My predecessor David Burpee opined toward the end of his life that he regretted only that he would not live to breed the plants of other planets with earth’s. Odd, but then he was a genius born in 1893 who was interviewing a newspaper reporter in the late 60s, still a hot time in the space race, when many folks in the US were confident that, eventually, extraterrestrial life would be found. As I noted last year, ET, or perhaps just a field of intergalactic ferns, may still be found. However, I shall not live to fulfill Mr. Burpee’s dream, much as I might wish. His casual observation expressed a profound understanding of agricultural genetics. Unfortunately, he didn’t live to see the fabulous promise of somatic embryogenesis—whereby substantial time and cost are reduced to improve crop plants—but he would have approved.

Nevertheless, my dreams aren’t as fanciful. I look forward to new cultivars resulting from genetic engineering—not space travel. I’d prefer new varieties that add unknown colors to gardens. Taupes, mauves, salmons (more salmons!), corals and, of course, pinks. A luminous shade of clear pink, with no grey or blue in it, is as mystical as any color you could have. And with new light will come new intensities, both high and low. Perhaps we shall see truly black flowers soon.

Yellows and blues could use help too. There’s already a great range of yellows, with corresponding emotional evocations, from lovingly warm to cheerfully cool. Widen it from blazing hot to almost freezing. Also, blue is a treasure box of subtlety and moodiness. My favorite is midnight blue which combined with lemon yellow is unforgettable. Twenty years ago Harris had a delightful multiflora petunia series, now long gone, called ‘Ribbons’. The dark blue and white striped, with the yellow, were stunning in a confetti-like mixed bed. Picnic time or evening repose, never a dull moment with ‘Ribbons’.

I suppose I’ll settle in for the remainder of my life with my own Forrest Gump box of chocolates here on earth. Other planets just may be more boring than earth. Nice to dream of them and of other suns, other spectra and other eyes, but I won’t oversleep. “You snooze, you lose”, as we say in business.

However, within reach of my lifetime are quantum leaps in gene transfer, which will usher in more of “les choses belles et etrangeres”, greatly to be desired. (However, I remember folks getting so upset in the 90s about Dolly the sheep, and wondering “Why the fuss?”) Plant/animal hybrids, animal/plant hybrids, animal/animal hybrids, plant/plant hybrids. Tiny little trees, 50 foot tall lilies of the valley. A tomato named “Porky”. A cow that grows its own grass. (Indeed, it was only a few hundred years ago that melons were thought to be the source of New World wild sheep.) Some advantages would be clear—plants could move about when they needed, in severe drought, for instance. Also, they would easily avoid inbreeding depression by choosing mates from other forests, since botanical eyes would eventually appear. Here comes Mr. Green Genes, indeed.

On the animal side, we humans could make our own food too, from time to time, or organ-by-organ, photosynthesizing from special areas of our limbs or head, or else via internal metabolizing like roots and bulbs do. Not so much “getting and spending we lay waste our powers”. Maybe Wordsworth was thinking of those little lambs popping out of the exotic melons, instead of daydreaming as his eyes floated across the bucolic green fields.

As we slog into the New Year, I want to share one of my personal enthusiasms with readers.

This pastime requires little or no expense, can be done with minimal or no equipment, and engaged in wherever you happen to be. It can be practiced in solitude or with others. No batteries or instructions are required.

Let us welcome 2009 with a celebration of Drudgery. I admit Drudgery does not evoke any of the glittering promises of advertising and the media circus, the words that invariably arrive with an exclamation point. Sexy! New! Fun! Cool! Exciting!

Drudgery is none of those things, and takes a certain quiet pride in the fact.  Rarely does the word arrive with an exclamation point at its side. Samuel Johnson, the great English essayist and creator of the first comprehensive English dictionary, defined “lexicographer” as “a harmless drudge.”

The painter Gauguin wrote in his journal, “Work is leisure.” Yet when I think about it, his might be an exceptional case. “Monsieur Gauguin, what do you do for a living?” “My profession is painting beautiful partly clad native women in the tropical paradise where I live.” It would be superfluous to ask if his job came with a good 401K program.

One reason to accept the beauty of Drudgery is that it comprises much of what we call work, and not a little of what we call recreation. The author Logan Pearsall Smith wrote, “The test of a vocation is the love of the Drudgery it involves.” (I wonder if he was a gardener).

Do not confuse Drudgery with its sibling Hard Work. There are certain people who complain, with great self-satisfaction, about all the Hard Work they do.

I do not deny the existence of Hard Work. I do not begrudge a soldier assigned to deactivating land mines that his is Hard Work. I concede to the Emergency Room physician who tends to patients nonstop for 18 hours that this is Hard Work indeed. Hard Work is the lot, too, of the diamond miners in Africa who work in unspeakable conditions. Working three jobs to support your family can be called only Hard Work.

There are other kinds of Hard Work that are less extreme or debilitating. To labor at a task which is altogether uncongenial is Hard. Working in a nasty and unsupportive workplace is most Hard. To work at something for which you have no aptitude: Hard again. It is sure hard to accomplish one’s task without adequate tools or guidance.

But when an executive or politician preens himself on his Hard Work, what he’s really talking about is diligent application, the persistence needed to accomplish a task. For him to complain of this as Hard Work is like a cow complaining of all the grass it must chew, or a hen kvetching about the ordeal of laying eggs.

If you consider your day’s work and grade the degree of difficulty of each task from 1 to 10, you will probably land in the sweet spot of Drudgery, somewhere between Gauguin’s 1 or 2 and the land mine remover’s 10. 

In decision-making, sometimes the Hardest thing to do is also the easiest. Often the greatest challenge is to step away from the task for a time, and come back to it later, with fresh eyes and a rested, open mind.

Many a military, investment or marketing blunder might have been averted if one brave soul had the temerity to propose that the assembled company of Hard Workers go home and play with their children.

It was as he was lowering himself into his bathtub that the Greek scientist Archimedes had his “Eureka” moment. I doubt the discoverer of specific gravity grumbled about the Hard Work involved in bath taking.

Contemplating drudgery brings to mind the image of Japanese Zen monks sweeping the sand in a temple garden. They look happy.  There is contentment in their movements. They turn sweeping into poetry,  a chore into an exercise of mindfulness.

We are, all of us, fated to lives filled with Drudgery. How very lucky we are.

Happy Gardening New Year!

“Nice place to live, but I wouldn’t want to visit”, I muttered to myself last week as I wove around Manhattan.  My midtown hotel was practically empty and the traffic light for mid-December—a terrible season for retailers.  In the hotel bar guests stared glumly at each other, mostly Brits and Europeans.  The waitress said, “A year ago this place was packed—it’s unbelievable”.

I encountered in conversations with friends two unusual gardening-related topics in New York City:  the “roof garden” craze continues to grow non-stop; and the cut-flower market remains quite strong, despite the economy. These two trends seem a bit unusual to me. They’re nationwide—not only in New York City—especially the roof gardens.

First, I love roof gardens.  However, why do people applaud so strenuously an idea to grow a garden, not in a front or back yard, but on a roof—that is, the topside of the ceiling?  It seems like a Will Rogers story.  I have spent a long career persuading folks to plant a few steps from their backdoor.  Now it seems no effort is needed to convince society to put a garden forty feet straight up, and where few people will see it, much less know it’s there.

Another big deal these days is tropical cut flowers. Tropical cut flowers? Indeed, they travel by jet, so that arrangers can have them in a “just so” state of freshness.  Seems excessive or Kubla Khan-like to me.  Let’s see, we have to cut our carbon emissions, wear a sweater indoors, buy a hybrid car, eat only seasonal food. . .  So, what’s wrong with drying flowers from the late summer garden?  They are dried by the air in the atmosphere; I can’t think of a method more friendly to the environment.

At Burpee we offer Sunflowers, Celosia, Amaranth, Baby’s Breath, Bells of Ireland, Strawflower, Statice, Chinese Lanterns—these are as easy as, well, apple pie. Plus, they’re truly gorgeous. Might save a bit of dough. Keep the air free of turbine fumes streaming off the jets from Colombia and Thailand filled with their precious cargoes of. . . . tropical flowers. . . . ?

I had the chance recently to experience two institutions you wouldn’t think at first glance were alike.  Over a few weeks I visited a well-regarded liberal arts college and later a famous casino.  The bizarre similarities were both fascinating and disturbing.

Who benefits?

The college is bookish, so it’s not surprising that the professors were the top-level entertainers, while the president and his entourage were the intellectual equivalent—if that is conceivable—of Donald Trump or Steve Wynn.  However, I was taken aback by the minor role students play on the campus.  They seemed elfin compared to the faculty who were either straightforward, hard-working types or “rock stars”. This wasn’t education as I remembered it. When I was in school the teachers were charmingly dull, keeping a respectful distance from the students and vice versa.  Nowadays, the atmosphere is casual, if not downright clubby, and centered around the teachers rather than the students—more like junior high school than college.  I wondered, truly, what my friend’s son was “betting” and what chances he had, since the “house” was so heavily favored.  College life has become an illusory family.  How will this prepare him for the future?

What are the stakes?

Students and parents alike seem to be placing on the table not merely a great deal of money, but an enormous amount of time as well—hour after hour, year after year.  Yet, what was the house—the college—standing to lose?  It seemed to me to be quite uneven.

Who wins?

I pressed my friend about the selection of this particular college to the point that it bugged him.  (I learned later that he had let his son decide.)  I asked practical questions.  What was the average salary of alumni?  What students went on to Nobel-type glory?  Had any students become famously successful and wealthy (like many of the professors)?  Were there accurate stats about grades?  (Turns out there weren’t even any grades.)  What about intramural-type academic competitions?  None of the above. I wondered how a person could make a college decision without data.

Apparently, the dominant criteria today include the social relevance of the programs, ethnic and cultural diversity, and the “buzz” about the place—in other words, public relations.  Prestige is conferred to colleges often by image and hand-me-down reputation.  However, mold is mold regardless of its age.  For instance, this school has had for many years a reputation for “radicalism”, and that figured into my friend’s son’s decision.  It seemed sad and even a bit ridiculous that a “radical” place would be chosen in such a conventional, middle-class way.  “My son feels comfortable here.”  I’m sure there were deeper reasons, but how many and how deep, I didn’t ask. The process seemed almost offhand, as if the heart stopping amount of money—not to mention four years of prime time human life—had the same importance as a vacation budget.

On the other hand, most colleges use primarily statistical criteria for student selection.  Like gamblers and tourists, prospective students drift from one resort-like campus to another, while the colleges profile them down to the last demographic, grade and SAT score.  Bit one-sided to me.

Herr Professor Faustus

A couple of weeks later, my friend and I drove to Atlantic City and hit a few casinos.  What a disconcerting juxtaposition.  The uncanny similarities include the “professorial” pomposity of the dealers and spooky vibe of the management whose professionalism surpasses that of their officious academic counterparts.  There are even amusing security staff parallels.  The food is better, but not as much as you might think.

Qui bono?

The recent economy has been rough on the casinos. A few of the gaming rooms were almost empty at midday, not unlike an afternoon college chemistry lab.  (Students use their computers in their dorms, thereby spending incredible amounts of time there—quite different from the 70s.  In my day we roamed all over campus when we weren’t entombed in the library.)

So, is the one-armed bandit the internet computer terminal?  Indeed, what are the true stakes?  A Faustian promise of internet-based omniscience, like the casino jackpots that occur so rarely as to be immaterial?  I know what happens to chronic gamblers—they die young and broke. How long does it take—four years?  What happens to the contemporary student’s soul?

And the remoteness, the emptiness, the pallor of the faces—be they mature adults in Atlantic City or young adults at college—was chilling. The place-of-no-place quality.  Here I am—nowhere.  It is definitely the opposite of a garden.

The true payoff for the kids is, alas, graduation.  No wonder they’re happy to leave.  Therefore, I felt an adolescent twinge of “the first time” as we pulled onto the turnpike and headed north out of godforsaken Atlantic City (great place to buy gold jewelry, though). 

Time to re-evaluate, in my view, the equally godforsaken liberal arts colleges. For example, bolster up science and technology. The hundreds of state-run engineering schools in the US are definitely not casino-like.  No “celebrity” professors, no “rock star” college presidents.  But the relatively inexpensive educations lead to great jobs in important global industries.  These would point to a brighter future than do such courses as “Appreciative Inquiry”, “Pop Culture Hegemony” or “The World Café”.  The kids can catch those acts later at Atlantic City, Foxwood or Vegas.

The Great Financial Meltdown of 2008 has left investors and politicians stupefied, collectively scratching their heads in the absence of real explanations or solutions. Pundits sagely call for greater “transparency,” so investors, regulators and the public might better assess an offering’s underlying value.

What we really want is VISIBILITY. Wall Street’s savvy insiders basically couldn’t see what they were buying. They were driving well over the speed limit with their eyes closed—and crashed. In this case it’s the innocent bystanders who are injured and pay the price.

Today there is one place left where the prudent capitalist can invest in confidence. In this investor’s oasis, there is full WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) visibility. Here is an investment that operates in full sunlight, offering a real time, 360 view of the investment landscape, so you can continuously fine-tune your strategy.

American Capitalists, don your jeans and straw hats and join me in the Great American Garden. You have nothing to lose but your losses. This is the only place where your investment yields, at least, a 25-to-1 return.

This astonishing garden-grown ROI is not modern-day speculative sleight-of-hand, but real, tangible and fungible. The pragmatic, prudent, down-to-earth principles and values that made this country great still work–and can put delicious food on your table and green in your wallet.

In the garden you reap what you sow, and can watch your assets grow before your eyes. And, unlike any stock you ever bought, you can enjoy your returns sautéed, boiled, braised, broiled or served raw. This is interest worthy of the name.

Skeptical? Let’s look at the numbers. In January 2009, our company, W. Atlee Burpee, will offer a collection of six packets of vegetable seed ($20.00 if purchased separately) for $10.00. This $10.00 investment in seed–tomatoes, carrots, green beans, lettuce, peas and bell peppers—can produce up to $1,500.00 worth of vegetables on a mere tenth of an acre.

Compared with the produce at your local supermarket … quite simply, there is no comparison. Your garden-grown vegetables offer flavor and freshness that, literally, money can’t buy. These are tomatoes that take pride in being tomatoes, carrots that exemplify a noble heritage of taste and quality.

Today butterhead lettuce is on sale at my local grocery for a $1.75 a head. Burpee offers a packet of 350 butterhead seeds for $3.00, each seed producing one head of lettuce. Making allowances for germination failure, we’re talking one cent per head. So, conservatively, the garden yield will have a supermarket value of about $500.00 for a $3.00 investment.

There are additional cost factors. Let’s estimate at a maximum five dollars for water and a bit of compost. Labor cost: if you don’t garden yourself and hire a gardener, figure 2 hours each week for a month @ $10.00 per hour: a total of $80.00. You’re still saving $415.00. Incredible, eh?  No wonder, then, that our beloved new friends, the French, call money, “lettuce”.  When you parlay the labor costs across all six crops, the labor gets proportionately cheaper. The bottom line? We’re talking about a return that guarantees $150.00 earned for every $1.00 invested.

Yet this ratio fails to factor in the abundant and tangible non-financial returns: flavor, freshness, a nutritional bonanza for your family. The transcendent pleasures of growing things, watching them grow, being self-reliant and self-sufficient. Replacing the banal gyrations of the marketplace with the elements of sun, earth, and water, and reducing the need for costly anti-depressants.

Over the years my sharp-eyed Wall Street friends have regarded the seed business as hopelessly naïve and outmoded, as if we were selling detachable shirt collars and spats, or music for player pianos. They’ve talked to me as if I were in a dream world, and needed to wake up. Alas, they were the dreamers, and their avaricious dreams are now everybody’s nightmare. I look forward to visiting their gardens.

The newspaper and magazine industries continue their steep slide into oblivion.  At risk, literally, is the public square, since newspapers emerged a couple hundred years ago in order to deliver the news—and often rules and regulations—individually to the newly literate and urban citizens who used to receive it from the town crier, or read it on placards in the neighborhood and village centers.  We see its relic form in today’s supermarket bulletin boards.  However, mass media—radio, film, television and computers—broke the newspaper’s monopoly on the debate among the educated, enlightened and informed.  No one can take the place of a big city newspaper editor and his staff.  When they go, the world goes.  And, unbelievable as it seems, newspapers and magazines are going.

This isn’t merely a nostalgic loss recalled in a daydream.  This nightmare signifies the collapse of an intellectual order that accompanied the rise of the printing press in 1440 and not only ushered in the modern forms of scientific discovery, democracy and free speech, but also fostered public education, literacy and upward mobility, particularly in the US, still the world’s most hopeful beacon of wealth, health, personal fulfillment and happiness, if not the only one.  Anyone emigrating from the US to Europe?  We take free speech for granted.  Foreigners don’t.

The internet threatens not only to shatter this benevolent order—this real intellectual world—but also to prevent any new or evolving one to emerge, since its virus-like replicating quality prevents inquiry, thought and orderly discussion, replacing them with a chaos of dull and addictive ephemera.  For example, as difficult as it is to accomplish, it is much easier to publish a correction in a newspaper than on a blog or journalistic website.  In the predator-filled worldwide web, a “correction” breeds new versions of the original mistake, as occurs regularly on Wikipedia.

Consider slavery.  I believe that slavery would not have been abolished, had not the newspapers—as well as hymnals—been allowed to flourish.  Today’s international scourges—illegal drugs, child abuse, illiteracy, pornography—are not attacked by major editorial voices on the web.  Indeed, several of these plagues are spread by the internet.  Imagine if the web had replaced newspapers in the 1830s.  Slave trafficking would’ve boomed rather than been held up to intense scrutiny.  And now, what pulpits have we?  What news bureaus?  Perhaps churches, temples, mosques and synagogues will replace our newspapers, or provide a welcome and helpful parallel.  Daily devotions alongside local news, obituaries and crossword puzzles. 

After all, what is the purpose of knowledge?

Last week, three young people were gunned down five blocks from my office in the middle of the night outside a bar.  Few at our busy office got any news of it until a couple days ago.  Yet all we ever hear about—day in and day out—are the petty crimes of people in “the public eye”.  I, for one, am concerned exclusively with critically wounded teenagers a few blocks away.  That I wish to know about, and in great detail. That’s my “localism”.

Take gardening knowledge. Who’s doing what to whom, with whom and when?  And it better be either old or rare.  Who really cares?  Yet, how many tomatoes fruit on one plant or vine, on average?  How many pea pods off a single vine?  How many green beans?  How many bell peppers fruit off a single plant?  How many cukes off one plant?  Anyone ever notice how many seeds are contained in an average $3.00 packet of lettuce seed?  Last week at my local big-name supermarket, Boston lettuce was $1.75 per head, and it was a sorry looking thing.  I wanted to buy it out of pity.  (Also, for the first time since the early 1970s, the parking lot was almost empty on a weekend afternoon.)

Is the fact that a typical Boston lettuce seed packet contains 800 seeds relevant to today’s public debates about poverty, hunger and health?  How about a discussion of the importance of public transportation—heard much about buses and light rail on TV or radio in the midst of $4.00/gallon gas and the Big 3 bailout?  Not even the newspapers have had the time—or presence of mind—to bring it up. Forget about news websites as well.  They’re too busy competing with the newspapers. 

The folks working at Heronswood Nursery include these excellent employees headquartered at Fordhook Farm in Doylestown, PA. On this 60-acre estate, we have planted over 10 acres of rare cultivars, including much of what we offer on-line and in the Heronswood Catalog. Also, these are the folks you will meet at our upcoming 2009 Open Days.

Hieu Bui is our number one seed propagator. Born in Vietnam, he now lives with his family in Philadelphia.

Norm Grigg is our landscaper. Born in the Virgin Islands, he lives with his family in Langhorne.

Dave Smicker is head of trials and gardens. A Pennsylvania native and graduate of Temple University’s horticulture program. Dave served as an intern at Fordhook Farm for over three years.

Jack Forbes is an assistant landscaper. He served in the US Army in Virginia from 1952 to 1953. He hunts and fishes and resides with his wife Jo in Doylestown, PA.

Linda Cassidy is a Bucks County native and one of Grace’s new assistants, after working for ten years at Fordhook when it was a bed and breakfast. She ably runs our test kitchens, contributing many recipes and helping to run our Open Days and scheduling visitors.

The handsome 8-year-old “Hurricane” Nathan Hale is the top dog at Fordhook. As a puppy he was chained outside and used as target practice by stone-throwing children at a gang house in North Philly, until an Air Force enlistee jumped the fence and rescued him. The next year, after this brave hero was given his orders to Afghanistan, he dropped Nathan off at a shelter in Doylestown. I bought him over the phone when I requested a black dog, my favorite kind. Mostly Lab with some Chow and Pit. Eats almost everything.

Five-year-old Sammy is a pure bred English Field Setter, a phenomenal bird dog, and fast as lightning. He easily runs down deer, for example. I got him from a group that rescues runts from litters at sportsmen’s clubs in the south. He is an affectionate “love dog”. Eats hardly anything.

Sammy has spotted an art critic.

Resting beneath the enormous Eastern sycamore.

Mary Kliwinski has taken all the great pictures that grace this blog. Self-taught and quite gifted, she also gardens part-time at Fordhook. She lives with her family in Doylestown.

Patty Kowski was our summer intern for the past two years and now works in Marketing at W. Atlee Burpee & Co. She assisted in every part of the trials, display gardens and Heronswood Open Days. She is a 2008 Penn State graduate with a degree in Agri-Business Management.

Bill Rein is our present intern, which hardly describes him. A graduate of Delaware Valley College, he became their arboretum manager in 2001. A horticulturist, Bill also writes very well as his guest blogs demonstrate.

Our Research Director, Grace Romero, was born and raised in the Philippines. A graduate of University of Michigan and Cornell University, she bred petunias and anemones for PanAmerican Seed while I was there in the 80s and 90s. She designed the Happiness Garden, as well as the many new Heronswood gardens at Fordhook.

Dan Tompkins is a part-time intern. He has helped in the last two year’s Opens. He is studying ornamental horticulture at Delaware Valley College and plans to attend graduate school.

Another holiday-time pint of view movie critique of “Quantum of Solace”, the latest James Bond turkey.

The clumsy and ostentatious title refers to our hero’s hard-won emotional release, fought out in a special digital effects studio.  This is James “Another time, another place” Bond?  Yes, and he’s worse than George Lazenby.  He is seriously disturbed.

On the plus side, the opening title sequence is surprisingly stunning, with a dynamic Mercator map motif and, mercifully, a few female figures whose design recalls 1950s era European art photography—not surprising from a middle-aged Swiss director.  This is a welcome relief from the direction of the playing card royalty featured in “Casino Royale”.  The hip-hop song is infectious but not memorable.  This Bond is based, for better and mostly worse, on scenery and special effects.

Another plus are the female leads.  Unlike “Casino Royale”, where, unbelievably, the women were less interesting than the men, “Quantum of Solace” sports a wonderful pair of ladies:  a sweetheart “girl next door” in Gemma Arterton and the high wattage bombshell, Olga Kurlyenko.  Arterton’s so charming that her dalliance with the sour Daniel Craig fails to convince.  Otherwise, she etches a distinct portrait in her couple minutes on screen, a good film actress.  Olga’s character possesses a tragic background, a bit of nuance and much enjoyable screen time.  An alpha female, she looks like a cross between Isabelle Adjani and former Bond vamp Sophie Marceau.  In the laughably fake fight scenes, she manages to project real toughness, a bit like Linda Hamilton in Terminator 2.  South America does indeed have a lot of green-eyed Russian beauties, so it’s inspired casting.  The remaining actors are either retreads from “Casino Royale” or insipid new characters.  “Quantum of Solace” hasn’t even a tiny fraction of the interest and sweep of “From Russia With Love” or “Thunderball”.  (For a refreshing contrast, watch 2006’s “Miami Vice”.)

What inspired the creators to change Bond from an intelligent and glamorous hero to a sullen, bitter, whining bore?  It’s startling.  Better to ask how it beat previous Bond opening box office records.  Yet it makes no sense:  Daniel Craig wears a new Turnbull & Asser wardrobe every few hours, but shows no sign of being a unique or special person.  Now he’s “human” and “normal”—like he’s in psychotherapy.  We’re supposed to relate to him as a “construct”.  Such tedium.  So, why then the flawless clothes tricks?  Can’t have it both ways; Sean Connery never did.

By these new personality-driven standards, Felix Leiter, played nicely by Jeffrey Wright, comes across as fascinating compared to Bond.  One wishes to know more about him.  Truly weird.  It occurred to me, while viewing, that Bond might be the true villain here, in an unconscious slip by the filmmakers.  Maybe Olga is the next Bond.  Maybe Felix?

The water shortage plot device is shallow.  Latin American military officers exploit helpless peasants.  The fake ecologist bad guy is played weakly and his role has none of the crazed brilliance given to magnificent actors like Michael Lonsdale, Lotte Lenya and Gert Frobe.  He isn’t even neurotic (maybe he’s the next Bond).  Strangely, too, they take a serious villain from “Casino Royale”—Giancarlo Giannini—and make him not just a good guy, but a bit of a punk.  What a waste of a great actor.  The Bolivian peasants are treated in a shockingly superficial way, as if they were in a Swissair travelogue.  The minimalist eco-resort in the climax is dull.  The bad guys have neither ideas nor imagination—they’re just mean; killing them doesn’t matter.  Speaking of devices, there are no gadgets.  “Anti-tech” means that the hero “moves more sleekly”,  as one reviewer praised it.  It means also “anti-good”.

Has the Bond franchise left the male fantasy playing field to Marvel and DC?  It seems so.  Unless you’re 10 years old, costumed super heroes have no credibility, much less interest.  They are completely unreal, which is their point.  The traditional Bond fan dislikes them—look at the ridiculous “Iron Man”.  Is the Bond fan now a young woman, dragged into the theater by Daniel Craig’s damaged allure?  Is the great 60s British spy hero—the “anti-Quixote”—all played out?  Perhaps Sean Connery was the exception to the rule—a pure man of action.  Yet, nowadays, one would think that after 9/11, in a world with a freakishly tall, cave dwelling terrorist, and hi-tech Somali pirates grabbing gigantic freighters, the Bond team would do better than a severely depressed sprinter in a beautiful suit chasing a short nature freak.

Perhaps it’s the running.  Men are running now.  Running away from the New Jerusalem (some of them) or toward it (a rare few) or just in circles, like around a track.  It’s the twilight of the baby boomers.  “Boomerdammerung”. To paraphrase Frank Zappa, James Bond isn’t dead, he just smells funny.

Here’s a fun game of horticultural “Truth or Dare”.

Growing sunflowers for snacking seed seems “out there” to me at least.  There would have to be an extremely delicious type that I’ve not heard of or grown yet.  The “freshness” of a nut’s taste is sometimes a result of its ripening after a few weeks or months.  The nutritional value changes little, unless the nuts are neglected for years or stored in moist conditions or a place that changes temperature.  A rich, “nutty” flavor in a nut comes as much with age as with genetics.  A “fresh” nut—right off the tree—can be a bit harsh.

But the costs of “growing your own” sunflowers are a bit staggering.  One pound, de-hulled, roasted and lightly salted, of premium quality seeds will run you about $10-12. However, acceptable quality de-hulled, roasted and salted sunflower seed sells for $3.00 to $4.00 per pound in the generic aisle.  In any case, that’s a heck of a lot of seed—a family of four can luxuriously snack off one pound for a week.  Maybe I’m missing something, but it seems to be a cost-savings that is, literally, for the birds.  Try ‘Super Snack Hybrid’; maybe you’ll make me a liar.

Another “no-brainer” is dried or shell beans, the nutritional value of which I’ve written about (please see Readers Respond!).  These are a fabulous deal at the supermarket.  Even at rare premium levels, dried beans are the world’s greatest bargain.  Also, the “freshness” issue pertains here as in the case of the sunflower.  Even more profoundly—you don’t eat them; you dry them first, then boil them, and then eat them.  So much for freshness.

But, get a load of the cost (and remember, dried beans—not fresh green beans):  one pound of any of the great types costs about $1.50 to $2.00, and the resulting large pot will feed a family for several days.  Again, unless the taste, or exoticism factor are so compelling that you absolutely must grow your own dry beans (‘Scarlet Runner’, ‘Italian Rose’, ‘Cannelino’—a rare white kidney—or a rare Corsican flageolet), “buy your own”.

A woman of the south, my mother moved “up north” to Glen Ellyn, a small village on the Aurora & Elgin railway line (the “Roarin’ Elgin”) 30 miles west of Chicago, with my father in 1945.  In her mid-20s, she’d lived as a pilot’s wife for a couple of years at bases in Edmonton, Canada, as well as Seattle and Minneapolis.  By the time she “hit big town”, she was ready to settle down and raise a small family.  One of her first, almost reflexive decisions was to hire a part-time housekeeper.  Imogen Coiley was a few years older and lived in the small African-American enclave out beyond the highway north of town.  Her son, Emmett, became one of my childhood friends.

Mom was uniquely sympathetic with everyone, but especially with black women older than herself.  Rural South Carolina was hit hard by the Depression and my lower middle class grandparents were devastated.  However, while the local black community was just as affected, they’d seen worse.  When they regained their footing, my grandparents were able to hire help and Serepta and Izora became my mother’s closest friends.  Her stories of the times they shared made an indelible impression on my childhood.  They taught her about self-respect (“Hold your head up high, Miss Vivian!”), a little bit about men and—most importantly for me—how to sing and dance in the black tradition. My mother passed these things along to me.  Let’s just say that you can’t learn them as an adult.

Therefore, my mother was a big fan of the young Mahalia Jackson, Big Bill Broonzy and, especially, Miriam Makeba.  She played the first couple RCA records over and over and over and only when the weather was nice—the sunshine reminded her of home.  And no one conveyed sheer joy like Miriam Makeba.  Her beautiful voice had an incredible ability to create happiness in a listener, especially the album called “The World of Miriam Makeba”.  Her fantastic band (circa 1962) included African drummers and singers that transfixed us kids and we’d start wiggling around, dancing.  Her rich music filled the entire house, shaking the rec room.
 
Thank you, Miriam Makeba, and rest in peace.