “localism” of family as well as civic and religious social life creates a sort of entropy that, while resisted by the young, is nonetheless profound.  We are steeped in our youth by the town and countryside of our birth.  This is why schools are under local control—the owners, managers and public.  Family is just the first among the equal sovereignties of “place”, especially after puberty.  So what does this have to do with medicine (much less gardening)?

Almost everything, unless you are on an extended sabbatical in a foreign land, in which case you better get to know the local doctor.  No one really practices long-distance medicine.  They have flying doctors in Alaska and Australia, and there’s the occasional news report about a “virtual” operation. But they’re the rare exceptions that prove the rule. A patient has to be seen by the eyes and touched by the hands.  “Localism” is a euphemism for “immediate surroundings”.  You don’t create it so much as manifest it. If you live in Chicago, Illinois, there you are.  If you live in Madison, Wisconsin, very different story.  Imagine if you live in Mobile, Alabama? Or Chula Vista, California?

So it is with gardening.  Horticulture (“gardening with a college degree”, as a friend once quipped) equals diversity.  And its root is protected—even sacred—space:  a little of what’s right amidst a lot of what’s wrong.  There are only four common or universal elements in the garden:  air, water, light and soil.  Notice the general variations to be found in each of them.  No wonder, then, that the range of complex variation in vascular plants alone is incredible.

I sighed as I answered one question after another from a faraway non-gardening reporter about “national trends”.  This is why we need local agriculture extension agents, I said to myself.  And keep them local.  No Feds, please, not in our gardens.

The reporter nagged me a bit more, so I tried my “Maine gardener versus Arizona gardener” routine.  Eureka!  He got it. Nothing comparable to our geographic diversity exists in a single nation except perhaps in India and China.  However, I’m not sure how their regional parts exactly interrelate.  I know one thing—they don’t have National Public Radio.

My view of American horticulture is that it doesn’t really exist.  View the USA the way you view China and India—there’s not “one” of them either.  As Joel Garreau said about 30 years ago, there are “Nine Nations of North America“.  When we decide or commit to “owning” our local and regional gardening identities, rather than aping the Royal Horticultural Society, we shall become “American”.

But there’s another universal in gardening I forgot—the gardener.  The love of plants qualifies as a fifth element.  On that both the Down-easter and Desert Rat gardeners can agree.

The Philadelphia Flower show celebrates 180 years and its parent Pennsylvania Horticultural Society its 182nd year.  Happy Birthday! 

Over a thousand bloom-hungry patrons in gowns and black tie flocked to Preview Night last Saturday, enjoying the sights, sounds and tastes of Italy, the show’s 2009 theme, an eye, ear, nose and throat exam for stir-crazy Philly gardeners.  I saw a few wonderful exhibits:  a whimsical Sienese “palio” with the colorful flags and drama of the city’s famous horse race; an attractively weird grotto motif and Spinal Tap-like display of the Mediterranean region’s myths and gods, including African—flawlessly executed, very imaginative and lots of fun; a handsome but dreary Venetian canal with a depressing black gondola; a Roman castle complete with a spectacular allee of columns and strolling singers; a little hill of Lake Como pines; a terrace from Tuscany; a striking Florentine Duomo cleverly suggested by a giant garden gazebo; an odd but popular Milanese fashion showroom or “bottega” of women’s hats, shoes and even dresses made of plant parts; a post-modern, edgy and stylish art sculpture of cut flowers in hundreds of little bottom-lit bottles in two rows flanking a large cubic space of European-style plant sculptures that was peculiarly static; and finally, a series of lonely-looking painted trees weeping, no less, that was technically marvelous.  These are just the highlights I could recall of the main exhibits.

The entire exhibition area suffers from poor lighting.  As soon as you enter, there’s a magnificent 20 foot tall bouquet of flowers.  Beyond that, the place goes almost dark.  It’s quite melancholic or what the Europeans call “lugubrious”.  In several places you need a coal miner’s helmet.  This is bizarre in a flower exhibit, and, furthermore, it is ironic that both the amateur competition and sales booth areas are very well lit, and the crowd was moving to them like moths.

An operatic duo began howling in the dreadful acoustics so I retreated to the outermost edges where the aforementioned amateur Victorian-style indoor-plant competitions were displayed on the simple judging benches.  This was a pleasant contrast as well as a bit of a relief.  The various plant clubs and societies do an excellent job working with the fine folks at PHS growing and showing an astonishingly wide range of cacti, euphorbias, orchids, primulas and countless others.  This is an excellent feature of the show, and I only wished it was twice as big..  One special highlight was to see the “Batman Begins” inspiration for the magic Himalayan flower that alters Christian Bale.  It’s a little gentian with a haunting blue flower.  (There are not enough gentians in the world.)  This timelessly classic exhibition space is the Westminster Dog Show trot-run of potted ornamental horticulture.

Complaints?  If you’re going to have an Italian-themed show in Philadelphia, you’d do well to include a homage to Frank Sinatra.  This is the only city in the world that broadcasts 5 hours of Ol’ Blue Eyes every week, and has done for 30 years.  Also, “doo-wop” was cradled if not born here, mostly by Italians.  A bit of informality was wanted.  Also, no Italian supermodels, male or female, which was a tragedy.  The glamour of flowers, the romance of gardens, the famous heritage of Roman beauty . . . and no supermodels?  America without baseball?  Texas with no cowboys?  A picnic without sweet corn? “Bella Italia” with no bellas?  Besides a couple of marble statues and an insipid painting, there were no classic beauties to be seen.

This “missing Venus”, so to speak, was a bit too obvious, at least to me.  Maybe I’m obsessed.  Venus, a.k.a. Aphrodite, Ishtar and so on, remains much loved in Italy.  They’re more obsessed than I am.  In some ways she defines Italy:  patroness or goddess of Eros, the energy that spurs human passions.  Venus ruled with her physical beauty.  Perhaps few know also that she calmed the waters of the sea, thus making her a sailor’s favorite.  The mermaid on the old sailing ship’s prows reminds us of her.  Indeed, love has a calming effect, reordering things here and there so that peace might return, as the ships find their way back to port.

If there was an equivalent to Venus at the show, at least in terms of providing a relaxing or calming tranquility, it was the small but welcome Ikebana exhibit.  The Oriental aesthetic it provided was the sole counterpoint to the gobbling overkill of the rest of the show.  Asian art is a careful, simple human gesture—a brief moment that “appears” in the world—as contrasted to the ideal “recreation of the world” in Western art.  This is a huge difference, and in stark display at this attractive exhibit.  Check it out.  Circulate through the show and take in each exhibit—what’s the point, social statement, etc. and then go to “Okenobo” in the section where the amateur societies are featured.  The relief is palpable, like a washcloth to the forehead. The eyes relax immediately.  Similarly, Chinese painters don’t busily fill up a stretched canvas with the world.  Rather, they just place a daub here and another there, suggesting a moment of human presence in time.  They’re content with their flicker in eternity.

Finally, I can understand avoiding the “Rocky” clichés and even eschewing the pizza garden, so to speak, but I cannot, for the life of me, comprehend the absence of the tomato, one of Italy’s great contributions to horticulture.  True, the Aztecs created the cultivated tomato, but it was Italy that popularized it and sent it around the world.  Granted, I have a vested interest as CEO of Burpee. But it’s the most popular vegetable in the home garden and as Italian as garlic.  Italians literally invented modern European cuisine—much of it with vegetables—yet this tremendously important aspect of its culture was missing at the show.

But at least the Vespa dealership had a fleet of sharp looking 2009 models—Italian design at its best.  I’d look odd on one—a bit like Louis Prima on a tricycle—but it would still be fun.  There was a Colavita stand nearby that was selling Umbrian extra virgin olive oil—by far the best—for $8.00 for two 17 oz. bottles.  One of these normally goes for $9-10.00.  WOW.

You can’t have it all.  But, if you’re a gardener or even an interested passerby,  the 2009 Philadelphia Flower show comes fairly close.

I just wish they’d work out the lighting.

P.S.  I’ll be speaking again on The Money Garden at 1:00 P.M. Wednesday, March 4, and 1:00 P.M. Saturday, March 7th.

P.S.S.  The annuals and perennials at the show were especially well grown this year by our friends at Meadow Brook Farm.

MIDSUMMER MIXES

We’re proposing planting varieties both of edibles and ornamentals in a relatively tight space, so that “the lambs will lie down with lions”. Create a design for these midsummer, or hot climate cultivars of vegetables, herbs, perennials and shrubs, annuals and small fruit. They’re selected for their tidiness and harmony when planted “ensemble”. Paradise in your front, back and side yards. Here’s the line-up of hot stuff:

“Tres bien ensemble.”

P.S. I shall be speaking on Monday, March 2, at 2:30 P.M. at the Philadelphia Flower Show. Subject is “Success In The Money Garden” with tips on the most productive vegetable varieties. Attendance is free with show admission. Please see www.theflowershow.com