While visiting Trenton recently, I saw—and realized—that the US is at the threshold of a social reconstruction, similar to the one that occurred from the 1870s to 1920s when millions of immigrants arrived. They were profoundly different from the dominant Anglo-Americans.  A painfully constructed nation, founded by expatriates and led through a civil war by their descendants, was flooded with penniless Germans, Italians, Russians, Poles, Greeks, Portuguese and Chinese.  Emma Lazarus’ poem ("huddled masses") at the foot of the Statue of Liberty is accurate.

The medical and educational resources available to the public were overwhelmed by clashing languages, customs and needs of large, sprawling family groups settling in cities, towns and rural areas. Pennsylvania, New York, New England, the south, the midwest and recently established states west of the Mississippi swelled with foreigners.

Add to the annual transatlantic human waves the ongoing reconstruction of the south.  The absorption of poor whites and freed African slaves combined with immigration to create a complex social challenge unique in human history.

Blending divergent, mutually unintelligible cultures into the established order was helped greatly by churches and the philanthropic community.  In particular, medicine and education were revolutionized to accommodate the new masses, both north and south.  Hundreds of new hospitals, clinics, schools and colleges were built in a matter of a few years. Agriculture was also transformed with the arrival of the foreign farmers and peasants, mainly from Europe. Burpee played a role in adapting European vegetables to the radically different US climate, as well as breeding more productive varieties to yield larger harvests for the new farmers.

Vast Latin American, Central European and pan-African neighborhoods of Queens and Brooklyn, and an enormous supermarket devoted to Korean, Chinese and Japanese vegetables, signify an upheaval in US demographics.  Our future society is Asian, African and Latin American, with the descendants of the UK and Europe in the minority.  Although I have read about this coming population shift for 20 years, I didn’t see it in person until quite recently.

Just as the mainly Protestant churches and various business-based philanthropies joined with (or in some cases led) government in the late 19th century to accommodate new arrivals from distant countries, the Catholics are performing the primary role now.  But these various institutions are not strong enough to transform US education and culture to meet the needs of these new neighbors.  Arabs, East Indians, Chinese, and Southeast Asians—they have no interest in the progressive education methods popular in the US for the last 100 years.  Far from it:  they will home school before allowing their kids to be left in a typical public school.  I’ve studied the subject closely, both here and in southern California.  Over half of my staff are immigrants.  The challenges in public education reform are increasing. 

If anything, the new citizens can teach the old ones a few new tricks.  These welcome arrivals are mostly religious, traditional and extraordinarily dignified considering their circumstances.  They are prodigious in intelligence and industriousness.  They become excellent politicians as well as business leaders. They raise productive, happy and successful families.  We not only owe them the opportunities of our Constitution when they embark on the path to citizenship, we also need their help.  Their infusion of new blood will be a lease on life for our nation.  However, we must treat them the way Lincoln would have treated them:  liberation from oppression is essential to our civilization.

A recent New York state lottery radio commercial bragged that it is “spending billions to educate millions”.  I did a double take, thinking I misheard.  Both liberals and conservatives should find this inadvertent revelation depressing.  It seems that no one is concerned with productivity anymore, that it has become a “bad word”.  However, gardeners know that you spend a little to get a lot.

In the same vein, the current mortgage crisis shows that the lessons a gardener learns daily have not been absorbed by ordinary citizens and the financial system as a whole.  You have to respect the yield that a piece of land can produce, and you have to know that to overestimate that yield—to gamble—is to risk the farm.  In essence, betting on the distant market (made to seem close through telecommunication technology) underpins the debacle that permeates the home lending industry.

Consider the contrasting garden economy: the productive garden, rather than the reactive market as a metaphor. Begin with the sun, a free and continuous source of cosmic power.  Add the water and earth.  The result is endlessly reproducing plant life. By both recognizing and respecting the ability of plants to use this free power, we can maximize their growth, despite obstacles such as disease and climate variation that nature throws our way.  As it goes with plants, so it goes with human beings. 

Thus, mortgage and home lending operate in similar ways.  By beginning with the “seed” of a mortgage to buy a property, an owner can nurture the property by making prudent additions and renovating along the way.  “Acts of God”, such as flourishing economies or the vagaries of fashion, can impact the property much as rain or winds impact plants, both positively and negatively.

The crux of the current mortgage crisis is that too many homeowners try to force maximum growth out of nothing.  The plant, as it were, does not have room to grow, and the gardener has already promised the entire harvest.  With multiple mortgages in a declining housing market, there is no way that a property owner can gain a yield to feed him, his family and the bank, from the first seed.  Eventually, the house goes to foreclosure, and the homeowner is left without a home for his children.  Any short-term gain that could have come from the deal is now long forgotten.

As the increasingly popular green movement suggests, society should imitate the virtues of nature—in this case productivity—rather than deviate from them.  A society that “spends billions to educate millions” will eventually collapse: educated and broke.  However, a seed is ruthlessly cost effective:  the commonly accepted ratio is about 1:12—every dollar spent on vegetable seed and compost or granular fertilizer yields twelve dollars of incomparably tasty produce.  Let this be a lesson to our economists as well as our educators.  We should be like seeds, nature’s microchip.  Create rather than conserve, save rather than spend, multiply rather than divide.  You will never see a “bail out” for home gardeners.

In the news we often hear that the environmental crisis is influencing, if not determining, public policy.  Yet, in the richest nation on earth, we are blessed with unprecedented natural resources, all based on plant growth.  In addition we have air, water and land so promising that we could, and surely must, create a garden economy for generations to come.  Nevertheless, we panic that environmental and economic catastrophes are closing in on us.  I believe that the reality is the opposite: we shall continue to enjoy an earthly paradise unknown to our ancestors.

It is a matter of investing not only in ourselves, but also in our natural resources, and balancing these divergent investments together—caring for ourselves as we care for our gardens.  Only in this way will our tilth yield the fruit of its labor.  As the American Puritan John Winthrop suggested, we should put ourselves forth, not only as the “shining city on the hill”, but also the shining garden in the sun, one that plants seeds from which future generations will profit.

In New York City recently, I was stunned by the majestic beauty of Central Park.  In fact, it’s overwhelming when scrutinized.  Therefore, it has become something like a giant dynamo of the city’s unconscious.  It reminded me of Norman O. Brown’s comment about how we are unconscious of our bodies, how that distinguishes being human.  As I walked in and around Central Park for several hours, I noticed that very few people seemed to be aware of it.

Central Park has an extraordinary history: it was built quite recently (the 1860s and 1870s), as these things go, and the dream child of an unusual pair of men, one a self-taught novice and ex-journalist and the other a budding genius in the field of landscape architecture.  It was laid out on democratic principles of easy and free access by the public, which was novel at the time, and in a weird way, still is. We suffer an epidemic of gated communities and parental playground paranoia.  Life was dangerous then, too, much more than today, but folks were tougher, in private and public.

But I digress.  The sheer majesty of the trees and the massive scale of the various greens and meadows places Central Park on a par with any of the urban gardens of Europe. Paris, London, Berlin and Munich have some that rival, but none are so stunning in their landscape artistry.

What Vaux and Olmstead achieved was to place the idea of nature ahead of the  consideration of the public’s access to it.  Central Park possesses aspects of  both the wilderness as well as the human world.  It’s an astonishing accomplishment to have pulled off in the middle of one of the world’s largest and certainly, its most sophisticated city.  It is like a goddess that tames and quells the beasts surrounding it.

One of the curious comments I heard from friends with whom I spoke about it was “Well, it’s a work of art, you know”.  I’m not the one to address about gardens being works of art, a bit raw as I am about the subject vis-a-vis Heronswood Gardens, which, while not Venusian, I assert will always be an extraordinary work of great art. But I nodded and sipped my drink.  I always naively thought Central Park was a type of public works project.

My hostess was needling me a bit.  She’s well aware of the grief we took about it.  She made up for her indulgence by pointing out that the governing body of the park is The Central Park Conservancy, “and they call it a work of art too, George”.  Sure enough, they do, on their website, in fact calling it “one of America’s greatest works of art”.  Very true!  We’ll have to work on getting a Cleopatra’s Needle out in Kingston.

Most garden perennials flower in spring after the low light season.  However, garden annuals bloom during the summer, which is not typical of native plants in North America.  Mainly tropical in origin, bedding plants have been the focus of breeding since the residential boom of the 1950s.  Annual cultivars descend from plants found near the equator, the only frost-free part of the world.  These heat and light lovers thrive in our tropic-like summers.  Their long-lasting flowering habits weirdly emulate the vegetative growth stage.  There’s nothing delicate about these flowers, such as the Kalanchoe, one of my favorites, with its intense neon, rubbery blooms, so different from silken dogwood petals and pale hellebore blossoms.  Petunias are lurid and arousing.  In general, annuals are brash, energetic and outspoken.  Some are almost monstrous.

The seasonal rhythm of the North American garden—flower, vegetation, seed and dormancy—has been altered by the popularity of annuals, including the tender perennials or, as they’re sometimes called, “tropicals”.  It is peculiar that the public associates a flowering plant more with summer than with spring.  I’ve always considered the mania for annuals a bit strange.  However, as my mentor Claude Hope used to say, “People like ’em”, and he was generally correct.  Sometimes April showers bring May flowers, but more often they fall on mulch beds prepared for annuals, which rely on huge amounts of summer water.  Perennials and bulbs are the proverbial May flowers.  Perhaps the new xeriscaping trend will become the summer annual craze of the future, and we’ll save a lot of hose water.  However, here in the humid and tropical mid-Atlantic, watering is often unnecessary.

The only summer colors I noticed growing up in Illinois were from the dazzling petunias, pelargonium and impatiens my parents cultivated.  The meadows, fields and swamps were shades of vibrant green, perked up by an occasional berry.  On the other hand, spring colors appeared only in the local woods and the Sonoran Desert where I attended school.

Without naming names, I list some “average last frost dates” published on the internet by reputable gardening organizations.

I was checking a couple weeks ago for planting dates to be sure I wasn’t in trouble with some very tender annuals. The location in South Carolina is in the Piedmont area, near my farm and, believe me, it’s hot there in May.

I feel sorry for the guys collecting “average last frost date” data. These were listed on web sites that came up in the first five minutes of a Google search. Looking them over, I got a headache. Weather is variable, but these averages seem wrong. Even taking wind velocity into account the calculation is not a very tricky problem. However, I thought airports kept these types of records. Aviation people are extraordinarily precise and accurate. The USDA was almost amusing: they indicated for zone 6 that the average would exist within a period from April 1 to April 30.

Maybe I’ve become a bit cynical, but I think the North American gardening community should be capable of producing a website with excellent weather data.

If someone loses his father at 10, goes to boarding school, graduates from Harvard with distinction, serves in Asia during World War II, inherits a lot of money, makes ambitious plans to contribute to society rather than fritter away a trust fund, reaches 97 and passes away, he can be sure he will be pilloried and ridiculed in the obituary columns.

Especially if he also:

Hartford was a potent threat to the elitist cultural establishment of the 1950s and 60s, who branded him a dilettante.  Since he possessed one of the largest fortunes in the US, it should be no surprise that, from time to time, he might act like it.  Perhaps he should have hired a better press agent.  He married four times—big deal.  Yet he avoided alcohol and played sports.  His yacht was named “Joseph Conrad”.  Perhaps if he had been a Trump, Murdoch or Sulzberger, and inherited a media or real estate empire, rather than the world’s largest grocery store chain, he would have been remembered better. But then, he would not have been as heroic.

Last week’s obits were scurrilous, focusing on his financial losses, as well as alleged drug use when he was in his sixties.  In the 1970s the nation was awash in cheap drugs, not the prescription antidepressants of today.  An ex-wife accused him of using cocaine and tranquilizers—apparently a sin for an aging millionaire.  Certainly a man of no special personal virtue himself, Frank Lloyd Wright didn’t receive any of Hartford’s many commissions.  Nevertheless, Wright’s mean-spirited portrayal of him as a foolish, scatterbrained playboy has been quoted in the many obituaries.  However, consider the source.  Wright and Edward Durrell Stone, who built the Columbus Circle museum, were rivals.  Plus, the pompous and insecure Wright was a legendary ladies’ man.

Let’s look at the world Huntington Hartford left.  Planes to the Caribbean overflow with middle class tourists. Visitors and collectors flock to shows and auctions of 18th and 19th century painting and sculpture.  The public has fallen in love with urban structures clad in white marble and Renaissance motifs.  For maverick cultural sensibilities, there’s a fashionable New York museum, about 15 years old, that was created by George Soros for his wife, Susan.  It has become deservedly chic for exhibiting textiles, jewelry and household appliances as fine art.  Hartford may have been a risk-taker, but he was also way ahead of the curve.

The irony is that he has been dragged through the mud in the obituary columns by many of the same people and publications who bemoan the lowbrow state of our culture. The New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Weekly Standard have likened Hartford to today’s spoiled debutantes and drug addicted film stars.  Yet a glance at his record shows that he was quite the opposite, a dedicated and iconoclastic champion of fine art and culture and a visionary.  His losses were often, eventually, our gains.  Society needs more Huntington Hartfords.
 

Green has always been my preferred color.  (Orange runs a close second, but that’s another story.)  I’ve often wondered why green clothing is hardly ever worn.  Military association?  I think this would be positive, not negative, but perhaps it is a taboo of sorts.  Beau Brummel probably ruined green at some point, drawing associations with grocers or Irishmen.  We remain cursed—and strangled—by his followers’ prejudices.  Augusta hasn’t helped much either.  (Golf courses are yet another story.)

Dark green is a stunning color for men’s clothing.  I have a friend whose wife made him an emerald-to-evergreen colored winter suit of superb wool she bought in northern India.  Another friend appeared at a summer wedding in a very pale sherbet green Cerutti suit—he was a big hit.  And why on earth aren’t there green denim jeans?  Could it be that the Union army veterans wanted to wear the same colors as their uniforms?  Or is it a deeper taboo, the association of green with jealousy or envy?  After all, the “green man” of pre-Christian Europe was a potent symbol, and perhaps a rival to Jesus. Also, light green is the holy color in Islam—its image of the light of paradise.

I pondered this deficit back in the late 1980s when a uniquely pretty shade of mid-green was the dominant fashion in young women’s winter stockings in Holland.  Tights color is a fashion “lingua franca” there. Every two years or so the stockings change from blue to pink to purple to rose and so forth.  Late 80s—green for several years, and I recommend it.

I suppose green was a very important ancient color, up there with red.  Blue is rare as a dye, so I’ve read.  But green is much wider in variation, and truly the dominant garden color.  However, blue denotes royalty and aristocracy.  It must have involved the juju about the unusual eye color, combined with the rarity of the dyes and the color of uncut blood veins.

Lime green is one of my favorite colors, certainly unusual in nature, very becoming on the dinner plate and half the fun of a gin and tonic. Until recent kidney problems, green food was pretty much “it” for me.  Years of day-by-day spinach, broccoli, green beans.  My mid-life crisis mantra was “Who moved my collards?”  My first bike was a metal flake lime green Schwinn 3-speed.  First car, fifth car and fifteenth car were green.  It’s a pretty car color.

Also, my enormous lawn is green.  I love it, it’s my favorite part of Fordhook Farm—I have to confess.  I exhale, so to speak.  But that’s a completely personal emotion.  I admire no one else’s lawn, while I adore discovering other people’s gardens. In fact, if I visit someone who has a better lawn, I get mildly depressed.  Green with envy!  Therefore, green is the color of self-reflection, in my opinion.  A lawn defines the personal space of one’s property, like a ruler might measure its size or a scale its weight.  I was told lawns began historically as gaming surfaces, perhaps originally from the Middle East, via trade and the crusades.  Maybe so, but it would have been an accidental birth to one of our landscape’s great beauties, conjuring up the peace of heaven and a farmer’s pastoral fulfillment.  A great lawn allows the eyes—and the entire face—to relax.

A recurrent image from trips to the Middle East is the caravan.  I saw two, in Tunis and Sudan, scruffy versions of movie ones.  Noisy and smelly, they resembled nightmares.  Modern trucks have replaced them in volume, but only where the original routes were charted centuries ago.  Some trucks haul several containers in a bizarre conga line, like those crossing the Australian deserts.  Faster versions, then, of the old caravans.

However, where there exist no such supply routes among sparse and scattered settlements and oases, the packed camel trains remain.  Yet even here cargo planes penetrate, delivering modern construction, farm and military hardware.  Like long ribbons, these remote rural routes connect old market towns, outposts, forts and government stations, filled with civic and religious buildings, old men and children.

This is how they beat us in Iraq.  Long caravans crawl from the far-off, clandestine sources of arms and munitions to the cities and towns where they fight us.  They use the same method as drug traffickers, such as the “mules” stringing from Mexico into the U.S.

The powerful image of the caravans resonates with me.  Terrorists use ancient, traditional routes, unknown to outsiders.  Trucks, vans, cars set up for desert use, loaded with weapons, and the secret soldiers that use them, the assassins.  Their paths seem like those of magically long mother snakes, winding in from their nests, first to staging areas, and then to Baghdad, the mosques, both Shia and Sunni, the open-air markets as well as the walled-in bazaars, like those in agricultural towns across Mexico. On to the highest value targets—the police stations, barracks, military academies and even high schools and colleges, where they void their cargoes of death.  Caravans of Russian, North Korean and Chinese arms, as in the 60s.

On the other hand, what of our forces?  Our massive, complex, utterly modern fortresses, like giant clinics of democracy, with teams of political doctors, nurses and epidemiologists.  Soldiers of mercy, spreading out to cure and care, as well as defend and attack.  “When it’s time to kill, kill!”,   my mother used to say.

Burpee’s program of providing vegetable seeds to Iraq began in early 2004 when my good friend, John Agresto, was tapped to lead the CPA’s efforts to reconstruct Iraq’s colleges and universities.  All of them have large agriculture departments. High on their list of needs was good seed, so they received nearly 3,000 pounds of tomato, melon, onion and squash seed.  DHL helped us by contributing free transportation.  The officials at the Department of Defense were cooperative and extraordinarily efficient.

The modern Iraqi diet isn’t much different from the rest of the countries in the greater Mediterranean regions.  However, they especially love the light green skinned zucchini, with its creamy, slightly sweet flesh.  Women use them somewhat like we do the potato, stuffing and baking it with meats such as lamb and various herbs and spices.  Compared to our zucchinis, it is prettier and more delicious.  Also, the Iraqi farmer is highly skilled—he can grow anything.  The only drawbacks are lack of seed and urban violence, which disrupts the produce markets and causes crops to languish and rot.

Often I think of the Iraqi farmer when my day is going rough.

Company towns are strange holdovers from the middle ages. In my mom’s hometown of Ware Shoals, the bank, church, clothing store, housing and, of course, work—all were owned by the textile mill. Money didn’t matter—whatever the company paid out, it got back in profits and rents. Step out of line and you better move along. However, no vagrants welcome, no strangers looking for a job. This paradox put the entire region into a deep freeze. My mother was fortunate to have had the opportunity to get out, in the form of my dad, a young pilot who had stopped in Greenwood, South Carolina, to visit his friendly competitors at Park, while flying huge bales of bare root tomato transplants in a small cargo plane from a greenhouse in Indiana to a farmers coop in southern Georgia. It was one of his first jobs out of college and before the war, the spring of 1941. Every time I meet George Park, Jr., whose brother I might have been, we have a drink. Burpee and Park remain fierce but friendly rivals.

But here’s the weird part: our current plant production nursery—where, coincidentally, we grow mostly tomato transplants—is a newly built greenhouse complex in tiny Metal Township, in the mountains of western Pennsylvania. At our dedication ceremony last winter, a local resident, Maureen Shook, asked me if I knew the local history: Park Seed had started within walking distance of our greenhouses. I could just make out the original Park residence, where Ms. Shook lives, across the small valley. Mr. Park had started out in 1868 selling flower seed to local farmers, and his business exploded nationwide, so he moved first to Florida and finally to South Carolina.

Ware Shoals has a celebrated high school football program, and its stadium can be seen in the current movie, “Leatherheads”. I used to visit my grandmother, “Mama Ann”, and my aunts, uncles and cousins in the summers when I was a child. She ran The Ware Shoals Inn, a pleasant traveler’s hotel and boarding house with a large dining room and typical veranda overlooking the town’s only lighted intersection. Uncle Lee lived out of town on a little farm that backed into woods, where John Pratt, Little Lelion, Ann Bethey, Little Tracy and I would play in the ponds. At night they’d scare the daylights out of me with ghost stories. There was no television or radio, just a screened porch. Aunt Doris kept a freezer case in the kitchen which we were allowed to raid once each sweltering evening. On Sunday, we’d pile into the car to go into town to see Mama Ann. A big, gorgeous woman, she’d stand at the inn’s stove frying chicken in a skillet. Biscuits, iced tea, watermelon, and then I would nearly pass out in the middle of the afternoon. She’d let me crawl up on her big bed next to the air conditioner. I’d cool off and fall asleep. The boarding house served a widow as well as the town deputy, who had the first aquarium I ever saw. A relative lived on the top floor, George Earle, who was in his twenties and had a confederate flag on his bedroom wall and a 1951 Mercury with which he cruised around town in his jeans and white t-shirt. Even he joined in on the ghost stories, which were the big pastime.

Everyone had a double first name. Mine was “B.G.”, for “Baby George”, since I was the youngest in the family. I used a stick to poke at the cottonmouth snake that lived in one of the ponds. Later my mother told me it was very dangerous, but we used to play with it anyway. My cousin Lelion worked at the Piggly Wiggly as a bagger and dated a girl that cashiered. John Pratt was a “ladies man” who later married and moved to Atlanta where he worked as a mechanic for Delta. They were all much older than I, but I still felt very close to them, which is a bit of a southern phenomenon.

Back to Queens: the armory is gone, the population is very thinly German, there are many diverse ethnic communities, and yet the pastoral feeling remains, due mainly to the familiar flatness of the topography and the proximity of large and beautiful parks. It is one of the few places on the east coast that reminds me of Chicago. I got so busy poking around for lost ancestral sites that I failed to stop at the rejuvenated Queens Botanical Garden. I drove by the impressive entrance. I can’t wait to make another trip and take in the new environmental exhibits that have received so much press.

Recently, on a lovely Saturday, I drove up to New York City to see the site where my grandfather, Jacob, worked in a nursery in Queens. He had just moved from Cincinnati, where he’d finished an 1890s era, “live-in” apprenticeship in his early teens. Then he spent a few years in rural western Long Island, outside the town of Flushing, known for its many German immigrants and nurseries, as well as a large armory. Grandfather joined the army and spent a few months in the Spanish American War achieving the rank of captain. Like other bachelors in their mid twenties, he took to heart the reports in the press that the Spanish had committed atrocities against U.S. civilians. Captured in the Philippines, he was tortured for a few days and released. He wrote in his journal that his captors decided that since he hadn’t talked, he knew nothing. He returned to Flushing a minor hero. He received a medal, rode in a parade and sat for a portrait. After a few weeks, he had enough of it and, in autumn 1898, began an odyssey back to Ohio to reconnect with his estranged relatives. He succeeded with one of his brothers. However, he remained restless and eventually chose Chicago as his home, a city with a huge German-speaking population. He married my grandmother, Anna, a German nurse who had immigrated, as a child, to Rock Island, Illinois. They had a family of four sons and a daughter, of which my dad was the youngest. In turn, I was his youngest, which is why a fifty-five year-old can have a grandfather who fought as a mature army captain in the 1898 “Philippine War”.

Time lines are even longer on my mother’s side. My maternal grandfather was born on March 7th, 1872, to a Civil War veteran from the rural and remote “upland” or Piedmont area of South Carolina. I have a small farm planted with loblolly pines on my maternal great, great uncle’s property in what’s called “the Deep South”, left to me by my mother. In a bit of a coincidence, my mother sang as a teenager in a choir at a Baptist Church convention in Brooklyn in 1937. Even then, Flushing and Queens were “out of town”. Her father was a school teacher who married at 48 to a woman in her 20s. He became the principal of the village school in Ware Shoals, a “mill town”—owned by the mill. When it changed ownership, he was out of a job and this was just before the great depression. When it hit, he was obliged for a brief time to move with my mother to a rural farmhouse so he could “work for food”, teaching farm children their ABCs in return for a chicken, vegetables and so forth. Mom’s two younger siblings stayed in town with my grandmother who had gotten a job in the town dress shop. Eventually, grandfather and mom were able to move back to town. He got a job as a grocery clerk at the “Big Friendly”, which soon became Piggly Wiggly. Grandfather was a Greek and Latin scholar, so the customers called him “Professor”, and many had been his students at the grade school. Today, the position would be a combination of stock clerk and “bagger”, since orders were usually phoned in or ladies would drop their lists off with him. He’d box them up for pick up or delivery.

He passed away in spring 1942 in his mid-seventies, after working right up to the last year. While in college during the late 30s, my mother met George Park, whose family owned Park Seed. They dated and he “pinned” her, but she broke it off when she met my dad.

Small world.