Here’s a preview of the first half of my speech to be given this Friday and Saturday, April 3 and 4, at 1:30 P.M.  Come hear the rest of it! Part 1, New American Sun Garden I’m going to talk today about the future of plant breeding from the unique perspective of someone who has […]

Three years ago this spring I wrote an op/ed piece for the New York Times (my third) about the then raging “natives versus exotics” controversy. They called it “Border Wars” and it contained a typo (8,000 versus 12,000 years ago for the recession of the last glaciers, due to my confusion over BC and AD).  […]

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…

After closing our fiscal year at Burpee Seeds, I noticed some intriguing figures in the sales of flower and vegetable seeds to home gardeners that, while displaying great differences, also show affinities that would warm a compost heap. Politics, in my opinion, is not so much a contest between different states of red and blue as between different shades of green—a comforting reality in today’s frosty political climate.Lets’ first examine…

Sometime in the mid 70s, I celebrated a party with friends at a then-landmark French restaurant in Chicago—the first of the “nouvelle”—called Le Perroquet. (There I tasted my first “mesclun” salad.) As we talked and dined I discerned, through the wine haze, that the place was utterly unique. Outside New Orleans, New York or San Francisco, no place like it existed, since fish was the focus. Thirty years ago, old…