I served as President of The American Horticultural Society for four years, 1990 to 1993.  For the first half of its existence the AHS headquartered in a series of offices in DC, including a second floor walk up over a Chinese restaurant.  When I joined in 1989, it occupied River Farm, a spectacular 27-acre estate with a handsome main house, ballroom, several barns and a small garden on the banks of the Potomac River outside Alexandria, Virginia—a far cry from a cramped downtown office.  I thought River Farm made more sense as a botanical garden than headquarters for an information and advocacy organization serving the continental US, plus Alaska and Hawaii.  However, in 1973 the board of directors accepted philanthropist Enid Haupt’s donation of the property.  The following fifteen years weren’t kind to the AHS.  It reminded me of other turnarounds in its level of difficulty, complexity, and denial among the players.  In other words, it was a bit of a mess. As an outsider facing an organization on the brink of insolvency, I was expected to change things, which I did, unfortunately not enough to relocate the headquarters.  But we started a few nationwide programs—the Children’s Gardening Symposium remains intact—and raised enough money to avoid disaster.

It was an exciting time. The staff was very competent. I had many meetings with luminaries such as Mrs. Haupt, Elizabeth Miller and the environmentalist Maurice Strong. I became acquainted with Society members across the nation.  I tried to change the board’s role, and mostly succeeded.  We created a new position of board chairman and a paid one for the next president.  However, if its mission was to educate Americans about horticulture, the AHS needed a revolution.  Since it was nearly broke, I suggested selling the property, moving back to DC, strengthening the staff with retired teachers, gardening evangelists and lobbyist type advocates, and starting an international children’s gardening project.  “Spread the word”, I said.  Alas, the board disagreed. They were wrong.

Horticulture is more diverse in the US than in any other nation.  So, I asked, why have a centralized British-style botanical garden model? The US isn’t similar to the horticulturally homogeneous UK, to say the least.  Few gardeners in Arizona put much value on demonstration beds along the Potomac.  Yet the board of directors viewed River Farm as the Society’s centerpiece.  This distraction prevented the AHS from focusing on its mission.  Instead of using our limited resources to help other horticultural groups across the country, we beautified the headquarters in Virginia.  The legendary former president of Toro, David Lilly, was the lone maverick on the board who recruited me for the volunteer presidency. A kind and thoughtful man, he taught me much about organizational behavior.  His favorite saying is, “I’m moving as fast as I can to catch up with my people because I am their leader”.  However, he was the only director who agreed with me.

Imagine a national non-profit organization that creates and sponsors annually a horticultural seminar in every state.  “The sun never sets on the AHS”, I quipped.  The board was unresponsive. Some directors sincerely hated the idea.  They had fallen in love with River Farm—building up its tiny collection and putting demonstration beds everywhere. Ironically, the property lost its charm in the process, illustrating the double jeopardy of doing the wrong thing and not doing the right thing.  Time may correct the situation.  But the AHS has a rare chance to become a “virtual” gardening non-profit organization.  Why let the horticulture magazines travel everywhere giving seminars?  Why allow a vacuum to exist in the aggressive advocacy, promotion and publicity of gardening on a national level?

The original 1923 mission was to promote gardening through magazines and bulletins about experimental horticultural techniques, new cultivars and plant collecting, supported by the membership.  It heavily emphasized ornamentals. Growing flowers was deemed to be more upscale by the new middle class than keeping a vegetable garden. The AHS was to get the word out, especially to the hinterlands.  However, today the hinterlands include California, population 37 million, and 50% greater in size than England. One has to adjust to history; telling Californians something new has become more challenging.  However, the AHS needs both to respond to the growing amateur gardener population and to persuade Congress of the importance of home gardening.  DC is an ideal location.  A reinvigorated mission will connect folks from Florida to Alaska, and from Maine to Arizona.  Dues paying membership was over 60,000 when I left in 1993—it’s now 25,000. That’s a wake-up call. The American Horticultural Society will remain at a crossroads until it focuses profoundly on its mission.

As house prices and new construction fall, the homebuyer has not only more choices, but tougher economic decisions to make due to tighter credit. Lenders are narrowing their focus on high-worth clients.  Middle class buyers face declining wages, workforce reductions and a pre-recession economy of $4.00/gallon gas and climbing food prices.  If they’re vacating a long-term house or condo, they must both sell into a declining market filled with homes for sale and get financing from a skeptical loan officer at a troubled bank. However, on the positive side, this is an opportunity to look at domestic architecture and garden design and ask, “What do we do now?”

Suggestions abound, from winsome “saltboxes” and bungalows—so perfect for child rearing—to cape-cods for a more upscale traditional feel and rambling modern ranches for a more inside-outside flow. A family of four probably doesn’t need much more than 2,000 square feet.  “Energy” should be tight, with its diffusion handled by no more than three vistas and four doors.  Keeping the family together begins with physical proximity, what used to be called “the hearth”.  Imagine a dinner table that is in proportion to a typical 5,000 square foot house; its size wouldn’t allow the family to see each other well, much less speak casually.  The old saying, “A man’s house is his castle”, is being taken a bit too literally these days.

There is a remarkable story about a family that won HGTV’s “Dream House” Sweepstakes a few years ago.  The parents became so uncomfortable in their new palatial 6,500 square foot home that they gathered their two young boys and the four of them made a camp on the mezzanine of the second floor landing, which was itself the size of a small house and had a view of the front door.  They disliked the alienating effect of living in a conglomeration of five normal-sized houses, put it up for sale and moved back to their bungalow.  However, they had difficulty selling the behemoth and continued to pay high maintenance fees and taxes—some dream house. Now HGTV’s website includes advice on how to cope with the responsibilities of winning this somewhat dubious grand prize. That’s show business.

On the other hand, for those who want their home to reflect how far they’ve come in their lives, the best I’ve seen lately were on the Street of Dreams in suburban Seattle in 2007.  However, I saw them only on the web, since they were torched by environmental arsonists last March. Long years of hard work deserve a pay-off, and these were the homes contemporary dreams are made of.  While there might be more cutting edge environmental houses in Europe, none had their scale. Of course, their size and location were criticized in the local press, which mostly ignored the ecoterrorist attack, committed probably by the same group that burned down the horticulture research buildings at the University of Washington a few years earlier.  Environmental impact from toxic runoff into trout streams deserves torch-burning private homes?  No kidding?  When ecologists become flame-freaks, the fate of the environment darkens, indeed.  Perhaps the press played down the investigation in order to deny the criminals publicity and protect the public from copycats. God bless the FBI.

For new homes a fraction of the size of those on the Street of Dreams, check this out.  I’ve known Martha Stewart since 1991, and used some of her recipes and branded products.  I find them interesting, but confess more a professional bias than true feeling.  Therefore, I was surprised to find a Martha Stewart creation that genuinely appealed to me.  Her houses are perfectly sized for a family of four or five, and extraordinarily well designed.  The price is right too.  The only downside may be their location. Most require long commutes.  However, she and KB have dealt sanely with the current rage for excessive size. The charming homes are free of the massive great rooms that are ubiquitous in million dollar estates, yet are ample for entertaining and cozy without being saccharine.  Some have incredible floor plans; she and KB nailed it.

In track housing—upscale or down—gardens are usually left to the homeowner to figure out, in most cases with the help or interference of a neighborhood association.  This is unfortunate.  Contract landscapers work within narrow specifications and don’t rock the boat. Most customers have little interest in the yard, much less the garden, and realtors panic outdoors.  Let’s hope housing trends change toward smaller houses and larger yards, reflecting both rising fuel costs and the aging baby-boomer’s fascination with gardens.  That’s the only silver lining I can see.  History is on the side of architects and designers like Sara Susanka and Julie Moir Messervy. Martha Stewart should join with them to create a new approach to affordable urban housing.

Everyone has fantasies of instant wealth.  Here are a few of mine: 

All Advertisements TV – People say there’s too much hype on the tube. However, the distasteful craziness is in the programming, not the ads. Imagine a channel with one great ad after another. Also, there could be themed hours such as cars, movies, furniture, perfume, clothing, beer, “greatest hits”, e.g., the E trade baby, nostalgia and so on.
 
All Obit Newspaper – Imagine if everyone received a full-fledged obituary. People’s snowflake-like stories deserve to be in print.  This could save the newspaper business.

Analogue LCD/LED Watch – Back in the 70s, a friend and I cooked this up after being frustrated by not seeing the rest of the day on the readouts of our digital watches.  We discussed it with a Chicago patent attorney who was surprised that no one had thought of it, which made us feel great. Then we ran out of money.

Barbie Movie – I pitched this to Mattel in the early 90s.  She is a horse trainer’s daughter, attending veterinary school on a scholarship and gets caught up in a racetrack bribery scheme.  The bad guys blackmail her dad.  Ken is a fellow student who helps her bust the case and save Pop from jail.  Climax is a big race.  The logic was that, although some people may not like Barbie, everyone loves horses.  I saw huge sales in India and the Middle East and asked for a percentage.  No dice.

Bible in Books – I have always wanted to read the Bible on airplane rides and hiking trips.  However, most editions are bulky, heavy and printed in tiny type. Why not divide it like a perennial clump?  Someone created the Yale Shakespeare in the 1920s:  forty small mid-blue hardbacks that lie flat.  I pitched this to a New York City publisher in 1996 and got turned away.  In ’99, Grove Press/Atlantic released “The Books of the Bible”, first in an excellent hardback series that is impossible to find and later in a paperback box set with smaller sized volumes printed in small type and bound too stiffly to lie flat—not worth finding.

CDs In Album Sleeves – I can’t read the tiny print on CD packaging, even with my glasses.  I miss large record covers.  Some artists got their start creating album photos and illustrations, while the classical and jazz “liner notes” were often brilliant. Besides, flimsy CD boxes are annoying. Why not rigidly package CD disks in the LP-sized sleeves?

“Santatra” – A retirement Christmas gig could be to sing both holiday and Sinatra songs in a semi-Santa outfit at resorts, Moose clubs and retirement homes.  Especially tropical resorts.  Then, in the summer, mix Sinatra with Handel and tour gardens under the stage name “Ol’ Green Man”.

Sitting on the table in the doctor’s office, listening to her run through the issues of weight and diet (my first amber light), I suddenly realized that, on a certain level at an acute angle in fluorescent light, I’d eaten unwisely all my life.  As she droned, I pondered the miscues, searching my mind for the big answer.  The first hint was her prohibition of bowls of steaming pasta: 
“Try cutting pasta out altogether for awhile.”
“Why?”
“Carbs.”
“Don’t I need them, you know, to live?”
“Not the ones from pasta—look, just try to eat vegetables instead. They have plenty of carbs.”
“But. . .” 
“And notch up the exercise.”
“What about rice?” 
“No.”

And that was when it hit me, like a poison dart behind the ear.  The kicker was rice, specifically its preternatural sweetness.  “Wow!”,  I thought and slapped my forehead.  I have been in the seed business for thirty years and never connected the dots.  All grains are fruits; while I knew this, I didn’t realize it.  That’s why they’re so delicious, like bananas to a monkey.  However, they differ only technically from custard apples.  If I didn’t quit eating grains in the quantity my doctor and nurses found incredible, I was going to stray into the red zone.  “Avoid rich food”, my grandfather had said.  He didn’t know the half of it.

The doctor added that mass plays a big role, so to speak.  Double duh.  But I needed to hear it.  We discussed my eating habits:
“Did you really eat a whole marrow squash, George?  That’s interesting, but make sure your plate is empty after that, because you’re getting more than you need.  Try eating less. And notch up the exercise.”

The breakthrough was the connection between grapefruit and wheat.  Bread is like fruit with fat mixed in. Who knew?  Being in the seed business, I should have. 

Many years ago, as a result of library research on the great German poet Else Lasker-Schuler, I came across many essays about her and her colleagues.  What struck me most was their unshakeable love of Germany.  Even after the Holocaust, despite their Jewish identity and living in exile with the memories of dead friends and family, they remembered their beloved Germany.  I marveled at this and mistook it for an expression of abnormal psychology.

I didn’t know it was a simpler and, for its naturalness, stronger self-identification with their homeland than that of, for example, Bavarians.  Far from being what today one would refer to as “ethnic”, these mostly well-educated sons and daughters of middle class Jewish families didn’t merely blend with their surroundings, they often bore the German standard higher than their neighbors.  In the 19th century, “Germany” was still a new idea imposed on principalities, districts, leagues and nations.  However, everyone spoke German: a variant or dialect at home, “high German” at work and “polite German” in public. Germans are more exacting and self-conscious in their speech and writing than the British.  The north and central parts of Europe were an enormous linguistic federation of people who spoke German.  But, unlike the Jew, the gentile’s home state was the only one in his heart.  In contrast, the new creation known as “Germany” had a modern identity that transcended these homeland borders.  Ironically, this made the Jew more “German” than the average German.

I remember my paternal grandmother saying she was from Schleswig-Holstein:  “Aus Kiel gekommen”.  It was actually a small town west of Kiel and much closer to Denmark than the rest of Germany.  In turn, though born in the far north, she was from ancestors a world away, near the eastern Saxon city of Chemnitz, the family still identifying itself as such.  (My grandmother introduced me to tulips, and later to weeding.  She was nearly six feet, strong and a bit intimidating—probably carried some Dutch and Celtic blood.)

It’s not well known that German grain and cattle farmers were as restless as the pioneers of the Old West.  For instance, the “prairie schooners” that fanned across the plains were modeled on German farm wagons.  Even my paternal grandfather—baptized George Jacob Balzheiser—was conscious of his roots in the “Rheinfalz”, not far from Worms.  His grandfather made the trip over, first to New Orleans, then Memphis and finally Cincinnati, wearing his worldly possessions including a letter of introduction to relatives who worked in a slaughterhouse.  Yet before coming to the Rhineland, the paternal clan had lived in the northwest, or Lower Saxony.  They were “Niedersachsen”, not “Deutsch” or “German”—that was only the basic language, and, in their case, an almost Dutch form of it.  Perhaps it was this great variation and dynamism that, in part, made Germany attractive to Jewish communities.  Certainly, the familiar continental climate of North America enabled German immigrants to dominate, relatively quickly, the US agricultural industry.

Although I never knew my grandfather, I visited a couple of ancestral haunts during a summer vacation in 1973.  Dad organized the trip and met me there.  Our relative and tour guide was a pleasant elderly man who was nearly blind, but still able to walk with us and point out the apartment building that stood on the site of the Balzheiser home.  I remember Dad taking a photograph of the old gentleman rubbing his hand on the wall, as if to make sure it was the right one.

Pity that few remember this remarkable nature writer.  Most likely due to the oversight of Chicago as a serious literary center by the New York publishing world since the 1920s when he was beginning.  Dubkin specialized in birds, insects and bats in cities, which is, ironically, trendy now.  Googling him yields only a few used bookstores.  Yet he wrote a weekly newspaper column for fifteen years and published seven books.

His best is The White Lady, an incredible account of his discovery of an albino bat in a grotto of overgrown bushes and trees in an abandoned lot, probably on the near west side of Chicago.  He doesn’t tell; it could have been anywhere in the swampy city, but the two branches of the Chicago River meet there, and bats thrive near water.  He watched the birth of the white baby bat from his post at the bottom of the enclosure, looking up at the mother, one of dozens hanging there birthing away.  The white colored head emerging was bright enough in the somber light to catch his eye.  Nature writing rarely gets better. 

The Murmur of Wings, his most popular, has been reprinted several times and most lately by Kessinger Publishing, known for reprinting obscure, hard-to-find literature in large, attractively priced editions. Churchill’s individual books are there, for example.  The Murmur of Wings is sublimely written.  Dubkin combined a sharp eye with a love of nature and an ingenuous style that ennobles each tiny creature.  His stories are as unexpected as his subjects.

One of his last books was an oddity:  Wolf Point, a short yet panoramic history of a tiny island in the Chicago River shadowed then—as now—by skyscrapers.  It seems forced and experimental and, while not bad, ranks lowest among his books, mainly because it’s not about nature.

We are overrun by noisy nature writers these days.  While a few reach for the standards set by Thoreau, Muir and Burroughs, none except Gary Paul Nabhan have come close. They should read Dubkin.

We held the July 12 Open House at Heronswood’s new gardens in Doylestown, PA, welcoming over 430 people from across the northeast and mid-Atlantic states. We conducted seven garden tours, sold over a thousand rare plants and gave away a young hydrangea to the first 250 guests. It was a great day, though very hot. Our next one, out in Kingston, Washington, will be on July 26th.

Here are some highlights:

Ready to go: greeting tables with The Garden Conservancy and Heronswood Nursery literature, and buckets of free spring water bottles; research greenhouse in background.

One of the hourly tours begins under the big sycamore tree. The first floor of the historic Burpee house was also open.

Southeast edge of the Carolina Shade Garden, named for my mother.

Great lawn with the entry to the Springhouse Garden.

Vice President of Finance, Hans Miller and his son, Jonathan, in the plant sales area.

Container display in the old horse paddock.

Heronswood owner George Ball talks with a morning guest.

We gave away hydrangea plants to the first 250 visitors. Most couples took only one, so we were distributing them most of the day.

The “stranded isle” test shows surprising results. Alas, only fifty will fit in my tiny hut, from classics to ephemera. Gone are the thrillers, breakthroughs, manifestos, philosophy and feuilletons; they don’t compare to identity, “imago”, the rough outline and telling detail. However, I include a few strays. Here is what’s left of a gaudy life.

After an unusually frenetic sales season, a desert island would be a relief. No computer, radio, television, public—Dorothy Parker’s “fresh hell”. Just a pair of reading glasses and a deep well.

Here’s the cream off a house full of books, in no order:

Sholom Singer taught me Medieval History at DePaul University in 1974 and 1975.  He was probably in his mid-sixties, with the light blue cotton shirts Chicago guys used to wear buttoned up to the collar with no tie, and black trousers.  He was a fantastic teacher:  erudite, tough and “old school”.

Once he interrupted me when I said I had an idea I wanted “to propound”.  ” ‘Propose’, George, you want to ‘propose’.  Never use words like ‘propound’.  I charge a fee for them.”  However, I made the mistake again with another word I don’t remember.  “George, stop!  Use the simplest word.  I don’t need the extra money.  My congregation takes good care of me,” he deadpanned.

Dr. Singer was a part-time rabbi, a kind of substitute teacher, as he put it.  He was from the same community on Chicago’s West Side that produced Saul Bellow, Isaac Rosenfeld and Benny Goodman.  After the immigrant families landed there from the chaotic cities and towns of Central and Eastern Europe, they went straight to work.  When he became passionate in class, which wasn’t often, it was only to distinguish Jews, Christians and “the Arabs”.  He was neither sanguine nor choleric about Israel, but pessimistic, remote and even cryptic at times, as if he knew more about the 1973 War than we did.  Once he seemed very depressed, but later he bucked up.  It was a night class which may have been the reason.

He gave me two great insights: one historical and one personal.  The first was in a class about medieval religious persecution.  Jews were often pushed from villages to cities, and then on to other villages, or to swamps to form their own.  Some left on ships for foreign countries—those were the fortunate ones.  The sick, weak, solitary or compromised were often executed. Sometimes entire villages were destroyed with everyone in them. Then he focused on successful Jewish communities, on the survivors who stayed put and in many cases prospered.  At this point he turned and panned across the classroom, his eyes widened.

“Now I’m going to tell you a theory of a 19th century historian—a man named Tewksbury—that explains some of this survival process, and also explains the general historical fact that over the centuries the Jews became a very successful ethnic group, particularly in proportion to the larger populations with whom they lived.

“First of all, Tewksbury said that primogeniture was customary among gentiles, most significantly of the moneyed classes, the guilds, managers and staff of large estates, the property holders, and especially among the most successful of these—the aristocracy and nobility.  The first son was ‘crowned’, literally or figuratively, as the head of the next generation.  He got it all.  The second son would be the head protector, the merchant’s right hand enforcer, or the head of the militia group, right up to the head of the knights.  In other words, the warrior.  The third son, again up and down the social strata, entered the church—the monks and priests. So the mobility of the male children was set in three directions:  wealth and its often dangerous responsibilities, including the treacherous environment of court life.  Second, war and the preparation for it, which was often as fatal as the actual battles, which were fought by harsher methods and resulted in more carnage than ours today.  Finally, the priesthood, where marriage was forbidden. The life of the Christian male offspring of the upper classes was frequently early death, since soldiers were led by the knights and palace intrigues led to regimes being murdered or exiled. In the case of religion, no legitimate heirs were allowed.  They couldn’t have kids. These rules were absolute.  So, perhaps half the men would survive, then they would have heirs, and the next generation would repeat the process. Tewksbury called this ‘the degeneration of the top’ a gradual and relentless pruning of the best and brightest, so to speak.

“On the other hand, the Jews at this time had lives that were different in three significant ways. First, Jews were prohibited from the military, except as advisors, procurement agents or bankers.  But generally they were out of the military, certainly as soldiers or knights.  Also, a Jew rising in the aristocracy was so rare that it proved the rule, literally.  So the best and the brightest tended to survive wars.  On the other end of the spectrum, the poor, the old, the weak, the sick—of both sexes—were often the first to die in the persecutions and did so in large numbers.  Forced marches, labor, or mass executions would always include most or all of them.  Only the strong survived.  So this pruning took place at the bottom of the Jewish population.  No more future generations of the Darwinian “less fit”, if one believes that theory, which was known in Tewksbury’s time.

“Finally, the role of the matchmaker (and Dr. Singer lightened things up by referring to the musical Hello Dolly) was practiced in every town, village and neighborhood, and it was accepted, like marriages in India.  But the Jewish matchmaker was an organizing social force. Every community had them—large or small, rich or poor.  They married off class to class, up and down the layers of society.  This house to that house, this hut to that hut.  And rabbis were required to marry, and all their sons were encouraged either to become a rabbi or distinguish themselves in a profession that wasn’t outlawed.”

Dr. Singer concluded that there was a combination of factors in the middle ages favorable to both a mobile as well as stable Jewish culture, and a perpetuation of elites.  So that was Tewksbury.  Everyone in the class breathed a heavy sigh of relief.  He also said it was certainly not a popular academic theory, but it was worth considering.  He ended the class by saying that this phenomenon may have had a positive influence on the rise of the conversions to Judaism in remote villages of Central and Eastern Christiandom. In all, it was a great class.

Not a week goes by I don’t think of Dr. Singer.  My memory of him is a great comfort, especially in today’s dark, superficial and xenophobic atmosphere, where Muslims are considered sub-human. He helps me to understand that our present-day outcasts in the West—Africans, Turks, Muslims, Palestinians, Native Americans—will likely be the pruned, paired off and exponentially multiplying inheritors of tomorrow.  Let the Jews be their example, and God bless them.

The second great insight Dr. Singer shared was surprisingly personal and, at the time, seemed bizarre to me.  However, he was my academic adviser so I shouldn’t have been shocked.  I was still a bit naïve, owing to an isolated, rural boarding school.

At the end of a fruitful but contentious session with me, he concluded by going off the subject. 

“You know, George, you can do two things with your life: you should convert to Judaism and become a rabbi.  You’d make a good rabbi.  But it would be difficult.  But think about it.  If you don’t want to do that, then you should become a minister.  You were born to it.”

Stunned, I mumbled something like “Thanks, I really appreciate it”, but felt so strange that I got a little dizzy for a second.  No one had ever even talked with me that way.  He eyeballed me and then waved the meeting to an end and said good-bye.
 

I’m extremely fortunate to live at Fordhook Farm, the Burpee family redoubt, where we carry on all of our basic ornamental and vegetable research, and put on our summer open houses, the next one being Saturday, July 12th.

A 19th century success story, the Burpees were a diverse clan including illustrious fathers, moms, daughters and wives.  The name is originally Beaupre, of French Protestant origin.  Pushed out of France, they emigrated to Canada and then Pennsylvania, where they became several generations of physicians.

The company’s founder, W. Atlee Burpee or just “Atlee”, hobnobbed with both Thomas Alva Edison and Henry Ford and was a distant cousin of the great plant breeder, Luther Burbank.  His son, David, traveled in high social circles in Philadelphia.  At his city men’s club, The Pennsylvania Society, he was titled “Brother Seed”.  Yet he founded the War Gardens movement during WWI, which later became known as Victory Gardens.  During the Second World War, he sent over a million pounds of vegetable seeds to the Allied governments of Europe.

David’s wife, Lois Burpee, followed her own missionary father’s footsteps into philanthropy, both with the Nobel Laureate Pearl Buck at Welcome House, the orphanage they founded together for Amerasian children,  and with the Burpee Company supplying vegetable seeds to church missions of every stripe worldwide.  She also wrote a remarkable out-of-print cookbook.

As the Burpees met the philanthropic challenges of the late 19th century and carried forward their contributions through the late 20th, we have confronted the famines of the 1990s in Somalia and Haiti, as well as humanitarian crises in Rwanda, Afghanistan and Iraq.  The air cargo carrier DHL helped us out in the Middle East, and CARE has been a steadfast partner.  My friend John Agresto, now at The American University of Iraq—Sulaymaniyah, was a rock in support of our efforts in Iraq.  An old fly-fishing buddy, and an avid vegetable gardener, John will be a visiting professor at Princeton University this fall.  For ten years he was President of St. John’s College of Santa Fe.  His book, Mugged By Reality, is the best account of the reconstruction in Iraq.

Now, as religious education becomes increasingly vital to the recovery of degraded and depleted urban neighborhoods and among the virtual refugee camps along the US-Mexico border, the Burpee Company and its affiliates continue to meet the challenge.  Our foundation has given support to community development programs from southern California to post-Katrina areas of Louisiana and Florida. We continue to support both secular and religious activities, as the Burpee family did a hundred years ago.

Our diverse, non-horticultural interests extend to the world of art and aesthetics.  Over the last twenty years we have accumulated a large collection of monumental sculptures at Fordhook Farm by the artists Steve Tobin, Daisuke Shintani, Densaburo Oku and Eric Finnerty.  Viewing the collection is possible by appointment for small groups and by the public on our Garden Conservancy Open Days.

Finally, our education activities include primary, secondary, college and university levels.  We support both agricultural and general academic programs with an emphasis on studies of constitutional democracies.  While we support public schools, we also provide limited assistance to private education reform organizations and religious schools.  However, our areas of concentration continue to be horticultural education, particularly to programs addressing poor neighborhoods and children’s gardens.