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.

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.