Recently, we completed a physical inventory of all the plants in the “Big Bang”, the main part of the garden. This update is the first in several years.  Many exciting, newly collected plants were noted.  Previously, our staff had accumulated data on accessions and placed the information in a long and complicated document with numerous separate fields, some of which were incomplete. Like the research and display garden for which it was named, it was grand, cumbersome and a bit unstable, due mainly to nomenclature changes between people entering the data, which is understandable over an active collecting period of more than fifteen years.  Led by our research director Grace Romero, several staff members including our head gardener, Dave Smicker, and our new botanist, Bill Rein, traveled to Kingston to spend weeks counting and recording each plant.  More Heronswood plants not “up” at that time will be verified later this summer.

On the production side, we have several full time gardeners and horticulturists working on the Heronswood nursery plants, both in research in Doylestown and Kingston, and in propagation in Delaware and western Pennsylvania as well as in Kingston.  The original zone 8 Kingston garden continues to yield treasures, the duplicates of which we carefully uproot and bring back to our zone 5, 6 and 7 trial beds to test for adaptation, if we cannot accomplish the goal with cuttings or seed.  In this traditional way of testing for climatic tolerance, we improve the plants we offer, assuring you greater success. The main adaptation center is Fordhook Farm in Doylestown, where Grace Romero has expanded the shade gardens by more than two acres over the past year, bringing the total acreage of rare perennials, shrubs and trees to four.  In a couple of years, Fordhook will be as large and almost as diverse as Kingston.

This summer (Saturday, July 26) we shall stage a Heronswood West Coast Open Day in Kingston, like the one we put on there last year. (Please see West Coast Layers of Meaning and Kingston Tide.)  Again, The Garden Conservancy will receive all the entry fee revenue.  Check their website for details of the other fine gardens on the Bainbridge Island tour.

Many people ask us about the long-term status of the original garden at Heronswood, which we have put up for sale after operating it also as a nursery since the 2000 acquisition.  Since May 2006, our answer hasn’t changed.  We’ll sell it only to someone who loves it as much as we do, and agrees to maintain the living work of art that spreads over almost four acres.  We’d answer the same if the question was about Fordhook Farm.  We have lovingly restored and maintained the original Heronswood gardens, and we shall sell to another who does the same.  While it is true that every speck of fir debris is not picked up daily and every path is not hand-raked weekly, it is untrue that the garden has suffered.  On the contrary, water pressure is improved with the nursery plants gone, making it easier to water the garden, which had been a problem from time to time.  And all the plants are given single-minded TLC by our resident horticulturist and botanist, Philip Bloomquist, who began at Heronswood as an intern in early 2006.  He and the excellent horticulturist, Alan Hansen, deadhead, divide,  prune and propagate for production.  The gardens have seldom looked better.

Regarding the local non-profit group, the PNHC, they have met and talked with various members of The Garden Conservancy staff, which may help.  We certainly hope so.  The dialogue between the PNHC and us has resumed after stopping last spring.  However, I have spoken only with their chairman, Lee Neff.  She requested and I obliged with an appraisal done by the local firm of Strickland, Heischman and Hoss, Inc.  They came in early and under budget, and one cannot say more about a professional service provider.  Mr. Strickland was instrumental in the preservation of Kruckeberg Botanic Garden.  Meanwhile, I have contracted with another very well regarded local firm to offer the property to the market.  John Brian Losh at Ewing and Clark has agreed to take us on and he couldn’t have a more beautiful property to sell.  Anyone interested in owning this splendid piece of horticultural history, please contact John.  Needless to say, it would make a stunning second home, or retirement spot for a gardening enthusiast, with its well-built Oriental style cottage.  With several large terraces, fountains and many trails, the four magical acres of extremely rare plants is the best entertainment spot a homeowner could ask for.

Those of you in the northeast US have an even greater surprise.  Heronswood has moved right into your area—no more than half a day’s drive at the farthest.  Boston is little more than six hours away, for example.  Indeed, last month for our first Fordhook Open, we received several folks from Chicago who drove through the delightful mid-Atlantic region and included the Heronswood gardens at Fordhook for a day’s visit.

Our next Fordhook Farm Open, highlighting our large collection of hydrangeas, will take place July 12th from 10 AM to 5 PM.  We shall have an assortment of rare Heronswood plants for sale, as well as a free collectible hydrangea to the first 200 visitors.

Come early and stay late.

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.

What can you say about a garden that you visited once and loved? That it was beautiful? That the extent of the exotic and the unusual was beyond that of any other private garden you’ve seen? That it was so magically and artistically arranged in its setting that anyone easily could be swept up in its spell? That once you entered it, you didn’t want to leave?

I am in the midst of my first visit to Heronswood, my first trip to the Pacific Northwest, my first encounter with spring in a climate with which I am unfamiliar. I have been sent here for work, as an employee of W. Atlee Burpee Company. Of course, I had heard the legends about the place, about the horticulture-friendly climate of the Pacific Northwest and the beauty of the Kitsap peninsula, about Seattle and its “cool vibe” and cool weather and its coffee. You get an image in your mind from such talk. Now, three days into my visit, I’m here to tell you – it is all true!

You can’t miss the really, really tall conifers – mostly native Douglas-fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii) and some western cedar (Thuja plicata) – that constitute the woods along the road. Then there is the immenseness of scale of the surrounding region, with Alp-like snow-capped rugged mountains to the west and east, the Puget Sound between us and Seattle, the greenness of the place already, in early April. The cool, damp climate makes an East Coast guy like me wonder how all those different species I am encountering are in leaf so early, when just this morning it was freezing, and so far it hasn’t felt like the temperature has broken 50 degrees.

Actually, the weather when I landed in Seattle two days ago was just like I left it that morning, three thousand miles to the east, at Newark Liberty Airport – gray and chilly. But after a quick (if bracing) jaunt around the waterfront sites and Pike Street Market, stopping to photograph Mahonias in bloom, Acer palmatum cultivars already leafing out in numerous city planter boxes, and other “only in the Pacific Northwest” oddities I couldn’t quite identify by species, my coworker Dave Smicker (a seasoned visitor to these parts – this is his fourth tour of duty since last summer) steers the car to the ferry to Bainbridge Island. That had to be the best ferry ride I’d ever taken – smooth as glass, the vessel was very nicely maintained (nice seats!), and the weather held. Only after we land and start driving toward Kingston does it start to cloud up again, and begin to drizzle.

It is not too long before we arrive at the unassuming gate to Heronswood. It is pouring now as I get settled in. Dave takes me on a tour to get me oriented. Umbrellas in open mode, we dash puddles and mud, and enter the cathedral.

I had been forewarned by George Ball that the “verticality” of the place was amazing. Now I think I know what he meant. The Doug-firs dictate the setting – the straight-up-to-the-sky trunks are thick, corky gray-brown columns, and the shade from their evergreen branches way, way up provides a very high ceiling that darkens portions of the garden, especially under this leaden sky. But you can’t miss the floor as you enter – the sixty-plus mounded island beds are nearly all carpeted in color right now. Along the paths ubiquitous gold and green moss covers the edges. Patches of namesake Hellebores looking pretty close to perfect even if a bit past prime bloom time, stocky trilliums, lots and lots of Anemone and Erythronium, the prostrate Ribes and other woody groundcovers I have little if any familiarity with – all are in bloom. Even if the species are exotic, the effect immediately brings to mind the woodland gardens back home. But why are these Dicentra and beautiful blue Corydalis fully out in ferny leaf and in bloom in early April? Wow.

At eye level there are shrubs heralding spring. The witch hazel relatives with which I am more familiar – the dangling chains of subtle cream beads on various gangly Stachyurus (like ‘Magpie’), the very short soft primrose yellow bells of the more structurally refined Corylopsis ‘Winterthur’ and C. glabrescens gotoana (two other early bloomers but with its mildy-sweet fragrance), various early rhododendrons. They stand out even in the rain and under all that coniferous shade.

Late yesterday the sun started to peak out from behind the clouds. I decide to explore the landscape around the Heron House. There seems to be a different style of garden at every turn. Formality takes over, with hornbeam arches (what a sight – the bare silver stems spiked with bud-tipped spurs still glistening with raindrops) around the bog garden adjacent to the house; a rather substantial box-outlined “Potager” further west; a Magnolia ‘Iolanthe’ in full bloom to the south; the extraordinarily beautiful trunks of well-established specimens of Stewartia pseudocamellia and Acer griseum in the back, a glowing golden semicircle of Cupressus macrocarpa ‘Lutea’ fronted by just-emerging patches of Hakonechloa macra ‘Aureola’ to the northeast. White daffodils scattered strategically near the front door, guarded by the mossy-trunked contortions of the Harry Lauder’s Walkingstick and the stout, leafless stems of a dormant Aralia elata (said to be ‘Variegata’ when in leaf). Ever-present moss carpeting trunks and dripping from branches throughout Heronswood reminds me that I’m in that enchanted temperate rainforest.

The woodland across the driveway beckons me back. Huge, shrub-like tree peonies are starting to leaf out fringy-red at the tips of their bare stems. A large specimen of Magnolia sprengeri ‘Diva’ reminds me of very large versions of the hardier saucer magnolias that hadn’t really opened yet back home. Aptly named, it takes center stage right now. Camellias are in bloom here and there. Scattered rhododendrons are in colors I don’t often see, species only now I am learning. Look at that one with the big red trusses; how about that deep purple R. recurvoides? Hydrangea macrophylla (at least fifty selections) and H. serrata (nine selections) are just leafing out at the tips; the lanky curved H. aspera types (twelve selections, give or take), taller than me, are all pretty dormant still – but look at those H. anomala petiolaris selections climbing the big tree trunks, reaching for the sky! Here and there, they are already in full leaf, new growth more like late May back home! It’s all so out of sequence, so unlike the spring seasons I have known. Can you imagine what this place looks like in May when most of the forty different Viburnum must be at their peak? Or June and July when the hydrangeas bloom? I hope the boss sends me back.

William Rein

Among the earliest gardeners in America are the Irish who traditionally plant potatoes on St. Patrick’s Day, often in the cold and blowing wind. Many Americans know that the failure of the potato crop caused an exodus of Irish natives to the United States. The subsequent contributions of the Irish Americans and their descendents range from politics to law to nearly every type of art and industry. But few are familiar with the Irish people’s profound impact on the potato.

Solanum tuberosum originated in the northern Andes, having been a staple food there for thousands of years, based on a diverse and multicolored crop cultivated extensively by the Inca when Francisco Pizarro arrived in 1532. As today, it thrived in the elevated regions of the subtropics, not unlike a cool summer in Canada.

Europeans were slow to take up the potato. They suspected root crops to be less worthy than aboveground herbaceous vegetables and grains. Oddly, while these medieval superstitions were widely shared among commoners, French and Italian aristocrats treasured the “earth truffle” and “apple of gold” as a delicacy, and court ladies famously wore tiaras of potato blossoms in their hair.

However, the Spanish saw an ideal slave food in the compact, long-lasting and nutritious tubers, one of which would suffice a native miner for an entire day. Colonial British spies noted its efficiency as well as productivity and took the news, and probably tubers as well, back to England.

Before America, Ireland had become Britain’s first true colony. The spud was reckoned to be an ideal crop for the virtual slave population that made up the Irish peasantry. Cheaper to grow and prepare than grain and suited to cool, cloudy summers, the potato was introduced in County Wicklow about 1640. In a few decades the large, lumpy type became the dominant food crop, especially in the populous south.

The adoption of the potato in Ireland set the stage for one of history’s greatest and most tragic ironies. The British generally ignored one of nature’s perfect foods, maintaining instead a poor diet of processed grains, such as flour, and aged meats. On the other hand, fresh and earthy potatoes provided the Irish peasant family with excellent nutrition for over 200 years, until the first of several steadily worsening potato famines beginning in 1830. As a result, Ireland’s rural and impoverished population sky-rocketed from 4 million people in 1780 to more than 8 million in 1841. A diet of potato and dairy products improved Irish health to such an extent that, eventually, Ireland literally dwarfed England. The sturdy Celts became the “Irish giants” of fact as well as fiction. Not only were individual size and strength improved, but also infant mortality was dramatically reduced. Families typically had 6 to 10 surviving children.

Tragedy stuck when a voracious strain of the fungus, Phytophthora infestans, originating in a remote valley in Mexico and causing a disease called blight, escaped and spread throughout Western Europe in 1845. Its prodigiously infectious spores rode the moist winds during the unusually cool, overcast summers of 1846 and 1847. Since many of the several dozen potato cultivars used in this time were related, the fungus devastated the crops not only throughout Ireland, but also across Northern and Central Europe. For instance, Poland was only somewhat less hard hit than Ireland. But the land-locked Poles simply starved en masse, while the Irish had better chances to take to the seas.

In a great reversal of fortune, the potato’s god-sent qualities for Ireland disappeared in the Great Potato Famine, when starvation caused the death of over 1 million people by 1848, more than 12 percent of the population. Millions more immigrated to North America. Ireland had lost nearly half its people by 1900.

Growers and farmers immediately blamed themselves, the soil, the British—even Satan. However, the potato surprisingly rebounded quickly once Irish and British agriculturists found the remedy in new plant-breeding programs based on potatoes from fields that survived. Out of this laboratory of misery, tragedy begot triumph. Many historians consider the Great Potato Famine to have stimulated modern agricultural science, indirectly leading to such work as Mendel’s study of garden peas in the 1860s, which in turn led to the modern science of genetics, and the theory of evolution.

Certainly, the roots of western civilization were conserved by Irish monks, as Thomas Cahill described in his book, How the Irish Saved Civilization. But overlooked is the role the Irish played, and the sacrifices they made, in conserving one of the world’s greatest food crops. As we celebrate St. Patrick’s Day, let us remember the example of the potato’s history in Ireland.

Abraham Lincoln had a modest library, befitting his focused outlook and humble origins. He possessed some law books, since he passed the bar exam by reading and memorizing all he could get his hands on. He famously never set foot in college, much less law school. (Today most states prohibit this; in fact, I don’t know anywhere in the US that a member of the bar is allowed not to complete law school.) However, the core of Mr. Lincoln’s library was unusually small, if shelf feet is the standard of measure. The books he both consulted and reread most often were the complete works of Shakespeare (especially the tragedies), and the Holy Bible. It is said that in his later years, he read nothing else. After all, he was leading a vast and newly constituted nation of a size and political structure the world had never seen. With these two works by his side, he utterly transformed the nation and laid the foundation for the world in the twentieth century.

Imagine Lincoln today. Perhaps it’s not so different, after all. New York City had an extraordinarily vibrant publishing industry that took its cues from the gigantic British book empire headquartered in mid 19th century London. Of course, the Internet is certainly much larger and more convenient, yet the issue persists: the search for eternal wisdom.

When I was visiting Mexico in the mid 70s, I spent several weeks in the capital city or “day-efeh”—Distrito Federal. Mexico City, one of the largest cities in the world, was founded by the Aztecs, and in the 70s its growth was explosive and there was a constant boom—even the beggars were busy. Construction was at a fever pitch and the sprawl there defines the term. Serenading everyone was a big noisy radio station, nicknamed “El Tigre”, that had a unique play list—they played only “Beatles” and “Credence”, as they were called, all day and half the night. Remarkably, it worked—this seemingly dull combination was, in fact, a perfect coupling, like a martini, or a rum and coke. To this day I marvel at how they pulled it off.

I thought about this also when I considered Macbeth and Hamlet on the one hand, and Job and Paul on the other. In contrast, I contemplated the anemia of most public and even much private education. They assign children books like Chicken Soup for the Soul in order to be “relevant”. Here and there are bright spots—find a populous Asian minority in a district and hang on tight. Perhaps your kids will make it to engineering school. I have a friend in LA who moved across town in order to get her children into a school mainly composed of Chinese and Indian subcontinent immigrant offspring.

Back in the garden, if limited to only two titles, I would recommend that the Heronswood customer own and thoroughly enjoy Liberty Hyde Bailey’s Cyclopedia of Horticulture in one of the early to mid 20th century editions, usually ranging 4 to 6 volumes, and Michael Dirr’s Manual of Woody Plants. Granted, none of us are guiding a young democracy through civil war, rather we’re earnestly pursuing an active and detailed hobby. So we may have shelves and shelves of garden law books, so to speak. I must have at least 50 titles in my small horticulture library. But I found the best, and certainly the most enjoyable, are Bailey and Dirr. I. H. Burkill’s Dictionary of Economic Plants of The Malay Peninsula is very rare but a precious gem as well. Also highly recommended is The History and Social Influence of the Potato by R. N. Salaman. The universe in a spud. For getting started, Roger Swain’s elegantly simple The Practical Gardener, Earthly Pleasures and Groundwork are indispensable.

My dad hated “throwing money at problems”, yet he was as guilty as most folks in business, and even more of us in our personal lives. Money easily seduces its owners into madness. Its abuse leaves long and terrible hangovers. Always better to “work the problem”.

Just as mythological as the silver bullet of money is the magical power of technology. Money does nothing more than buy you things; technology merely extends the range of existing abilities. Technology is as deaf, dumb and blind as ten million dollars. The true romance of resources is found in the miner’s tale, the farmer’s story, the captain’s log, the soldier’s diary, the death of a salesman.

So what’s it all about, Alfie?

The greatest challenge in commerce is to serve the public, to sell to the masses. I’ve had many talks with scientists and inventors who insist on “a little more time” or “more space” or—most frequently—”more money” to achieve their perfect goal. The curse of the PhD in business is to develop his work to the full capacity of its technical range, with no regard to the fact that the customer does not want it. The secret to product development is in the intermediate range. “But I can do this,” the breeder protests, when you announce the release date of his new cultivar. There is nothing more fatal than a “perfect” product.

Usually given to the breeder by a dissertation advisor, this wretched curse of the goal of perfectibility weakens over time. The alternatives are enduring a miserable collegial environment, or quitting for another profession, such as religion (not uncommon). However, often a research professional finds an effective niche in business with savvy marketers. It doesn’t happen very frequently—but neither does a rousing success. The tip of the pyramid is small.

Whether the industry is automobiles, consumer electronics, fine food or gardening, greatness results from a balance between the possible and the desirable. Wine is a great example. If you want to blast through an evening, Two Buck Chuck, or the ubiquitous box wine, does the trick. For a less crude experience, you may choose from several hundred more expensive, distinctive and enjoyable wines. At the top, for a truly memorable long night, there are several dozen wineries that demand about fifty dollars a bottle. For these wines to be successful, the winemaker goes not to the full extent of his technical ability, but works out a balance between his resources of time and money on one hand, and personal and collegial talents on the other to find the taste that hits the bull’s-eye. It is complex work that requires huge energy, talents, and sensitivity. The tastings by the judges are run blind, ranked on a numerical scale and published in widespread wine magazines. I stumble over stacks of them at the local Borders. No amount of money or technological resources created the stunning achievements of Warren Winiarski or Michael Grgich, the two Napa winemakers who beat the best of French wines in 1976. Rather, they literally lived with the vines, worked hundreds of sleepless nights in the wineries, and intimately understood their customers’ palates. No technology or money involved.

Most of us wake up to three feet of snow and feel overwhelmed by the daunting task of shoveling and piling up all the white stuff just to get to work or school. We also anticipate many weeks of boredom ahead as the cold wind blows across the icy snow. But while we are curled up on the couch reading thrillers or gardening catalogs, and listening to the weatherman forecasting more snow, the gardeners among us are breaking out in secret smiles.

What few people know is that a heavy snowfall acts as a geothermal blanket for your garden and landscape plants. Call it the “igloo effect”. The desiccating winds of winter, in combination with sub-freezing temperatures, are lethal to garden plants, as well as many herbaceous woodland plants. Only when wrapped in a heavy blanket of snow and, even better, topped off with a thin duvet cover of ice, do your precious perennial plants and low lying shrubs sleep the beauty sleep—well protected from the forces of Old Man Winter.

Think of the vibrant lushness of spring grasses in northern New England and across New York to northern Michigan and Minnesota: the long, rich green blades are unique to the northern latitudes, but also to the lands blessed by a long and heavy mantle of snow. Not only does the winter blanket conserve the earth’s heat, but also it disperses the intense winter sunlight evenly across the subsurface, saturating the tops of the plants with gentle and even light. Those of us down here near the Mason-Dixon line and across the central plains to Missouri and Kansas—we don’t have the heavy snow cover, so the sudden cold snaps and the high winds “prune” our herbaceous perennials and grasses down to the quick, if not below the soil. Thus, except deep in the ravines, our springs are not anywhere near as verdant as those of our northern neighbors. Compared to our neighbors to the south, for whom winter is a wet and clammy death, the snowbound folks from Maine to Connecticut and across Wisconsin, should be very happy indeed.

So, blessed be the winter snows.