Note: Every once in a while we here at the old bloggie limp, or shuffle, over to the stove and brew up a nasty, filthy, strong pot of coffee. The ensuing, almost hallucinatory, stimulation allows us to publish “monster” blog posts. This is one.

Oh, dear readers, you may recall from your early childhood the bowl haircut boys—this was usually due to parents’ extreme frugality—but you may remember as well the rare boy who would disappear between class breaks and return a few days later with a bald head and hang-dog look on his face. Worried exchanges would take place well out of his earshot—so lovingly thoughtful were we children back then—and the “L-word” was introduced to us. Around the JFK assassination in my clock.

So, welcome to a “Back To The Future” moment. Here’s a future no one wants to back into, so to speak. However, Nick is on the beat. And I’m an amateur entomologist. I just love bugs. Happy reading!  

During late winter this year, head lice were epidemic at my children’s school. That’s not to say that the place was exactly lousy with lice. But for a few weeks, children with lice were found often enough to worry my wife and me.

Frequently, when one infested child was identified, others were found. Usually, we were able to infer who the children were by who was sent home. Often, the same two siblings, who were coincidentally in both of our children’s classrooms, were sent home.

The school immediately informed us of newly discovered (or rediscovered) infestations. And when they did, we made our children strip in the subfreezing garage, searched through their hair like frantic chimps, and envisioned the ballooning water bills when we would be driven to wash and rewash bedding. We felt fortunate that they remained louse free.

The word “louse”, or variations of it, is firmly rooted in our language. Figurative use as pejoratives dates from late 14th century: “lousy weather” or “louse of brother-in-law” (whatever) are examples. “Lousy with” (swarming with) is an American usage from the 1840s. But these are expressions we use without thinking, just as we use “lock, stock, and barrel”. Lice infestations today seem somewhat novel and unusual. They were once more visceral and immediate.

During most of human history, lice infestation was a ubiquitous experience. Lice have been found with Egyptian mummies. Or take, for instance, the Vikings, but nearly any group would do. The Vikings, as they were exploiting and expanding the world, in addition to arms and amulets, carried among their accoutrement finely crafted combs with closely spaced teeth. During that period, most people wore their hair long, and combs were used as much for removing head lice as for making hair look beautiful.

The historical novel Lord Grizzly tells the story of the American mountain man Hugh Glass who travels up the Missouri River in 1823 with a party of beaver trappers. Hugh is attacked by a she grizzly bear with a cub. Though he succeeds in killing the bear with his knife, he gets pretty well torn up and a displaced fracture of his leg. His companions find him, sew him up with sinew, dig his grave, and wait for him to die. But Hugh won’t die. It’s hostile Indian country and after watching over him for several days, they abandon him, taking all food and weapons with them.

When Hugh finally comes around, he manages to realign the bone in his leg and to crawl nearly the entire 200 miles back to Ft. Kiowa, which his party had left 3 months earlier. During his crawl, Hugh comes across an ancient, dying Arikara woman abandoned by her tribe, whose members Hugh knows would kill him on sight in a heartbeat. Out of kindness, Hugh gives her water and cooks her food. He then buries her when she dies. No good deed goes unpunished; the dead woman gives Hugh an unwelcome gift—lice.

Unlike my wife and me, Hugh knows lice. He removes his buckskin clothes, puts them on an ant mound, and the ants feed on the lice. Soon the ants are crawling on Hugh too. When they begin to bite, he knows that he is clean. Hugh calls the lice “graybacks”, a term not now in usage that was common among Civil War soldiers who were tormented by lice also. Not too long ago, nearly everyone would have gotten lice at one time or another.

Almost certainly my wife and I naively overreacted. The Center for Disease Control says that head lice infestation, or pediculosis, is a common occurrence. Firm data on head lice incidence in the United States are not available, but 6 to 12 million infestations are estimated to occur each year in the United States among children 3 to 11 years of age, who are more likely to contract it than older children or adults. Some studies suggest that girls get head lice more often than boys, probably because of more frequent head-to-head contact. Head lice are insects that neither fly nor jump; transfer to another person is largely passive. Head lice feed on human blood; they are obligate human parasites, meaning they need humans (and humans only) to complete their life cycle. They can live no more than 36 hours apart from their host and prefer to lay their eggs (nits) on hair. There is no evidence that head lice transmit disease. Children diagnosed with head lice need not to be sent home early from school and can return to class after appropriate treatment has begun. Successful treatment should kill all crawling lice, but nits may persist after treatment. No big deal.

But when I was a child, I don’t remember anyone getting head lice. None of my siblings ever had them, and others tell me the same. What happened? Are head lice more common today?

Apparently, they are. Reasons for this are not certain, but societal changes surely contributed. Forty or so years ago classroom behaviors began to change. Children no longer only worked alone at individual desks but spent more time in small groups and moved around to different work areas, increasing contact among children and coincidentally promoting infestations. And as the work force expanded and both parents (and single parents) went to work outside the home, more children attended day care and after school programs. This too increased potential contact with infested children and in turn infestation incidence.

People, of course, want head lice about as much as they want a sharp stick in the eye. As the incidence of head lice infestations increased in schools, the demand for effective louse treatments grew. And a lucrative industry was spawned. One current estimate is that various louse shampoos, sprays, and rinses bring in $150 million a year.

Many of these treatments are based on pyrethroid-type compounds (originally isolated from chrysanthemums). For a time, the treatments delivered eradication in one application as promised but not now. Resistance in pest populations resulting from extensive use of single or similar compounds is an old story. And it’s a big problem too. Consider multiple drug-resistant tuberculosis or resistances in such common bacteria as Staphylococcus and Streptococcus (“flesh eating bacteria”). So why not lice?

This is the age of the New Normal, and that’s any suboptimal situation that we seem unable to correct: the jobless recovery, events such as the Boston Marathon bombings, and (I read) for the fast food industry, price cuts and stagnant sales. I suggest we add head lice infestation to this assemblage.

Here in the upper Midwest, it’s been a long winter. The ground has been continuously under snow since December 19. That snowfall closed down the city, and to children’s delight, schools too. It was the fourth greatest snowfall on record with 19.2 inches recorded near my house. I told my own children to take note: this is an unusual storm; you won’t see one like this again anytime soon. But, as it turned out, we had three more substantial snow storms. They weren’t as big as the first one, but they brought the same, heavy wet snow that covered all the spruces and pines (and everything else) so that we looked like the Canadian Rockies.

It was a winter wonderland. I liked it. Of course not everyone did, even some in my own family, and most people are now absolutely sick to death of it. I’m ready for spring too, but with this week’s high pressure and cold air, the snow hangs on —not a crocus, not a daffodil in sight. But with your thumbnail, scratch off a little of the bark of a common buckthorn twig, and you will find bright green tissue ready to go.

Around here, buckthorn’s all over. When we first moved to our house last summer, we admired the mature landscaping. Only gradually did it dawn on us how overgrown the place was. When we looked carefully, we saw emerging from —whatever it was —here an old crabapple and there a mature hawthorn. Then everywhere we looked, we saw lilacs, dogwoods, various types of fern, and smooth hydrangea, all peering from beneath, around, and through the overgrowth. There was even a towering old tamarack that I had failed somehow to see. The “whatever it was” was buckthorn. It was then that I got interested in buckthorn eradication.

Buckthorn, a native of Eurasia and North Africa, was introduced to North America as an ornamental shrub in the early 19th century. Why it was thought a plant of merit, I can’t say for sure. It certainly takes no effort to cultivate (but why would you want to) and will flourish to a confluent hedge in no time. Birds like its fruit. The bark and fruit also were used as a purgative (though apparently results could be violent). In the early 19th century, much of medicine focused on shocking the body back to health. For that reason, buckthorn’s —let’s say —cleansing attributes may have been valued, and perhaps its specific name (cathartica) was an optimistic forecast of buckthorn’s medicinal effects. Who knows?

But the problems with buckthorn must have been apparent soon after it escaped cultivation. It aggressively invaded forests, woodlands, meadows, fields, and roadsides. And it aids the spread of a disease that was important back then —crown rust of oat. In summer, the undersides of buckthorn leaves are marked by small, orange somewhat powdery protruding pustules. These are fruiting bodies of the fungus that causes crown rust. Buckthorn is required for the fungus to complete its life cycle (and infect oats). In the early part of the last century in the upper Mississippi Valley, where oat was a major crop, concerted efforts were made to contain and eradicate buckthorn expressly to spare that crop. But buckthorn’s presence today in all but the southernmost tier of US states and farthest north Canadian provinces demonstrates how unsuccessful those efforts were.

Buckthorn spreads like mad in almost any environment it colonizes. It freely grows in full sun to deep shade. It grows rapidly, tolerating various soil types and varying moisture and drought conditions. It produces an abundance of fruit that is attractive to birds, who spread it far and wide. If a buckthorn thicket is cleared, exposing soil that had been in deep shade, the shed seeds quickly germinate and initiate a new thicket. And cut stumps readily sprout. In spring, buckthorn has a leg up on its deciduous peers by leafing out earlier; in fall, those leaves continue to photosynthesize well after most plants have senesced. There is also evidence that buckthorn changes soil carbon and nitrogen dynamics, facilitating the elimination of leaf litter and invasion by exotic European earthworms and ultimately making the soil less suitable for native plants. These changes in the soil may persist even after buckthorn has been removed.

So what to do this spring when December is still in the air and on the ground? Why continue my buckthorn eradication project. I began it last summer in a small way, cutting a few buckthorns that were obviously in the way. But it quickly ballooned to a major undertaking. My procedure is simple: plants that are small enough I pull out of the ground; otherwise, I cut them at the soil line and treat the stump with Roundup. One application of Roundup is not usually enough though, so I reapply it when the stump begins to sprout.

From an area of probably well less than half an acre, I have removed literally hundreds of buckthorns, ranging in size from small seedlings to real trees close to a foot in diameter at the soil line. The real work comes in disposing of the cut brush. I’m lucky though: I drag it down to the road by my house, make a small effort at consolidating the pile, and the city ultimately takes it away (it’s all part of my municipal services bill).

I get a certain amount of satisfaction in removing the buckthorn. It’s made a remarkable difference in opening up the property. It probably doesn’t increase the resale value —any more than remodeling a kitchen does, though. But I’m not moving anyway. I have roughly a third more to clear, and it’s easier now than in summer when it’s hot and the buckthorns have leaves. But this is a long-term project. When I’ve removed all the buckthorn, I won’t be done. For years, I anticipate that buckthorn will continue to come up from roots and seed. I’ll keep you posted.

Let me be frank. I oppose “growth” and object to the “growing economy,” I take exception to “growing” companies. These terms—used chronically and uncritically by politicians and pundits—leave me vexed and perplexed. Why? Because I am convinced that “growing” is precisely what economies don’t do. They might increase or expand, but they grow not.

At some point in the 20th century, “growth” grew into shorthand for an increase or expansion in the amount of goods and services produced by the economy. “Grow” is now used as a transitive verb, as in Paul Hawken’s manifesto, “Growing a Business.”

Even as a metaphor, “growth” has its limits, soon apparent in the absurd, oxymoronic terms “flat growth” and “negative growth”. A governor of a large state recently declared he wanted to “grow” the size of his economy’s “pie”. Block that metaphor!

I hear your protests. “Grow” is a figure of speech, a metaphor, Mr. Ball! Why put this harmless butterfly of a phrase upon a syntactical wheel?

My animus derives partly from my role as the head of a “growing business,” a 136-year-old firm specializing in plants and seeds, things that really grow. Our long-term motto, “Burpee seeds grow,” is not a metaphor, but a statement of fact.

The indiscriminate use of “grow” and “growth” has profound implications for how we view our economy. The anthropomorphism of the “growth” term, endowing business and financial statistics with animate, living qualities, is imprecise to the point of being delusional. The notion of a “growing economy,” I suppose, puts color in the cheeks of pale, sexless numbers.

The use of “grow” or “growing” as a synonym for expand, increase, develop and enlarge is largely a 20th century creation, or growth, one that should be pruned from the English language.

Adam Smith, in his Wealth of Nations (1776), makes multiple references to “growing” and “growth”, but he is referring to seed (of all things!) grain, fleece or timber, not economies. Thomas Malthus, the unheeded prophet of the limits of growth, in his An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) , likewise applies the terms to, simply, things that grow.

TheOxford Dictionary of English Etymology defines growth as “Show[ing] the development characteristic of living things.” The word “grow”, I might add, derives from the Indo-European term word for “grass”. Tell me, is the economy growing like grass?

“Grow” is one of many terms that have migrated from agriculture into business. We speak of “seed money”, “hedge funds”, “yields”, and “plants.” “Share”, as in stocks derives from the “shearing” of sheep and, thus, a unit of raw wool. No surprise that the rise of agriculture back in 8,000 B.C., give or take a millennium, brought economies into being.

Not so many centuries ago, agriculture pretty much constituted the economy: economic growth and the growth of plants and animals were inextricably bound. The ancient Mesopotamian currency, the shekel, introduced around 3,000 B.C., was based on a weight of barley: 180 grains, to be precise. Seed capital, you might say.

I fear one result of using our “growing” terminology is that we ourselves cease to grow, because we’ve stopped thinking. Try this thought experiment: if the economy is growing, is the hidden hand of the market growing with it?

Talk of the “growing economy” is a pathetic fallacy: projecting our wishes and feelings onto external phenomena, resulting in angry skies, brooding mountains and roses that art sick. The effect belongs in poetry, not the economy nor in economics, that properly dismal science.

The notion of economic “growth” is pure magic realism. It’s as if we imagine that cheek-puffing zephyrs propel clouds, autumn leaves gaily cartwheel across the lawn, and water sprites dance in our water glass.

The economy represents and involves numbers and statistics—and precision. Innumeracy is a now serious issue in this country. The myopic, hazy, lazy thinking behind our talk of “growth” appears to be shared by our children, whose math skills are perilously close to those of their peers in debt-ridden Spain, Portugal and Greece. Unless we start taking our economic numbers seriously, the problem, not the economy, will only grow.

One of the most unexpected, most salutary developments of our era has been the triumphant resurgence of vegetables. No longer regarded as a side dish of life or anodyne adjunct, vegetables have arrived!

We are in the midst of a vegetable Renaissance. The Dark Ages, when vegetables were boiled into colorless, textureless, flavorless pap are well behind us. At faddish restaurants legumes are now rendered into fanciful, exotic forms, with effects falling between origami and three-dimensional chess. Sometimes I almost sense our vegetable friends feel silly and out of place in these culinary contrivances. Between bites, I hear their cries. “George,” they mew, “free us from these motley habiliments.  We are not made or designed by people. Let vegetables be vegetables. If you humans love us, love us for ourselves.” Now you know.

If I failed to foresee the dawning of the Age of the Vegetable, I still less anticipated the corresponding Waning of the Flower. The poet Gertrude Stein wrote, “Before the flowers of friendship faded, fading friendship faded.” Where have all the flowers gone?

Not so long ago, our towns and cities were blooming with florist shops. Restaurant and dining room tables flared with flora. Women wore nosegays. Men’s buttonholes clutched flowers. Guests arrived bearing bouquets. Maidens wore flowers in their hair.

Where flowers are not, romance is not. Does this sound simplistic? It is simplistic, and true. Romance evaporates in the neutral, scentless, colorless, lifeless air of our digital life. Flowers provide the perfect antidote to our too-modern civilization: the ultimate melding of color, form, texture and scent.

For millennia, flowers have engaged our senses and subconscious. Floral images live in paintings, fabrics, vases, shrines, ceremonies, avowals of love, songs, and poetic odes, evoking remembrance, nobility, beauty, peace, glory and salvation. Little wonder the flower was the cherished symbol of the Romantic Movement: flowers evoke nature at its most exalted, sublime and phantasmagoric.

Painter Monet wondered, if it were not for flowers, would he have become a painter Transcendentalist Emerson observed, “The earth laughs in flowers.” Meanwhile Dr. Freud astutely noted, “Flowers are restful to look at. They have not emotions or conflicts.” Flowers dispel depression and soothe wounded bodies and souls. They engage and inspire our senses in multiple ways.

Seasonally, flowers long precede vegetables, heralding spring to wan, weary beings etiolated by winter’s shallow light. They are the glittering jewels of the garden. Humankind has happily gardened flowers for 8,000 years; it is one of the original earthly joys. It’s time to cultivate our flower garden.

The space once given flowers in the garden increasingly is allocated to vegetables. Patios now feature tomato, pepper and basil plants: no flowers to be seen or sniffed. More likely, the flowers, wherever they might be, are sniffing back tears, brought on by their increasing neglect.

My hope is that our cities’ community gardeners will extend their love of horticulture to cut flowers as well as “urban vegetables”. The last 15 years have reduced the number of American florists by 40%; the ranks of America’s commercial flower growers are in steep decline.

The narrow selection of ornamental flowers in your groceries are raised by workers in poor conditions, then flown in from South America, Africa, and the Middle East: not exactly locavore. After their travels and travails by jet and truck, the plastic-wrapped, freshly gassed blooms are often in bleak condition, billowing pollutants. The flowers we see in our florists and groceries scarcely hint at the spectrum of flower color, blooms, patterns and scents. It’s as if we limited ourselves to playing just a dozen notes or so on our floral piano.

Vegetables feed your body; flowers feed your soul. See how a single flower can transform a room. Bask in the brilliance of a newly opened flower, as your eyes drink the saturated colors. Marvel at radiance of a meadow awash in color. Let a thousand urban gardens bloom.

The young think time is on their side, the old know that time waits for no one. Yet time is a blessing to gardeners. Our upcoming sowing and planting “app”, GardenTime, has been designed only with you and your garden’s seeds and plants in mind.

Most new gardeners know what to do; they aren’t as sure when to do it. Our primary goal is to help you to nail down your killing frost dates.  Along the way, GardenTime addresses and solves a wide range of other time-related challenges.

The “judo” of gardening, timing works wonders for skilled green thumbs and beginners alike. Time favors even non-gardeners, or anyone who takes pleasure following celestial and earthly rhythms. GardenTime will interest everyone.

Judo focuses less on your body’s movements than on their timing. Watching and studying your opponent enables you to use his timing in your favor and control the match. It might sound unfriendly to compare seeds and plants to judo opponents, but it is not far out. You respectfully bow to each other before and after every practice routine and match. Winning feels great. But, similarly, losing doesn’t feel humiliating because opponents are respectful of each other.  Learn your opponent—plants and seeds—and you’ll benefit even when you lose.

Consider seeds. “Season” originates from the same word for “sowing”, as well as “seed”. Both philosophers and physicists agree that time is perceived by metabolism. Nothing is decoupled from time; a seed’s metabolic functions are dictated or induced by expressions of time, such as daylength. As it is with humans, so it is with plants and seeds. Sow some sunflowers or sweet corn and stand back. Depending on the weather they jump up within a week or two. Radishes pop up in a few days, “like hairs on a cat’s back”, as a veteran seedsman once told me.

On the other hand, sow seeds of lisianthus for cut flowers, or cyclamen and begonia for decorative pots, and take a ’round the world vacation. The first growth will appear in several months. (This is why we sell them as plants.)

Between the rapid and slow germinating groups are the tropical and sub-tropical plants:  tomatoes, melons, summer squash, dry beans, peppers, eggplants, petunias, impatiens—as well as the hallmarks of temperate zone food crops—”sugar” and garden peas, “snap” and green beans, carrots, beets, winter squash, lettuces, parsley and basil, to name a few. You can sow most of these both outdoors and indoors in many of the milder parts of the US, such as the low altitude mid-South.  The Brassicas—broccoli, cauliflower, et al—take a bit longer. In any case, they take their sweet time to emerge and bear their fruits, roots or leaves. But they aren’t slow—a couple of weeks on average to emerge as workable seedlings.

Indeed, time is sweet in late winter and early spring, from the human standpoint. Winter lasts a bit too long for most people. (I am the only exception I know—I love winter and hate to see it go.) It is dark, cold and, just before ending, very wet. Spring becomes a lovely musical instrument on which to play the entire scale of cultivated plants. Its onset resembles the slow opening notes of Mahler’s First or Beethoven’s Sixth Symphonies. Seeds grow, stems extend, leaves unfurl, buds pop, roots swell, flowers spread open.

A gardener is a combination of judo master and symphony conductor. To help you, if you’re new to it, or have moved to a different part of the country, or become rusty after a few years, try GardenTime , our new “sowing time management” app. Like an experienced family gardener, GardenTime gives you the precise time to sow either indoors or outdoors, and when to transplant or “set out” the indoor-sown crops. We base our killing frost dates on plants and seedlings on inputs from the industry as well as communities—and even Burpee customers—across the country.

No matter where you garden, GardenTime will tell you exactly when and how long you have to sow and transplant—the biggest stumbling block for new gardeners. You’ll use GardenTime to your advantage like a judo master, and direct your plant “orchestra” like a symphony conductor.

Most of all, with GardenTime, starting your garden—doing those first simple chores—will be as easy as the proverbial walk in the park. (In the spring.)

Often I’m asked, “What’s the future of gardening?” Here is my short answer, so to speak.

First, the number of gardeners is growing, as baby boomers enter their 50s and 60s—the peak years of active home gardening. Gardeners inspire new gardeners, so children and even grandchildren are seeing—witnessing, you might say—more home gardens being grown each year.

Second, the garden seed, plant and tools industries have publicized many of the previously unknown or under-emphasized benefits of gardening to the general public. Mild stretching, bending, kneeling, and squatting are great workouts for middle-aged and elderly people who cannot endure long, hard exercise.

Dreaming about next year’s gardens and planning seed, plant and supply purchases involve mental routines similar to crossword puzzles and memorizing poetry. They keep the brain supple, even though gardeners regard the process as an exciting adventure.

Also, everyone knows that the fresh air of a garden is tonic. So many of us have acquired new, gadget-related indoor habits, even when the weather is pleasant and the birds are chirping.

Third, research from the renowned clinical psychologist Jeannette Haviland-Jones at Rutgers University on the effects of the “Duchenne smile”—the smile that reaches the eyes—is stimulated most often and deeply by the sight of fresh flowers. It’s as if happiness resulted from our co-evolution with flowering plants. Haviland-Jones has demonstrated that flowers not only make happy people happier, but also curb the effects of depression. In some cases freshly cut blooms work as well as prescribed medicines. (So, amidst the vegetable craze, don’t forget the flower beds.)

However, the largest and fastest growing area of home gardening today is vegetables, and the future of home garden vegetable, herb and fruit gardening is taking on new and innovative forms.

Specifically, everyone wants the full ripeness, succulence, taste and nutrient levels of home grown and freshly picked vegetables, not the bland and increasingly expensive store-boughts. People in a wide variety of habitats—downtown and uptown urban neighborhoods; the so-called “collar” communities bordering them; the rapidly expanding near and far suburbs; and even semi-rural and rural towns, villages and areas—are excitedly growing vegetable gardens.

What is the long term future of vegetable gardening? The answer is the same as it has always been, since plants were first domesticated over 12,000 years ago: innovation. Similar to the later inventions such as the telephone, automobile and light bulb, garden plants have always depended on continuous quantum leaps in improvement.

More nutrition? Traditional plant breeding has answered with the new broccolis, tomatoes, peppers and even cucumbers that possess up to 100% more antioxidants and vitamins when grown to full ripeness—and excellent levels of taste—in home gardens (Boost Collections, 2011 cover item). We plan to add new items to this category every year for the next decade.

Larger yields? In all of our vegetable breeding programs we select for both taste and yield. Gardeners want abundant harvests for the work they do. Furthermore, the recession of 2008 remains fresh in people’s memories, stock portfolios and home values. It spurred an enthusiasm for vegetable gardening that has not been seen since the enormous “back to the land” movement of the early 1970s. But now the savings produced by a large-sized patio container garden—and even much more in a proper ¼ acre vegetable patch—are astonishing. The future looks bright for “money gardens”.

Let’s do the math. Home-grown tomatoes? A patch of 25 plants will enable you not only to avoid the pale, tasteless, 1,000 mile shipped tomatoes at the supermarket, but to save you over $1,000, cash, and enjoy a quality of tomato no money can buy. In the future innovative varieties will be bred for small space-gardens and large patio tubs. Like ‘Bush Steak’ and ‘Big Daddy’ of today, they will yield even more luscious fruit in even less space. A vegetable patch including 25 tomato plants won’t be large, but small!

What applies to tomatoes applies to all vegetables. This quantum leap in plant yield will enable both city and country dwellers to share similar benefits. Gardens will grow not necessarily in overall size, but in output. Thus, the number of gardens and gardeners enjoying them will tremendously increase.

Next, motherhood has recently become a more health-conscious time in family life. Many mothers and fathers grow vegetables rather than use store-bought ones to amend their infant’s and toddler’s baby food. This trend will increase as breeders focus on relatively mild-tasting (yet still retaining all nutritious elements), and particularly soft-fruited vegetables at full ripeness stage. Specially selected and traditionally bred peas, melons, squash, and even the more challenging carrots, cauliflower and broccoli, are in test phases as we speak. Softer, juicier, milder—perfect both for the baby’s health and the parents’ satisfaction.

Future gardeners will want more excitement. If the public wants a giant sized paste tomato, it can order ‘SuperSauce’ from our catalogue in a couple of weeks. If the public wants a sweet corn to grow on decks and patios, they will have it in ‘On Deck’. A broccoli that thrives in high heat and full sun? The new ‘Sun King’. A naturally mutating chive growing in a test field that our breeder found one day? ‘Cha-Cha’ chive—exclusive from The Cook’s Garden—has two sources of herbs: the normal stems and a head that produces young shoots instead of flowers. The reddish-purple flower petals have been transformed into hundreds of tiny shoots that have an even spicier taste. Two chives in one! Cha-Cha innovates the entire world of chives. That is excitement.

Environmental awareness and responsibility? Again, The Cook’s Garden presents a bit of the future now. For 2013, The Cook’s Garden is the only company to sell certified organically grown heirloom plants raised from certified organically grown seed, of our top heirloom selections, carefully studied over a period of 17 years in comparative test gardens of thousands of old heirloom varieties.

Next, let’s consider a game-changing future innovation. The Cook’s Garden is developing brand new types of herbs. Herbs have become overexposed, even a bit clichéd in recent years. To reawaken gardeners’ and diners’ senses—as well as sensibilities—we need to revolutionize herbs.

Herbs respond to the same “terroir” as do wine grapes, but only generally at the present time. We discovered that the interaction of a herb’s root system with soil, water and air, is very much like “terroir”, only affecting oils, rather than fruit sugars.

The excitement is that, today, most people view herbs as one-dimensional flavors—a common view that will be hard to shake off. The challenge will be to prove, first, that our Pinnacle Herb plants taste better because they have more flavor. They are stronger, but not overbearingly so. So, people who buy these potted herb plants—ideal for patios—will be able to use fewer clippings if they want the “same” flavor. But we believe most will opt for the richer “terroir” flavor, because that’s the fulfillment of herbs, both naturally and in the kitchen. For example, oregano “blooms” into a new flavor when heated, and yet another, still newer variation of flavor when soaked in vinegar. Different flavors of oregano! Why not cultivate all herbs to possess such diversity?

In conclusion, whether for taste, yield, nutrition, getting out in the fresh air, smiling deeply when surrounded by fresh flowers in the yard or in the home, having a connected family activity—gardens will play an increasingly essential role in our nation’s long-term future.

Call it the slow reinvention of gardening. We depend on annual weather cycles. Yet, today, more of us wish to move at nature’s pace, whether our garden is in the “back 40” in rural America, or on a roof in urban America, or just a large patio garden in Pennsylvania that used to be in the yard until the deer destroyed it.

Gardening moves forward. And it is innovation in plant research—along with luck—that is the human engine of this positive movement.

Finally, in 1972 David Burpee was asked by the press about the future of gardening. He excitedly told the newspaper interviewer that he was thrilled that, soon, new planets would yield new botanical worlds, and—subject to scientific quarantines and other protocols—we here on Earth would be able to grow new crops. He regretted he probably would not be alive to see it. But he was, of course, quite serious as well as deeply passionate about this future development. “DB”, as he was known, was a very forward-thinking genius. It was under his leadership that ‘Big Boy’ was introduced. By being easy-to-grow, very tasty, high-yielding, and relatively compact for 1948, ‘Big Boy’ revolutionized home gardening from a chore to a pleasure. He could see the future. And, after all, it was only three years since the moon landing.

I cannot think that far ahead, but I present above a small glimpse into the foreseeable future.

by George Ball

This is the season when we appraise the year passing, and gently outline the year ahead, tracing tentative personal goals and plans. Even as our country inexorably advances towards the dreaded fiscal cliff, it is likewise a period when the press routinely diverts us with articles highlighting our era’s grand acquisitors and their grand acquisitions.

We read about the Russian oligarch whose Manhattan pied-a-terre for his 22-year-old daughter set him back (but not very far back) a cool $88 million. There’s the art collector, financier Leon Black, who plunked down $120 million for Edvard Munch’s “The Scream.” We read, too, of the Malaysian tycoon who trolls about in his $4.8 billion yacht. Our proud possessors might well want to toast themselves with an 1811 Chateau d’Yquem, which flew out of the doors of an auction house at the too-good-to-pass-up price of $117,000 a bottle.

The plutocrats and their plums are not without redeeming social value. Their outlandish expenditures qualify them as gaudy efflorescences of supply side economics. With them, the slow drip-drip of trickle-down becomes a roaring waterfall, cascading into the coffers of builders, decorators, craftsmen, artists, and tradespeople. Indeed, if all of America’s very rich were to emulate these stupendous spenders, our descent from the fiscal cliff would surely land us all in a feather bed with a high thread count.

I’m reminded of King Louis XIV of France, whose lavish expenditures on Versailles subsidized thousands of French drapers, tailors, goldsmiths, silversmiths and other artisans. In order to channel fresh water to his palace, he employed 22,000 soldiers and 8,000 workers. Versailles alone employed some 15,000 people. He had at his service a gilded version of the Works Progress Administration. Louis XIV gets too little credit as an exemplar of Keynesian economics.

These musings bring up the whole realm of values—the vast, too-little-charted territory where we measure things at their true worth, and, so doing, hope to uncover our individual and collective meanings. The discussion of values gets little, if any, attention in today’s noisy press. The early 19th C. German philosopher Schopenhauer observed that the French aptly called journalists “day laborers”, a designation that helps explain their remarkably confined perspective. In journalism, first principles come last.

Values take a number of forms. At the more material end of things, there’s economic value: the tangible price for a tangible product or service. We call this kind of value a bargain when we receive more in the exchange than we might customarily hope for or expect. A true bargain is universally held to be a good thing, even by your average billionaire.

Then we come to values with a capital V, the kind you can’t buy: the Values of nurture and safety, emotional attachments, community, truth, beauty, morals and ethics, virtue, knowledge, and wisdom. Oddly enough, these Values seem faded as suitable topics for the mass media.

It was not so in the 19th century, when the steam engines of the Industrial Revolution had long been set in motion, and popular culture and consumerism ascended. These values found fervent and articulate champions in the philosophers Thoreau and Emerson in the States, and Arnold and Ruskin in Great Britain.

In the 21st century, there remains one place where all eternal values come alive—where both transcendent and tangible values intersect: the garden. Here is where you find beauty and truth, as well as flavor and fragrance in a true feast for the soul as well as the senses. Here you breathe freely, move gently, and refresh your body under the dome of heaven.

It is no coincidence that, from the Native American tribes, most notably the Pawnee who reconfigured their gardens according to the movement of the stars and planets they worshipped, to the children of Abraham—Hebrew, Christian and Moslem—whose foundational texts began as agriculture manuals, most religions arose from the principles of plant domestication or, as Thoreau put it, “faith in a seed”. Gardening is not simply the original paradigm of civilization—and, thus, politics—it is the best one. We reap what we sow indeed, especially in the gardens of humanity. And time—with its requirements of planning and patience so contrary to current popular culture—must be respected.

But to get back into lower case value for a moment, here in the garden is where extraordinary savings await you: the last bargain on earth.

Let’s do the math. A couple packets of tomato seed—either the pink and tangy Brandy Boy or the fragrant, sweet and highly adaptable Big Daddy—yields 50 guaranteed seedlings out of 55 seeds total. An average plant produces 35 fruits; multiply by 50. Your tomato patch yields 1,750 fruits, at a retail store price of $1.50 a pound. That would be $2,625 worth of store-bought tomatoes from a couple seed packets costing you about eleven dollars.

Your return on investment? 238 to 1 or 23,800 per cent, plus a deep sense of satisfaction. And your homegrown tomatoes are juicy beauties, bursting with just-picked flavor—everything bland, faux store-bought tomatoes aren’t.

That’s not just a value, but a harvest of Values. The last of the “Big Splendors”.

Russian oligarchs, take note.

by George Ball

I saw a Wall Street Journal article a couple of weeks ago about surprising, nay stunning, modern and contemporary art auction results. Old records were smashed and new ones set. Many were paintings of majestic importance and quality, such as Jackson Pollock’s. Yet others were for art works as trivial as—of all things—metal tulips.

It’s just like “everything else” these days, pardon the cliché. I was discussing it with a friend recently with respect to music. Samuel Barber? Too pretty. Ralph Vaughan Williams? Way too pretty. But modernist and contemporary music? All the rage. Few, if any, musical directors include Barber or Vaughan Williams in symphony repertoires; they are exceptions to the rule. Today, much art lacks traditional craft. People tell me that’s the point, but I still don’t get it. For example, few people learn to sing well. I remember, as a child, we used to sing while walking to and from school. Formal music instruction was mandatory in grade school. Alas, the country was younger then.

Consider pop music: Beyonce, Justin Bieber and Jay Z? I, for one, cannot take them for more than a few seconds. Taylor Swift is often flat. I am half southern so I am sensitive to country music. Swift cannot sing well. But then Sheryl Crow deliberately goes too sharp or flat for effect. Yet it is unpleasant. It is “effect”. Not aptitude, and certainly not training. Music is one of the toughest things to study, particularly classical music. Harmony? Counterpoint? The teachers bang your head against the wall for months on end. This is why one can hear a symphony by Bartok played flawlessly, night after night. God bless orchestras.

It is well-known, but worth repeating, that all the great pop singers of the 50s and 60s were trained in church from early childhood on. You will never hear them go flat.

Vaughan Williams’ “In the Fen Country” is one of the most exquisite pieces of music ever written. Or his songs set to the poems by Robert Louis Stevenson, the Wanderer series I think it’s called, depicting in poignant melody the sad plight and struggle of Scottish people driven off their land. The same goes for most traditional Scottish folk songs. Or consider poetry. Many of the passages in the Bible were developed, crafted and smoothed by translations into some of the most beautiful words in any language. Or Shakespeare. So few of these passages are familiar to most people any longer.

Yet “drip” paintings, as the Wall Street Journal dismissively called them (bit of a put-down of such a giant as Pollock) and the stack of garish metal tulips each go for many millions of dollars. Amazing, literally.

Here is another example of the subjectivity of beauty.

In the late 80s, after my colleagues and I had finally broken ‘Mona Lisa’ anemone, the first anemone identified on the Aalsmeer auction ticker by name, into Holland—the world’s largest and most competitive flower market (a reverse auction: dropping from high to low)—I flew back to Chicago from Amsterdam thoroughly exhausted after celebrating, including a couple of consecutive nights of drinking, which the Dutch did voluminously in those days. (Not so fashionable now.) Through the wine haze, one of the salty dogs of the Dutch flower industry told me, “You think we party? You should go drinking with the fish guys!”

The ‘Mona Lisa’ breakthrough in Holland was a big achievement. No company had done it before, much less an American one. As anyone who knows it will tell you, ‘Mona Lisa’ and its imitators are perhaps the finest cut flowers in the world in terms of sheer all-around beauty: irresistible and impossible to have too many in the home. I have seen people instantly relax in their presence.

The pinnacle of my thanks from the Dutch auction industry was to be invited to the chairman’s elegant corner office in downtown Amsterdam for his personal congratulations over coffee. At that time there were 13 separate flower auctions, working ‘round the clock, every day. So he was an important and impressive fellow. He had a Renaissance bronze next to his picture window that opened onto the roofs of Amsterdam.

Back home at my former company, PanAmerican Seed, we spent the next couple of years reselecting over the winter and building up another stock of “corms”, or bulbs as they might be called, of a truly spectacular crop—fantastically clear colors, very large blooms, long strong stems, over 2 weeks vase life in clear water. The perfect cut flower! Everything was “go”. We went to Japan in 1989. One of the best executives I ever worked with, John Guenther, and I sat down with all the top flower growers and merchants in every major city. (Oddly enough, Japanese industry might be consolidated at the top, but it is highly fragmented on the ground, so to speak.) But each and every one of the flower buyers we met said the same thing: “Too beautiful”.

John and I didn’t understand what was going on at first. We didn’t have very many Japanese trips under our belt, we were in the youthful prime of our business lives, very excited, confident and certain of the value of our product. However, we were not sophisticated about the many ways the Japanese say “no”, without using or even suggesting the word. Besides, a “no” was unimaginable to us.

We were confused for a long time. We went from one city to the next in a nation of millions of enthusiastic flower lovers. The daily lunch or dinner photos of the trip show our smiles—bright at first—gradually falling over the two weeks until we appear as if we are simultaneously grimacing and smiling. In the last, we don’t even try to smile. Amusing set of photos, since there are so many because the Japanese take them all the time. Like a flip book movie of our collapsing smiles.

Toward the final days of the trip, I began to fantasize jumping over the airport fence, running across the tarmac, and flagging down a plane. I got home and was sick in bed for a week.

The Japanese do not like large flowers. We had no idea. When we figured it out on about the last day, we were astounded. They like vase flowers which have a width or diameter that is “just so”. Anything over that is absolutely unacceptable. A European simply—and happily—uses a larger vase. But the Japanese seem to have an almost totalitarian, “government issue” aesthetic, which includes vase and bloom sizes. I was told later that it has to do with Japanese traditions of living in small, compact homes. We missed by several centimeters. The buyers completely ignored everything else that was virtuous and beautiful. “Too beautiful”, they’d repeat over and over. It became an Alice In Wonderland nightmare.

Somehow I think this story is related to the phenomenon of a commercial artist of no particularly great talent—but extraordinarily transgressive and child-like—such as Warhol taking the art world by storm for a half century. Today’s art world is “Japan”. Anything that is “too beautiful” is unacceptable. “Vase sizes” are analogous to parlors and sitting rooms. Thus, 19th C. Beaux-Arts paintings are shunned, despite their breathtaking beauty, psychological depth, and historical importance. Thus, too, no one conducts the work of Ralph Vaughan Williams or Samuel Barber.

Warhol was famous for saying—among other things, such as the 15 minutes of fame—that art is something people do not have to buy. How vacant, to me; how cold and lonely. A pity that such vulgarities are popular, even coveted.

I shall never forget meeting the great—tremendous—painter, Nathan Oliveira at an art event in San Francisco. He said something like none of his paintings should be worth more than $10,000. I understand, somehow. No coincidence that he was a legendary teacher.

If one wishes to see some nice anemones, similar if not better than my (now) old ones, there is a grower named Battenfeld near Rhinebeck, NY. Others took over my operation and, well, the blooms are still great but not quite the same. It was my baby and Scott Trees’ and Simon Crawford’s and Sten Larsson’s as well. Understandable. Now at Burpee I focus on sunflowers, campanula and dahlia and, of course, marigolds and zinnias, which are almost as important to us as tomatoes and sweet corn.

by George Ball

October closes with Halloween, the most misunderstood holiday, due to its roots not in horror but in rain. Just as seed is the first and the last—the seed and the fruit—so too are rains the alpha and omega of the growing season. Only after the dry heat of summer and early fall—unique to Western civilization, including the Mideast—do the rains (or snow) finally fall and prepare the earth for surviving winter and providing seed with the soil from which it can grow in spring.

The demons emerge on Halloween to show us, ironically, their marginal, subordinate status, and their submission to the rule of the natural, agricultural laws we must follow. They taunt us as we proceed at our work, to remind us that we must persist. Halloween is amusement, pure and simple.

Perhaps its peculiar contemporary mode (“trick or treat!”) foreshadows the vulgarization of Christmas, when the children have the tables turned on them; they are scrutinized, measured and subjected to greater or fewer gifts at least in Santa’s traditional form. But, no matter: Halloween exists to mark not only the agricultural calendar in our collective memory but also the return of the rains of autumn and the moisture to the soil.

If you are fascinated by the alpha and the omega that distinguishes the world’s great religions, you need look no further than seed.

While rain contributed to the evolution of plants it lacks the vivid quality of illustrating literally not only “the first and the last”, but also time itself. The seeds of flowering plants seem like the seconds of the earth’s cosmic clock—an endless flowering followed by the ticking and tocking of seeds fruiting, ripening and variously covering the expanse of our planet’s land surface.

Indeed, mankind invented the calendar to organize and regulate seasonal sowing cycles which, in turn, are caused by the earth circling the sun.

If seeds are the seconds, annuals are the minutes, vines are the hours, perennials the days, shrubs the months, and trees the years: a perpetual clock devised by the proverbial invisible watchmaker.

However, seeds—like seconds—are unique. Only brief and ephemeral moments contain the acts that change everything in our lives, from World War I to falling in love. Indeed, seeds remind me of the “alpha and omega” as figuratively expressed in the Judeo-Christian tradition. We plant them, as well as eat them. We transform them into bread, the staff of life. Seeds do not take energy—they give it. As tools for survival, seeds are perfect, as long as you store them carefully (water destroys them and mice love them).

Happy Halloween!

by George Ball

The beaks of birds tell their story. Technically, the term is “bill”, short for “mandible”, of which there are two, the upper and lower. Most people call them “beaks,” and birds don’t seem to mind.

A short, blunt, clearly triangular-shaped beak with an obviously sharp point allows finch-like birds to pierce, tear, and pry open the “nuts”—seeds’ thick, tough capsules or hulls—and consume the kernels within. Strong and compact, nut-cracking birds can grow large, especially in the tropics where the fruits and nuts are likewise larger.

Birds’ beaks never stop growing, as they have a lot of work to do. Because of their exceptionally high metabolism, many small birds eat 20% of their body weight daily. Hummingbirds visit as many as 1,000 flowers in a day to dine on nectar in order to maintain their 105° F body temperature. (A thousand flowers seems low somehow.) The heart rate of the Blue-Throated Hummingbird can go as high as 1360 beats per minute.

Birds with longer and wider beaks use them to swallow seeds—shell, hull, chaff, kernel and all. Also, beaks help birds in their other tasks: nest-building, worm- and larvae-picking, and extracting other invertebrate delicacies from trees, mud, sand and soil. Many styles of beaks help birds consume large insects such as beetles, or rodents, as opportunities present themselves.

Other birds, including starlings, have various sorts of “harvester”-style beaks. Starlings simply open their mandibles and fly through low brush and grass, eating insects. As they probe, sally, lunge and glean, starlings are “shooting” their large, open beaks, like the tips of stretched bi-valve throat pouches.

Starlings’ discerning eyes are located just behind their beak’s joints: the left eye perceiving color, the right eye detecting movement, which explains why certain birds tend to look at objects with one eye or the other. As a kid, I hated starlings, which we called “grackles”. They infested our house one summer, dozens of them—aggressive and making a racket with their hideous calls and wheezy songs. I’d use my BB gun to try to shoot them, with no success. My yelling was much more effective, and they eventually moved on.

Birds co-evolved with an extremely varied range of phenomena. The seed-eating birds draw the attention of gardeners and seed growers such as Burpee and its colleague companies around the world. During both the crossing (hybridizing or self-pollinating) and harvesting seasons, most of us remain “on guard”, primarily on the lookout for insects, but keeping an eye out for the more voracious, seed-loving birds. Neolithic man had to endure difficulties with birds in growing and harvesting seed crops, like the vital, all-important grass we know as wheat.

Beginning in the 19 th century, farmers found a way to take advantage of seed-eating birds; pigeons, housed in multistory towers, were used to glean stray seed from pastures after the growing season.

Water is an enormously important bird nutrient. We all know how much birds love bathing. We tend to be less aware of how much water they drink.

I am less familiar with migratory and predatory birds. I wish I had time to be a “birder”. Several hawks and one owl reside in the 60-acre research farm where I live. They hold themselves, literally, aloof and remote. Raptors use their claws rather than their beaks to capture prey. Owls frighten me a bit. Their low, deep hoots have a haunting, almost hypnotic effect. Like menacing villains, owls terrify prey with their eyes, paralyzing them with fear.

Predatory birds can be eerily clever. For instance, ravens will work in pairs as they raid seabird colonies: one bird will distract a nesting adult, allowing the other to grab an exposed egg or chick.

Since childhood I have been a fan of the small, familiar birds of home: finches, nuthatches, thrushes, wrens. Their presence around large homes and gardens is inevitable, since birds coevolved with the plants, shrubs and bushes they inhabit. These birds expand the populations and distribution of plants, helping prevent the inbreeding depression of the plants’ gene pool. They consume the fruit of various species such as winterberry, serviceberry, hawthorn, flowering dogwood, hackberry, honeysuckle, firethorn and mountain ash, to name a few. While digesting them in flight, they scarify the seed with their acidic digestive juices and gizzards, which often have small stones that help break down the seeds.

By the time the birds have flown a sufficient distance to prevent inbreeding of the plants by either wind or insects, they defecate the pre-germinated seed, now conveniently nestled in a nitrogen-rich food pack. Bird droppings—so vexing when they descend on our automobiles—are seed being sown, and evolution being maintained.

Unlike many insects, birds don’t resemble flowers. But in some species their beaks are symbolic indicators of their food seed, and some beaks look like the nuts they consume. In other birds—such as spoonbills, cormorants and pelicans—their beaks suggest both how deep or how shallow in the water their prey live.

Flying great distances, birds harness the wind, especially the great currents at about 10,000 feet and higher. In turn, these winds originate from the movement of the earth which causes the temperature variation that cause vapor, or gas, to move. While all birds like to fly dry, migratory birds like to fly bone-dry—the lighter the better. By flying so high and dry they meet with less resistance, most of which is water vapor.

The journey of most migratory birds is less than a thousand miles, one way. Their destinations are not so far, and there are plenty of dining stops along the way. Some fly south in the fall to find food: late season seeds, berries in mid-South, early season in Deep South, or year ‘round in the sub-tropics, such as Mexico. Other species fly north in early April and May to roost and reproduce. Birds are smart—they know when to leave.

One of the most extraordinary things I’ve observed was the behavior of a three-day-old pigeon. Except for its physical limitations, which weren’t so great considering its formal development, it was ready to grow, if not to go, as in get out of town. I’ve never seen such constant energetic motion—such a pure will to live. Everything was there, except size and a bit of coordination. One or two practice sessions and “game on”. The pigeon’s eyes were especially large for such a tiny, unfolded, wildly animated embryo. Birds live by their eyes.

Here I will step aside and let Mr. Darwin take over. He can carry you much farther than I. On the Origin of Species was inspired to a large extent by his observations, made in the tropics, of the differences and similarities of birds’ heads and beaks. Also, take a look at The Life of Birds by the articulate David Attenborough, the companion volume to his superb BBC nature documentary.

I shall return to this subject soon, since the composer Ralph Vaughan Williams transported me back to sweet memories of birds, particularly the songbirds’ precious calls and songs.

Finally, here’s a partial list of the great seed and berry producing plants that songbirds love and we can offer you for sale. They are sunflower (the taller the better), echinacea, rudbeckia, asters, coreopsis, poppy, marigold, zinnia, cosmos, gooseberry, hibiscus and sedum. There’s still time to plant many of them, or plan to do so in your 2013 garden.