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.

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.