Certainly these are heady days for people who have been working to reform the way Americans grow food and feed themselves–the “food movement,” as it is now often called. Markets for alternative kinds of food–local and organic and pastured–are thriving, farmers’ markets are popping up like mushrooms and for the first time in many years the number of farms tallied in the Department of Agriculture’s census has gone up rather than down. The new secretary of agriculture has dedicated his department to “sustainability” and holds meetings with the sorts of farmers and activists who not many years ago stood outside the limestone walls of the USDA holding signs of protest and snarling traffic with their tractors. Cheap words, you might say; and it is true that, so far at least, there have been more words than deeds–but some of those words are astonishing. Like these: shortly before his election, Barack Obama told a reporter for Time that “our entire agricultural system is built on cheap oil”; he went on to connect the dots between the sprawling monocultures of industrial agriculture and, on the one side, the energy crisis and, on the other, the healthcare crisis.

Americans today are having a national conversation about food and agriculture that would have been impossible to imagine even a few short years ago. To many Americans it must sound like a brand-new conversation, with its bracing talk about the high price of cheap food, or the links between soil and health, or the impossibility of a society eating well and being in good health unless it also farms well.

But the national conversation unfolding around the subject of food and farming really began in the 1970s, with the work of writers like Wendell Berry, Frances Moore Lappé, Barry Commoner and Joan Gussow. All four of these writers are supreme dot-connectors, deeply skeptical of reductive science and far ahead not only in their grasp of the science of ecology but in their ability to think ecologically: to draw lines of connection between a hamburger and the price of oil, or between the vibrancy of life in the soil and the health of the plants, animals and people eating from that soil.

I would argue that the conversation got under way in earnest in 1971, when Berry published an article in The Last Whole Earth Catalogue introducing Americans to the work of Sir Albert Howard, the British agronomist whose thinking had deeply influenced Berry’s own since he first came upon it in 1964. Indeed, much of Berry’s thinking about agriculture can be read as an extended elaboration of Howard’s master idea that farming should model itself on natural systems like forests and prairies, and that scientists, farmers and medical researchers need to reconceive “the whole problem of health in soil, plant, animal and man as one great subject.” No single quotation appears more often in Berry’s writing than that one, and with good reason: it is manifestly true (as even the most reductive scientists are coming to recognize) and, as a guide to thinking through so many of our problems, it is inexhaustible. That same year, 1971, Lappé published Diet for a Small Planet, which linked modern meat production (and in particular the feeding of grain to cattle) to the problems of world hunger and the environment. Later in the decade, Commoner implicated industrial agriculture in the energy crisis, showing us just how much oil we were eating when we ate from the industrial food chain; and Gussow explained to her nutritionist colleagues that the problem of dietary health could not be understood without reference to the problem of agriculture.

Looking back on this remarkably fertile body of work, which told us all we needed to know about the true cost of cheap food and the value of good farming, is to register two pangs of regret, one personal, the other more political: first, that as a young writer coming to these subjects a couple of decades later, I was rather less original than I had thought; and second, that as a society we failed to heed a warning that might have averted or at least mitigated the terrible predicament in which we now find ourselves.

For what would we give today to have back the “environmental crisis” that Berry wrote about so prophetically in the 1970s, a time still innocent of the problem of climate change? Or to have back the comparatively manageable public health problems of that period, before obesity and type 2 diabetes became “epidemic” (Most experts date the obesity epidemic to the early 1980s.)

But history will show that we failed to take up the invitation to begin thinking ecologically. As soon as oil prices subsided and Jimmy Carter was rusticated to Plains, Georgia (along with his cardigan, thermostat and solar panels), we went back to business–and agribusiness–as usual. In the mid-1980s Ronald Reagan removed Carter’s solar panels from the roof of the White House, and the issues that the early wave of ecologically conscious food writers had raised were pushed to the margins of national politics and culture.

When I began writing about agriculture in the late ’80s and ’90s, I quickly figured out that no editor in Manhattan thought the subject timely or worthy of his or her attention, and that I would be better off avoiding the word entirely and talking instead about food, something people then still had some use for and cared about, yet oddly never thought to connect to the soil or the work of farmers.

It was during this period that I began reading Berry’s work closely–avidly, in fact, because I found in it practical answers to questions I was struggling with in my garden. I had begun growing a little of my own food, not on a farm but in the backyard of a second home in the exurbs of New York, and had found myself completely ill prepared, especially when it came to the challenges posed by critters and weeds. An obedient child of Thoreau and Emerson (both of whom mistakenly regarded weeds as emblems of wildness and gardens as declensions from nature), I honored the wild and didn’t fence off my vegetables from the encroaching forest. I don’t have to tell you how well that turned out. Thoreau did plant a bean field at Walden, but he couldn’t square his love of nature with the need to defend his crop from weeds and birds, and eventually he gave up on agriculture. Thoreau went on to declare that “if it were proposed to me to dwell in the neighborhood of the most beautiful garden that ever human art contrived, or else of a dismal swamp, I should certainly decide for the swamp.” With that slightly obnoxious declaration, American writing about nature all but turned its back on the domestic landscape. It’s not at all surprising that we got better at conserving wilderness than at farming and gardening.

It was Wendell Berry who helped me solve my Thoreau problem, providing a sturdy bridge over the deep American divide between nature and culture. Using the farm rather than the wilderness as his text, Berry taught me I had a legitimate quarrel with nature–a lover’s quarrel–and showed me how to conduct it without reaching for the heavy artillery. He relocated wildness from the woods “out there” (beyond the fence) to a handful of garden soil or the green shoot of a germinating pea, a necessary quality that could be not just conserved but cultivated. He marked out a path that led us back into nature, no longer as spectators but as full-fledged participants.

Obviously much more is at stake here than a garden fence. My Thoreau problem is another name for the problem of American environmentalism, which historically has had much more to say about leaving nature alone than about how we might use it well. To the extent that we’re finally beginning to hear a new, more neighborly conversation between American environmentalists and American farmers, not to mention between urban eaters and rural food producers, Berry deserves much of the credit for getting it started with sentences like these:

Why should conservationists have a positive interest in…farming? There are lots of reasons, but the plainest is: Conservationists eat. To be interested in food but not in food production is clearly absurd. Urban conservationists may feel entitled to be unconcerned about food production because they are not farmers. But they can’t be let off so easily, for they are all farming by proxy. They can eat only if land is farmed on their behalf by somebody somewhere in some fashion. If conservationists will attempt to resume responsibility for their need to eat, they will be led back fairly directly to all their previous concerns for the welfare of nature. –”Conservationist and Agrarian,” 2002

That we are all implicated in farming–that, in Berry’s now-famous formulation, “eating is an agricultural act”–is perhaps his signal contribution to the rethinking of food and farming under way today. All those taking part in that conversation, whether in the White House or at the farmers’ market, are deep in his debt.

But the drop-in-the-bucket issue is not the only problem lurking behind the “why bother” question. Let’s say I do bother, big time. I turn my life upside-down, start biking to work, plant a big garden, turn down the thermostat so low I need the Jimmy Carter signature cardigan, forsake the clothes dryer for a laundry line across the yard, trade in the station wagon for a hybrid, get off the beef, go completely local. I could theoretically do all that, but what would be the point when I know full well that halfway around the world there lives my evil twin, some carbon-footprint doppelgänger in Shanghai or Chongqing who has just bought his first car (Chinese car ownership is where ours was back in 1918), is eager to swallow every bite of meat I forswear and who’s positively itching to replace every last pound of CO2 I’m struggling no longer to emit. So what exactly would I have to show for all my trouble?

A sense of personal virtue, you might suggest, somewhat sheepishly. But what good is that when virtue itself is quickly becoming a term of derision? And not just on the editorial pages of The Wall Street Journal or on the lips of the vice president, who famously dismissed energy conservation as a “sign of personal virtue.” No, even in the pages of The New York Times and The New Yorker, it seems the epithet “virtuous,” when applied to an act of personal environmental responsibility, may be used only ironically. Tell me: How did it come to pass that virtue–a quality that for most of history has generally been deemed, well, a virtue–became a mark of liberal softheadedness? How peculiar, that doing the right thing by the environment–buying the hybrid, eating like a locavore–should now set you up for the Ed Begley Jr. treatment.

And even if in the face of this derision I decide I am going to bother, there arises the whole vexed question of getting it right. Is eating local or walking to work really going to reduce my carbon footprint? According to one analysis, if walking to work increases your appetite and you consume more meat or milk as a result, walking might actually emit more carbon than driving. A handful of studies have recently suggested that in certain cases under certain conditions, produce from places as far away as New Zealand might account for less carbon than comparable domestic products. True, at least one of these studies was co-written by a representative of agribusiness interests in (surprise!) New Zealand, but even so, they make you wonder. If determining the carbon footprint of food is really this complicated, and I’ve got to consider not only “food miles” but also whether the food came by ship or truck and how lushly the grass grows in New Zealand, then maybe on second thought I’ll just buy the imported chops at Costco, at least until the experts get their footprints sorted out.

There are so many stories we can tell ourselves to justify doing nothing, but perhaps the most insidious is that, whatever we do manage to do, it will be too little too late. Climate change is upon us, and it has arrived well ahead of schedule. Scientists’ projections that seemed dire a decade ago turn out to have been unduly optimistic: the warming and the melting is occurring much faster than the models predicted. Now truly terrifying feedback loops threaten to boost the rate of change exponentially, as the shift from white ice to blue water in the Arctic absorbs more sunlight and warming soils everywhere become more biologically active, causing them to release their vast stores of carbon into the air. Have you looked into the eyes of a climate scientist recently? They look really scared.

So do you still want to talk about planting gardens?

I do.

Whatever we can do as individuals to change the way we live at this suddenly very late date does seem utterly inadequate to the challenge. It’s hard to argue with Michael Specter, in a recent New Yorker piece on carbon footprints, when he says: “Personal choices, no matter how virtuous [N.B.!], cannot do enough. It will also take laws and money.” So it will. Yet it is no less accurate or hardheaded to say that laws and money cannot do enough, either; that it will also take profound changes in the way we live. Why? Because the climate-change crisis is at its very bottom a crisis of lifestyle–of character, even. The Big Problem is nothing more or less than the sum total of countless little everyday choices, most of them made by us (consumer spending represents 70 percent of our economy), and most of the rest of them made in the name of our needs and desires and preferences.

For us to wait for legislation or technology to solve the problem of how we’re living our lives suggests we’re not really serious about changing–something our politicians cannot fail to notice. They will not move until we do. Indeed, to look to leaders and experts, to laws and money and grand schemes, to save us from our predicament represents precisely the sort of thinking–passive, delegated, dependent for solutions on specialists–that helped get us into this mess in the first place. It’s hard to believe that the same sort of thinking could now get us out of it.

Thirty years ago, Wendell Berry, the Kentucky farmer and writer, put forward a blunt analysis of precisely this mentality. He argued that the environmental crisis of the 1970s–an era innocent of climate change; what we would give to have back that environmental crisis!–was at its heart a crisis of character and would have to be addressed first at that level: at home, as it were. He was impatient with people who wrote checks to environmental organizations while thoughtlessly squandering fossil fuel in their everyday lives–the 1970s equivalent of people buying carbon offsets to atone for their Tahoes and Durangos. Nothing was likely to change until we healed the “split between what we think and what we do.” For Berry, the “why bother” question came down to a moral imperative: “Once our personal connection to what is wrong becomes clear, then we have to choose: we can go on as before, recognizing our dishonesty and living with it the best we can, or we can begin the effort to change the way we think and live.”

For Berry, the deep problem standing behind all the other problems of industrial civilization is “specialization,” which he regards as the “disease of the modern character.” Our society assigns us a tiny number of roles: we’re producers (of one thing) at work, consumers of a great many other things the rest of the time, and then once a year or so we vote as citizens. Virtually all of our needs and desires we delegate to specialists of one kind or another–our meals to agribusiness, health to the doctor, education to the teacher, entertainment to the media, care for the environment to the environmentalist, political action to the politician.

As Adam Smith and many others have pointed out, this division of labor has given us many of the blessings of civilization. Specialization is what allows me to sit at a computer thinking about climate change. Yet this same division of labor obscures the lines of connection–and responsibility–linking our everyday acts to their real-world consequences, making it easy for me to overlook the coal-fired power plant that is lighting my screen, or the mountaintop in Kentucky that had to be destroyed to provide the coal to that plant, or the streams running crimson with heavy metals as a result.

Of course, what made this sort of specialization possible in the first place was cheap energy. Cheap fossil fuel allows us to pay distant others to process our food for us, to entertain us and to (try to) solve our problems, with the result that there is very little we know how to accomplish for ourselves. Think for a moment of all the things you suddenly need to do for yourself when the power goes out–up to and including entertaining yourself. Think, too, about how a power failure causes your neighbors–your community–to suddenly loom so much larger in your life. Cheap energy allowed us to leapfrog community by making it possible to sell our specialty over great distances as well as summon into our lives the specialties of countless distant others.

Here’s the point: Cheap energy, which gives us climate change, fosters precisely the mentality that makes dealing with climate change in our own lives seem impossibly difficult. Specialists ourselves, we can no longer imagine anyone but an expert, or anything but a new technology or law, solving our problems. Al Gore asks us to change the light bulbs because he probably can’t imagine us doing anything much more challenging, like, say, growing some portion of our own food. We can’t imagine it, either, which is probably why we prefer to cross our fingers and talk about the promise of ethanol and nuclear power–new liquids and electrons to power the same old cars and houses and lives.

The “cheap-energy mind,” as Wendell Berry called it, is the mind that asks, “Why bother?” because it is helpless to imagine–much less attempt–a different sort of life, one less divided, less reliant. Since the cheap-energy mind translates everything into money, its proxy, it prefers to put its faith in market-based solutions–carbon taxes and pollution-trading schemes. If we could just get the incentives right, it believes, the economy will properly value everything that matters and nudge our self-interest down the proper channels. The best we can hope for is a greener version of the old invisible hand. Visible hands it has no use for.

But while some such grand scheme may well be necessary, it’s doubtful that it will be sufficient or that it will be politically sustainable before we’ve demonstrated to ourselves that change is possible. Merely to give, to spend, even to vote, is not to do, and there is so much that needs to be done–without further delay. In the judgment of James Hansen, the NASA climate scientist who began sounding the alarm on global warming 20 years ago, we have only 10 years left to start cutting–not just slowing–the amount of carbon we’re emitting or face a “different planet.” Hansen said this more than two years ago, however; two years have gone by, and nothing of consequence has been done. So: eight years left to go and a great deal left to do.

Which brings us back to the “why bother” question and how we might better answer it. The reasons not to bother are many and compelling, at least to the cheap-energy mind. But let me offer a few admittedly tentative reasons that we might put on the other side of the scale:

If you do bother, you will set an example for other people. If enough other people bother, each one influencing yet another in a chain reaction of behavioral change, markets for all manner of green products and alternative technologies will prosper and expand. (Just look at the market for hybrid cars.) Consciousness will be raised, perhaps even changed: new moral imperatives and new taboos might take root in the culture. Driving an S.U.V. or eating a 24-ounce steak or illuminating your McMansion like an airport runway at night might come to be regarded as outrages to human conscience. Not having things might become cooler than having them. And those who did change the way they live would acquire the moral standing to demand changes in behavior from others–from other people, other corporations, even other countries.

All of this could, theoretically, happen. What I’m describing (imagining would probably be more accurate) is a process of viral social change, and change of this kind, which is nonlinear, is never something anyone can plan or predict or count on. Who knows, maybe the virus will reach all the way to Chongqing and infect my Chinese evil twin. Or not. Maybe going green will prove a passing fad and will lose steam after a few years, just as it did in the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan took down Jimmy Carter’s solar panels from the roof of the White House.

Going personally green is a bet, nothing more or less, though it’s one we probably all should make, even if the odds of it paying off aren’t great. Sometimes you have to act as if acting will make a difference, even when you can’t prove that it will. That, after all, was precisely what happened in Communist Czechoslovakia and Poland, when a handful of individuals like Vaclav Havel and Adam Michnik resolved that they would simply conduct their lives “as if” they lived in a free society. That improbable bet created a tiny space of liberty that, in time, expanded to take in, and then help take down, the whole of the Eastern bloc.

So what would be a comparable bet that the individual might make in the case of the environmental crisis? Havel himself has suggested that people begin to “conduct themselves as if they were to live on this earth forever and be answerable for its condition one day.” Fair enough, but let me propose a slightly less abstract and daunting wager. The idea is to find one thing to do in your life that doesn’t involve spending or voting, that may or may not virally rock the world but is real and particular (as well as symbolic) and that, come what may, will offer its own rewards. Maybe you decide to give up meat, an act that would reduce your carbon footprint by as much as a quarter. Or you could try this: determine to observe the Sabbath. For one day a week, abstain completely from economic activity: no shopping, no driving, no electronics.

But the act I want to talk about is growing some–even just a little–of your own food. Rip out your lawn, if you have one, and if you don’t–if you live in a high-rise, or have a yard shrouded in shade–look into getting a plot in a community garden. Measured against the Problem We Face, planting a garden sounds pretty benign, I know, but in fact it’s one of the most powerful things an individual can do–to reduce your carbon footprint, sure, but more important, to reduce your sense of dependence and dividedness: to change the cheap-energy mind.

A great many things happen when you plant a vegetable garden, some of them directly related to climate change, others indirect but related nevertheless. Growing food, we forget, comprises the original solar technology: calories produced by means of photosynthesis. Years ago the cheap-energy mind discovered that more food could be produced with less effort by replacing sunlight with fossil-fuel fertilizers and pesticides, with a result that the typical calorie of food energy in your diet now requires about 10 calories of fossil-fuel energy to produce. It’s estimated that the way we feed ourselves (or rather, allow ourselves to be fed) accounts for about a fifth of the greenhouse gas for which each of us is responsible.

Yet the sun still shines down on your yard, and photosynthesis still works so abundantly that in a thoughtfully organized vegetable garden (one planted from seed, nourished by compost from the kitchen and involving not too many drives to the garden center), you can grow the proverbial free lunch–CO2-free and dollar-free. This is the most-local food you can possibly eat (not to mention the freshest, tastiest and most nutritious), with a carbon footprint so faint that even the New Zealand lamb council dares not challenge it. And while we’re counting carbon, consider too your compost pile, which shrinks the heap of garbage your household needs trucked away even as it feeds your vegetables and sequesters carbon in your soil. What else? Well, you will probably notice that you’re getting a pretty good workout there in your garden, burning calories without having to get into the car to drive to the gym. (It is one of the absurdities of the modern division of labor that, having replaced physical labor with fossil fuel, we now have to burn even more fossil fuel to keep our unemployed bodies in shape.) Also, by engaging both body and mind, time spent in the garden is time (and energy) subtracted from electronic forms of entertainment.

You begin to see that growing even a little of your own food is, as Wendell Berry pointed out 30 years ago, one of those solutions that, instead of begetting a new set of problems–the way “solutions” like ethanol or nuclear power inevitably do–actually beget other solutions, and not only of the kind that save carbon. Still more valuable are the habits of mind that growing a little of your own food can yield. You quickly learn that you need not be dependent on specialists to provide for yourself–that your body is still good for something and may actually be enlisted in its own support. If the experts are right, if both oil and time are running out, these are skills and habits of mind we’re all very soon going to need. We may also need the food. Could gardens provide it? Well, during World War II, victory gardens supplied as much as 40 percent of the produce Americans ate.

But there are sweeter reasons to plant that garden, to bother. At least in this one corner of your yard and life, you will have begun to heal the split between what you think and what you do, to commingle your identities as consumer and producer and citizen. Chances are, your garden will re-engage you with your neighbors, for you will have produce to give away and the need to borrow their tools. You will have reduced the power of the cheap-energy mind by personally overcoming its most debilitating weakness: its helplessness and the fact that it can’t do much of anything that doesn’t involve division or subtraction. The garden’s season-long transit from seed to ripe fruit–will you get a load of that zucchini?!–suggests that the operations of addition and multiplication still obtain, that the abundance of nature is not exhausted. The single greatest lesson the garden teaches is that our relationship to the planet need not be zero-sum, and that as long as the sun still shines and people still can plan and plant, think and do, we can, if we bother to try, find ways to provide for ourselves without diminishing the world.

Oh, sure, there are plenty of more notable culture shocks that register on moving from New England to California. Drivers here switch lanes on a whim, their faith in telepathy evidently eliminating the need to signal their intentions. Compared with New Englanders, Californians are almost ridiculously friendly—friendly enough to put a Connecticut Yankee (O.K., a Connecticut Jewish Yankee) on his guard. People you’ve just met are constantly proposing you go with them on a camping trip to “the Sierra,” as if spending a weekend in a tent with strangers were a reasonable way to break the social ice. The first time I picked my son Isaac up after a play date here in Berkeley, his new pal’s mom invited me over for “a tub” just as casually as someone back in Cornwall might have asked me to tea after we’d exchanged greetings at the general store for, oh, maybe a decade or two.

These sorts of cultural differences I’m finding I can get used to; California is remarkably soft and hospitable ground in which to reroot, no doubt because the state has welcomed so many transplants over the years. It’s the horticultural changes I’m having trouble with. Everyone tells me how easy it is to garden in California, and it’s true there is almost nothing that won’t grow here, assuming you can figure out how to program the irrigation computer in the basement. Yet for me, having worked so hard for so long to become fluent in the plants and land and weather of northwestern Connecticut, gardening in California feels like writing in a second language. I can do it, sort of, manage to make myself understood, but everything feels (and, I’m afraid, probably looks) stilted, the handiwork of someone still consulting the printed instructions; what once was second nature is now strained.

You want to know what I really miss? Friends, family, fall color, first snow, sure, and pretty much as I expected. But the thing I didn’t count on missing quite as sharply as I do is my garden at this time of year, when the spring rains and strengthening sun are raising some new astonishment from the formerly dead earth virtually every week. April’s shocks of forsythia give way to May’s soft apple blossoms, the apple blossoms to the lilac (one plant that won’t reliably flower here; it wants a good stiff winter), the captivating lilac to the summery rose. And then, running in parallel, the ritual sequence of bulbs: April’s crocus and narcissus yielding to May’s tulips, the tulips to summer’s alliums. The order of bloom is so dependable and familiar that even from this distance I can picture spring unfurling in my garden as if in time-lapse. But though the sequence is as fixed as physical law, exactly which week it kicks off in any given year depends on just how deeply winter’s frost has penetrated the ground, and this year, for the first time in ages, I have no idea.

I get news from my garden in unsatisfying dribs and drabs. Our tenants don’t garden, so I hired a local gardener named Chuck Birge to look after things, and he will let me know what made it through the winter and what did not. We New England gardeners have to tally our dead each April, and this spring the casualties promise to be high. A string of mild winters accompanied by long-term predictions of global warming led many of us in Zone 5 to begin pushing the envelope. So a few years ago, figuring I might as well make the most of a warming world, I planted a Franklinia, a handsome specimen tree I’d always admired but really isn’t cut out for life in Zone 5. As you may know better than I, the New England winter reverted to classic form this year—and any day now I’m betting Chuck will report that my young tree didn’t make it. I can’t help thinking that, had I been around, I would have wrapped the burlap around its trunk a little more snugly, perhaps have nursed it through those lethal January nights.

It’s going to sound funny, but I do feel as if, by moving away, I’ve somehow let my garden down. Can you feel guilt toward a place or a plant? I’ll admit I sometimes do. A garden is a kind of bargain struck between the gardener and the land, and it survives only as long as both parties do their parts to keep it up. This rocky hillside in Connecticut would be an entirely different landscape if not for my gardening of it. Indeed, on the evidence of what we found when we bought it in 1983, the land had its own plans, and they did not include people, much less gardens.

What had been a working dairy farm until 1966 (going by the feed-store calendar nailed to the crumbling milk house door) was by 1983 rapidly reverting to second-growth forest. The ashes, oaks and chokecherries had marched down the hillside, conquered most of the cow pastures and were threatening the little frame house, which we found cowering behind its narrow moat of lawn, defended weekly by the previous owner’s screaming Toro. The next 20 years consisted of a protracted series of negotiations with the imperial forest that resulted in new ponds, a fenced-in vegetable garden, various new shrubs and trees and a long border of perennials fronting a fieldstone wall that, each morning, conducted me down a path into the woods, where I had built a little studio to work in.

I think of the garden as a negotiation because, as I learned early on, any attempt to unilaterally impose terms on the New England landscape is doomed. That lesson sometimes proved expensive, as when I dug a pond in a place where water simply didn’t want to be. My imported notions of the picturesque—I was determined to look out at a pond from my desk—were no match for the water’s equally determined intentions, which were basically to be somewhere else entirely from around Memorial Day till Thanksgiving. After several summers spent gazing out at a gaping 12-foot-deep crater, I began to understand where the local water really wanted to collect, and did something I had not realized you could do: I moved my pond, much to the satisfaction of both gardener and ground water (and excavator).

But most of my negotiations with the land involved more prosaic matters—finding the happiest spot for a tree peony, or the right shrub for a boggy depression—and were conducted by hand rather than by heavy equipment. I would never claim to have a green thumb, but over time I did manage to acquire some measure of the botanical empathy that I’ve always thought distinguishes the green thumb from the rest of us: the helpful ability, I mean, to see matters from a plant’s point of view (where it wants to be; what it needs to thrive), or, as a pond consultant once advised me, to “think like water.”

By the time we decamped for California, I felt as if I was on pretty good terms with my little patch of New England. Sure, there was still the occasional skirmish with the forest (representatives of which abducted three of my chickens last spring), but on the whole, relations between me and the species I shared this land with had attained a mutually agreeable state of equipoise. That balance of forces is never more than tenuous, however, for without the gardener’s continual interventions, the forest will resume its march down the hill, rout the perennials, topple the walls and eventually erase the garden from the landscape. In my absence, Chuck’s job is to deploy clippers, pruning shears, mowers and weed-whackers to keep that from happening. As for me, 3,000 miles away, a lot of my “gardening” these days consists of phone calls, e-mail and the crossing of fingers.

“Consult the genius of the place in all,” Alexander Pope famously counseled the gardener, yet most of us quickly realize this is much easier said than done. Perhaps because this particular “genius” (by which Pope of course meant spirit) speaks so obliquely and frames so much of what it has to say in the negative—in the form, I mean, of a dead tree or a water-free pond—it has taken me the better part of a quarter-century to even begin to comprehend everything it was trying to tell me. Now I needed to learn the language of a completely different genius, acquire its alien idioms of soil and light and rain. How would a Queen of Night tulip, my favorite, look in the high-contrast sparkle of Bay Area light? (Spectacular, it would turn out.) What must a carrot feel like, pushing through Berkeley clay? (Utterly defeated.) What taste will that soil impart to the lettuces I like to grow? (Minerals.) As a way of coming to know the genius of a place, gardening is nothing if not pragmatic: the important truths are all local and founded on no principle but what works and what doesn’t.

There are no shortcuts through the vale of trial and error, and the journey is bound to leave its mark on the gardener as much as on the place. I sometimes think that consulting this phlegmatic genius, learning his tricky New England dialect, has been my principal work these past few years, that and writing about the process. I’ve written three books that, in one way or another, take place in my Cornwall garden, and it was there (“there”!—I’m so much more accustomed to typing “here”) that I found my voice as a writer. By now some not-small part of my identity is tied up with that place or, rather, with the making of that place, which is not at all the same thing. I am more of a gardener than I am a New Englander. And yet learning to garden in New England, in a place where the revanchist forest and Zone 5 winter lows shadow your every move, has no doubt colored how I look at things, given me a sense of place I would not describe as relaxed.

Compared with California, compared with just about anywhere, New England is notoriously difficult ground in which to put down roots. Thoreau would probably say the stony, stingy soils have had a deforming effect on the local temperament, and he’d probably be right. Certainly we found that it takes a lot more than a closing to attach a newcomer to a parcel of New England real estate. A quarter-century after we moved to Cornwall, people in town were still referring to our house by the previous owner’s name. Particularly since he had lived in the house for no more than a couple of years, this really used to bug me—until I bumped into him and he mentioned that no one had ever called it his place until he sold it to us. “The whole time I lived there, it was always Joe Matyas’s old place,” he said. “Used to bug the hell out of me.” Apparently you have to move away or die before anyone in small-town New England is prepared to completely acknowledge your presence.

Maybe now that we’re gone, our neighbors have begun to call the property on Flat Rocks Road “the old Pollan place.” (Yikes!—feels like reading your own obituary.) For me, a guy from New York moving to a town whose older families have been around since it was incorporated in 1740, “belonging” in Cornwall has been as much a matter of forming an attachment to its land as to its people, if not more. John Locke thought that the concept of private property originated in the mixing of one’s labor with nature. Whatever you think of the political implications of that idea, surely it contains a kernel of emotional truth. For me, at least, some such mixing of self and land, and not merely a deed of ownership, is ultimately what makes a place your own. By cultivating this land so intensively, by building and digging and planting trees, some of what I am has become part of what this place is and (unless Chuck really drops the ball) what it will remain.

As you can imagine, the idea of ever “selling” such a place was out of the question, even when an interesting opportunity lured us West. But holding onto Cornwall meant we couldn’t afford to buy a house in California, so we’re renting, an existential condition that complicates a gardener’s life. Yet if what I wrote in the previous paragraph is really true (and to be honest, I’m not yet sure), the lack of a deed shouldn’t keep me from making this new place, at least in some spiritual sense, my own. Certainly the owners are not standing in my way. Operating under the dubious assumption I would be able to transfer whatever horticultural skills I possess to California as readily as my driver’s license, the people we’re renting from have pretty much given us carte blanche to make changes in their yard; in fact, they offered us a break on the rent in exchange for working on the garden. I just hope they won’t be too disappointed.

It’s a good thing that states don’t license gardeners the way they do drivers, because if I had to take a written test to requalify as a gardener in the state of California, I would definitely have failed. What month should you plant tulips? What’s the name of the tree with fruits that resemble miniature pumpkins? Will basil survive the winter outdoors? Should you stake an artichoke? Is Mexican salvia an annual or a perennial? So little of what I brought with me as a gardener seems to apply. I’d be lucky to get my learner’s permit.

So I’m beginning slowly, observing more than planting, taking the time to learn the names of so many unfamiliar plants, and to dope out the sequence of the seasons. Contrary to what you hear, there are seasons in California; they’re just all messed up. A subjective judgment, you think? Well, consider this bit of perversity: In December, just as the deciduous trees finally drop their leaves, the grasses, after lying dormant and dun-colored for months, suddenly wake up and turn green. Without a real winter to keep them apart, spring and fall trip over each other coming and going. And when exactly does spring start around here, anyway? Since the sequence of bloom never really ends, can it be said to ever begin? I still haven’t figured out whether to regard the camellias, which began blooming in December and are still pumping out their dowager blossoms in May, as last fall’s last flowers or this spring’s first.

So, heeding Pope, I’ve set about consulting the new resident genius of the place, and I’m beginning to pick up a smattering of the local dialect. Like the fact that the unfolding of the horticultural year follows the rhythms of the rains rather than the temperature or even the length of the day. O.K., pretty basic, but this explains why even the most experienced gardeners I consulted usually shrugged when I asked them what hardiness zone we lived in; the crucial designation that explained everything in New England—from the list of what could be grown to when the forsythia fountained and the maples flared—doesn’t much matter in California. Water matters.

And the water thinks differently out here. For one thing, it comes all at once, crowding a whole year’s worth of rainfall into three months of complete overkill. Every drop after that is paid for and comes by way of a black plastic tube. This is what it means to garden in a Mediterranean climate, which is, instead of hardiness zone, the crucial horticultural designation hereabouts. I learned there are five such Mediterranean zones around the world (the Mediterranean itself, parts of South Africa and Chile, southern Australia and coastal California), places where the flora evolved to make the most of a mild, rainy winter and then withstand a long dry summer. Not surprisingly, plants from all five regions feel perfectly at home in Northern California. But then so do species from the desert and, with irrigation, plants from northern-temperate places like New England, Japan and China. Everybody’s here.

Depending on what you’re used to, the results are gardens of astounding diversity or dissonance. I’m sorry, but it still rubs me the wrong way to see cacti cohabitating with pine trees, pines with palms, palms with azaleas, azaleas with aloes, aloes with tulips. It’s a very urban idea, this sort of botanical cosmopolitanism, and maybe it’ll grow on me. But when you can do just about anything you want in the garden, it’s hard to know what you want to do. So here I find myself, a somewhat pinched New England gardener at sea in an excess of California possibility.

Part of grokking the genius of the place is acquiring a sense of what it wants to be in your absence: what “lapsed” looks like in your garden. I know for a fact that five years of neglect in Cornwall would doom most everything I’ve planted there and usher the forest right onto the porch. Here? Well I’m not entirely sure yet, but the abandoned gardens I see around don’t seem to revert to anything pre-existing; there’s no forest on the other side of the gate nursing its resentments. Rather, it’s the garden plants themselves that run riot when the gardener dozes, the passion vine spreading out to smother the porch, the wisteria clambering over and yanking down the arbor. In California it’s not the forest’s avant-garde of shrubby weeds that needs to be restrained, but the stuff we plant ourselves, which is why I find I now spend less time encouraging and defending my perennials than checking their rampancy—weeding less and hacking more. I can see why the local nurseries carry machetes.

So far, though, the main focus of my gardening has been the relatively manageable little patch of edible things I put in by the back deck. Growing vegetables has always seemed to me the elemental act of gardening—sowing a few seeds in the spring so as by summer to harvest something good to eat from your land. This at least had been my way into the garden as a child, and it felt like the right way to re-enter it here. Isn’t this what new arrivals have always done? The immigrant’s garden is a place in which to recreate something of home on foreign ground, to see the plants you know best put down new roots and, with any luck, thrive in this strange soil. (Talk about botanical empathy!) The initial impulse may be a reactionary one, but not necessarily, I discovered, the result.

Two tremendous trees dominate my new backyard, a cedar and a redwood, and the only spot sunny enough for vegetables was a semicircular bed already planted with bulbs and perennials. So first I had to convince my landlord that this was a mistake. After she signed off on my plan, I moved her perennials, dug in some compost and planted a handful of the sorts of vegetables I’ve always had in my garden: broccoli, kale and chard, several different kinds of lettuce, a handful of strawberries and some kitchen herbs. The only thing that felt weird about any of this was that I was doing it in November—these are cool-weather crops I would never put out in Connecticut before April. But, hey, this is California. And because it is California, because I really am hoping to assimilate horticulturally, I made some room in my new garden for a pair of dwarf citrus trees (a kumquat and a Meyer lemon) and the spiky bluish seedling of an artichoke.

For most of the quote-unquote winter, I had to push myself to get out into the garden. Old habits of hibernation die hard, and the prospect of weeding around Christmastime or the Super Bowl held no appeal whatsoever. But that was O.K., because during those short days things grew at a snail’s pace. (Everything, that is, except the snails themselves, who crisscrossed the garden on their slime tracks with impunity until I threw down some diatomaceous earth.) In March, as the rains subsided and the days got longer, life in the garden quickened considerably. We began harvesting an impressive amount of food (for March anyway), including some gorgeous heads of butter lettuce, nice bunches of red chard and rocket and a couple of tasty heads of broccoli. My kumquat is about to bear its first little fruit, and the Meyer lemon is covered in richly scented blossoms. Now, by local standards none of this qualifies as a horticultural achievement; indeed, you probably couldn’t stop these things from growing if you tried. Even so, I’m feeling kind of impressed with myself.

But what I’m most impressed with is my artichoke, a plant I tried to grow in Connecticut with no success. Artichokes won’t flower until they’ve been through a winter; the problem is, they can’t withstand a Zone 5 winter. Supposedly you can trick them into thinking they’ve experienced a winter by planting them early in the spring and protecting them from hard frost, but I never managed to fool one in Connecticut.

Here in California, I didn’t have to try. Straight through the quote-unquote winter, my artichoke grew and grew, tossing off one toothy glaucous leaf after another, the leaves getting steadily larger and more leathery until the plant was the biggest, most riveting presence in the garden, a shrubby thistle that, if you squinted, resembled a great shaggy dog. And then a few weeks ago it threw its first flower: an arm like a monster stalk of celery thrust straight up into the air, culminating in a clenched green fist. There was nothing reactionary about this immigrant’s garden now. No longer a memorial to some zone a world away, the garden looked as if it belonged here, and maybe (just maybe), so did I.

If this sounds like a laughable comparison, consider what it was I was doing in the garden that afternoon: disseminating the genes of one species and not another, in this case a potato instead of, let’s say, a leek. Gardeners like me tend to think such choices are our sovereign prerogative: in the space of this garden, I tell myself, I alone determine which species will thrive and which will disappear. I’m in charge here, in other words.

But that afternoon in the garden I found myself thinking that a bumblebee would probably also regard himself as the decision maker, opting for one bloom or another. But we know that this is just a failure of his imagination. The truth of the matter is that the flower has cleverly manipulated the bee into hauling its pollen from blossom to blossom.

All plants care about is what every being cares about on the most basic genetic level: making more copies of itself. Through trial and error, plant species have found that the best way to do that is to induce animals—bees or people, it hardly matters—to spread their genes. How? By playing on the animals’ desires, conscious or otherwise. The flowers that manage to do this most effectively are the ones that get to be fruitful and multiply.

That May afternoon, the garden suddenly appeared before me in a whole new light. All these plants, which I’d always regarded as the objects of my desire, were also, I realised, subjects, acting on me, getting me to do things for them they couldn’t do for themselves. Could it be that we are drawn instinctively to flowers?

Some evolutionary psychologists have proposed an interesting answer. Their hypothesis goes like this: our brains developed under the pressure of natural selection to make us good foragers, which is how humans have spent 99 per cent of their time on Earth. The presence of flowers is a reliable predictor of future food. People who were drawn to flowers, and who, further, could distinguish among them, would be much more successful foragers than people who were blind to their significance. In time the moment of recognition—much like the quickening one feels whenever an object of desire is spotted in the landscape—would become pleasurable, and the signifying thing a thing of beauty.

By the same token, natural selection has designed flowers to communicate with other species, deploying an astonishing array of devices to get the attention of specific insects and birds and even certain mammals.

Some plant species go so far as to impersonate other creatures or things in order to secure pollination or, in the case of carnivorous plants, a meal. To entice flies into its inner sanctum (there to be digested by waiting enzymes), the pitcher plant has developed a weirdly striated maroon-and-white flower that is not at all attractive unless you happen to be attracted to decaying meat. (The flower’s rancid scent reinforces this effect.) Flowers by their very nature traffic in a kind of metaphor, so that even a meadow of wild flowers brims with meanings not of our making. Move into the garden, however, and the meanings only multiply as the flowers take aim not only at the bee’s or the bat’s or the butterfly’s obscure notions of the good or the beautiful, but at ours as well. Sometime long ago the flower’s gift for metaphor crossed with our own and the offspring of that match, that miraculous symbiosis of desire, are the flowers of the garden.

There are flowers around which whole cultures have sprung up, flowers whose form and colour and scent, whose very genes carry reflections of people’s ideas and desires through time like great books. It’s a lot to ask of a plant, that it take on the changing colours of human dreams, and this may explain why only a small handful of them have proved themselves supple and willing enough for the task. The rose, obviously, is one such flower; the peony, particularly in the East, is another.

The orchid certainly qualifies. And then there is the tulip. Arguably there are a couple more (perhaps the lily?), but these few have long been our canonical flowers, the Shakespeares, Miltons and Tolstoys of the plant world that have survived the vicissitudes of fashion to make themselves sovereign and unignorable.

It isn’t obvious that the tulip belongs in this august company of flowers, probably because, in its modern incarnation, it is such a simple, one-dimensional flower, and its rich history of being so much more than that has largely been lost. The only way we have any idea what made a tulip beautiful in Turkish or Dutch or French eyes is through paintings and botanical illustrations. That’s because a tulip that falls out of favour soon goes extinct, since the bulbs don’t reliably come back every year. In general, a strain won’t last unless it is regularly replanted, so the chain of genetic continuity can be broken in a generation.

Ogier Ghislain de Busbecq, Ambassador of the Austrian Hapsburgs to the court of Suleyman the Magnificent in Constantinople, claimed to have introduced the tulip to Europe, sending a consignment of bulbs west from Constantinople soon after he arrived there in 1554. (The word tulip is a corruption of the Turkish word for “turban”.) The fact that the tulip’s first official trip west took it from one court to another—that it was a flower favoured by royalty—may also have contributed to its quick ascendancy, for court fashions have always been especially catching.

But never before or since has a flower—a flower!—taken a star turn on history’s main stage as it did in Holland between 1634 and 1637. It was then that the tulip, still fairly new to the West, unleashed a speculative frenzy that sucked in people at every level of society. A single bulb of Semper Augustus, an intricately feathered red-and-white tulip, changed hands for ten thousand guilders at the height of the mania, a sum that at the time would have bought one of the grandest canal houses in Amsterdam. Semper Augustus is gone from nature, though I have seen paintings of it (the Dutch would commission portraits of venerable tulips they couldn’t afford to buy).

In France in 1608, a miller exchanged his mill for a bulb of Mere Brune. Around the same time a bridegroom accepted a single tulip as the whole of his dowry—happily, we are told; the variety became known as Mariage de ma Fille. Yet tulipomania in France and England never reached the pitch it would in Holland. How can the mad embrace of these particular people and this particular flower be explained?

For good reason, the Dutch have never been content to accept nature as they found it. Lacking in conventional charms and variety, the landscape of the Low Countries is spectacularly flat, monotonous and swampy. In his famous essay on tulipomania, the poet Zbigniew Herbert suggests that the “monotony of the Dutch landscape gave rise to dreams of multifarious, colourful and unusual flora”.

Such dreams could be indulged as never before in 17th-century Holland, as Dutch traders and plant explorers returned home with a parade of exotic new plant species. Botany became a national pastime, followed as closely and avidly as we follow sports today.

Land in Holland being so scarce and expensive, Dutch gardens were miniatures, measured in square feet rather than acres, and frequently augmented with mirrors. The Dutch thought of their gardens as jewel boxes, and in such a space even a single flower—and especially one as erect, singular and strikingly coloured as a tulip—could make a powerful statement.

It is hard to date with precision exactly when tulipomania in Holland started, but the autumn of 1635 marked a turning point. That is when the trade in actual bulbs gave way to the trade in promissory notes: slips of paper listing details of the flowers in question, the dates they would be delivered and their price. Before then, the tulip market followed the rhythm of the season: bulbs could change hands only between the months of June, when they were lifted from the ground and October, when they had to be planted again. Frenzied as it was, the market before 1635 was still rooted in reality: cash money for actual flowers. Now began the windhandel—the wind trade.

Suddenly the tulip trade was a year-round affair and the connoisseurs and growers who shared a genuine interest in the flowers were joined by legions of newly minted “florists” who couldn’t have cared less. These men were speculators who, only days before, had been carpenters and weavers, smiths and cobblers, schoolmasters and lawyers. Rushing to get in on the sure thing, they sold their businesses, mortgaged their homes and invested their life savings in slips of paper representing future flowers. Predictably, the flood of fresh capital into the market drove prices to new heights. In the space of a month the price of a red-and-yellow-striped Gheel ende Root van Leyden leapt from 46 guilders to 515. A bulb of Switsers, a yellow tulip feathered with red, soared from 60 to 1,800 guilders.

Every bubble sooner or later must burst. In Holland the crash came in the winter of 1637, for reasons that remain elusive. But with real tulips about to come out of the ground, paper trades and futures contracts would soon have to be settled—real money would soon have to be exchanged for real bulbs—and the market grew jittery. Within days tulip bulbs were unsellable at any price.

In the aftermath, many Dutch blamed the flower for their folly, as if the tulips had, like the sirens, lured otherwise sensible men to their ruin. This is going too far, though there are plants in the garden that manufacture molecules with the power to change the subjective experience of reality we call consciousness.

Why in the world should this be so—why should evolution yield plants possessing such magic? The manifold and subtle dangers of the garden, to which a creature’s sense of taste offers only the crudest map, are mainly the fruits of strategies plants have devised to defend themselves from animals. Some plant toxins, such as nicotine, paralyse or convulse the muscle of pests which ingest them. Others, such as caffeine, unhinge an insect’s nervous system and kill its appetite. Toxins in datura (and henbane and a great many other hallucinogens) drive a plant’s predators mad, stuffing their brains with visions distracting or horrible enough to take the creatures’ mind off lunch.

By trial and error, animals figure out—sometimes over eons, sometimes over a lifetime—which plants are safe to eat and which forbidden. Evolutionary counter-strategies arise too: digestive processes that detoxify, feeding strategies that minimise the dangers (like that of the goat, which nibbles harmless quantities of many different plants), or heightened powers of observation and memory. This last strategy, at which humans particularly excel, allows one creature to learn from the mistakes and successes of another.

The “mistakes” are, of course, especially instructive, as long as they’re not your own or, if they are, they prove less than fatal. For even some of the toxins that kill in large doses turn out in smaller increments to do interesting things—things that are interesting to animals as well as people. Goats, who will try a little bit of anything, probably deserve credit for the discovery of coffee. Pigeons spacing out on cannabis seeds (a favourite food of many birds) may have tipped off the ancient Chinese to that plant’s special properties.

For most of their history, after all, gardens have been more concerned with the power of plants than with their beauty—with the power, that is, to change us in various ways, for good and for ill.

I once grew opium poppies in my garden—yes, with felonious intent. I also grew marijuana, back when that was no big deal. The demonising of a plant that less than 20 years ago was on the cusp of general acceptance will surely puzzle historians of the future. They will wonder why it was that the “drug war” of the late 20th century was fought mostly over marijuana.

There has been another dramatic change in the story of marijuana since my brief career as a grower and that is the change in the genetics and the culture of the plant. It is richly ironic that the creation of a powerful new taboo against marijuana led directly to the creation of a powerful new plant.

American gardeners have managed to transform “homegrown” domestic marijuana into what is today the most prized and expensive flower in the world. Top-quality sinsemilla sells for upward of $ 500 an ounce, making cannabis the country’s leading cash crop. Two hundred million years ago, there were no flowers. There were plants then, of course—ferns and mosses, conifers and cycads, but these plants didn’t form true flowers or fruit and so couldn’t support many warm-blooded creatures.

Flowers changed everything. The angiosperms, as botanists call the plants that form flowers and then encase seeds, appeared during the Cretaceous period and they spread over the earth with stunning rapidity. Now, instead of relying on wind or water to move genes around, a plant could enlist the help of an animal by striking a grand co-evolutionary compact: nutrition in exchange for transportation. By producing sugars and proteins to entice animals to disperse their seed, the angiosperms multiplied the world’s supply of food energy, making possible the rise of large warm-blooded mammals.

Without flowers, the reptiles, which had prospered in a leafy, fruitless world, would probably still rule. Without flowers, we would not be.

We humans like to think we call all the shots in our gardens; like local forces of natural selection, we decide which species survive and which disappear. Even our grammar makes the terms of the relationship perfectly clear: I choose the plants; I harvest the crops. It’s a world of subjects and objects, and here in the garden, as in nature generally, we are the sovereign subjects.

But the longer I garden, and watch the bees at work beside me, the more I think that that grammar is completely wrong. No doubt the bee, too, thinks he’s got the better of the blossom, but the truth is that the flower has cleverly manipulated him into hauling its pollen from blossom to blossom. This is the classic example of what scientists call coevolution. In a coevolutionary bargain like the one struck by the bees and the flowers, the two parties act on each other to advance their individual interests but wind up trading favors: food for the bee, gene-transport for the plants.

Matters between me and the potatoes I’m planting really aren’t any different. We, too, are partners in a coevolutionary relationship, as we have been since the birth of agriculture. Like the flower, whose form and scent and color have been selected by bees over countless generations, the size and taste of the potato have been selected over generations by us—by Incas and Irishmen and McDonald’s customers. Bees and humans alike have their criteria for selection: symmetry and sweetness for the bee, heft and nutritional value for the human.

The fact that one of us has evolved to become intermittently aware of these desires makes no difference whatsoever to the flower or the potato. All the plants care about is what every organism cares about on the most basic genetic level: making more copies of itself. Through trial and error, these plant species have discovered that the best way to accomplish that is to induce animals—bees, people—to spread their genes far and wide. How? By playing on those animals’ desires, conscious and otherwise. The flowers and spuds that do this most effectively are the ones that get to be fruitful and multiply.

So did I choose to plant “my” potatoes or did the spuds make me do it? Both. I can remember the exact moment the fingerlings seduced me, showing off their knobby charms in the pages of a seed catalog. The tasty-sounding “buttery yellow flesh” sealed it. A trivial, semiconscious event, it never occurred to me that our catalog encounter had any evolutionary consequence whatsoever. But evolution consists of countless trivial, unconscious events, and in the continuing evolution of the potato, my perusal of that catalog is one of them.

As soon as you start looking at things this way, the garden appears before you in a whole new light, the manifold delights it offers to the eye and nose and tongue no longer quite so innocent or passive. All these foods and flowers, which we’re accustomed to regarding as merely the objects of our desire, are also, you realize, acting on us, getting us to do things for them they can’t do for themselves. So who’s really domesticating whom?

I find something heartening in this upside-down perspective. For centuries now, we humans have overestimated our power over nature, with the result that we’ve lost the knack of imagining ourselves in nature, as one species existing in a web of other species—which is, of course, what we still are and will always be. Even the “invention of agriculture”—perhaps the most far-reaching change to this planet we’ve wrought—is something we could never have pulled off without the active participation of other species, the ones that seized the new evolutionary opportunity when it presented itself. So the grasses and cows, the apples and the poppies began to evolve in the direction of our desires—for nutrition, for sweetness, even for intoxication. And we in turn remade the earth (and ourselves) to accommodate them, plowing the soil, chopping down trees and turning into farmers.

The wonder is that we don’t look upon domesticated species—the grasses, the cows, the apples, the dogs—with more respect for their evolutionary cleverness. Why is it the wolf wins our admiration, when it is the dog at our feet that’s natural history’s big winner? So this afternoon when you’re out mowing the lawn, blithely assuming you’ve got all those crew-cut blades marching crisply to your orders, consider all that the grasses have achieved. I’d always assumed that the weekly mowing does the grasses no favor, is strictly for our benefit, but of course mowing’s ecological point is to keep the forest at bay. Along with the fields of wheat and the meadows, lawns are something the grasses have done to us, a most ingenious strategy for conquering the trees.

Claude Hope, known in horticultural circles as “the father of the impatiens,” was a legendary flower breeder and seedsman. A Texan by birth, he died last July, at the age of 93, at Linda Vista, his flower farm in Dulce Nombre de Jesus, Costa Rica. It was there in the 1950′s that Hope founded a seed company that became a pioneer in the mass production of hybrid flower seed, which has proved a boon not only to homeowners looking to colorize their yards on the cheap but, even more so, to the plant species involved.

Consider the impatiens, a species virtually unheard of before it made Claude Hope’s acquaintance. The natural history of this plant can be divided into two eras: Before Claude (B.C.), and After (A.C.). In less than a quarter century A.C., the impatiens has insinuated itself into the American landscape like no other flower before or since, conquering not only its shadier suburban yards but also its strip-mall window boxes and the tire planters in front of America’s nicer filling stations.

B.C., Impatiens wallerana whiled away the eons living the obscure life of a tropical weed native to the stretch of east Africa between Mozambique and Tanganyika. The plant, a denizen of riverbanks and the shady jungle understory, looked nothing like the way it does now: growing to a height of three feet, Impatiens was a gangly upright annual that bore only a few inconspicuous blooms on top, typically in orange. Early on the plant did show some Darwinian talent for getting itself around: it evolved an ingenious, spring-loaded seedpod that, when touched or otherwise stimulated, would—impatiently—fling its seeds halfway across a river. It also somehow managed to get itself transported to Central America, where it took up residence in the shade of fence rows, and where, one day in the 1940′s, it caught the eye of Hope, who would later recall being “immediately enchanted.”

That enchantment would prove to be the impatiens’ big break, its ticket to world horticultural domination. We think of domestication as something people do to certain pliant plants and animals, but it makes just as much sense to view the process as something the more clever plants and animals do to us—a sophisticated evolutionary strategy for increasing their number and range. By evolving in such a way as to gratify human desires, a handful of adaptable plant species have induced certain visionary humans—humans like Luther Burbank and Johnny Appleseed and Claude Hope—to spread their species’ genes far and wide.

We say that Hope “bred” the impatiens, crossing the spindly orange weed over and over again until the plant had evolved into a compact, branching, floriferous mound that blooms its head off in no fewer than eight colors. But of course it was the impatiens that proposed all those chance mutations and genetic combinations in the first place; what Hope did was create a great many interesting sexual opportunities for the plant, and then select the offspring that would survive and prosper.

And survive and prosper they did. Hope introduced the Elfin series in 1969, followed soon thereafter by Super Elfin and the Dazzlers, and within a decade or so the impatiens had acquired a vast new habitat, becoming the most popular bedding plant in America. As is usually the case in such evolutionary success stories, the impatiens had the good fortune to find itself in a wide-open ecological niche, called the Postwar American Suburb. By the early 70′s, the trees and shrubs that the first generation of suburbanites had planted around their new split levels and Capes had matured, and a flower that could thrive in their deepening shade had it made. Before long, Hope’s shade-loving hybrids had won the Darwinian competition to spread their leaves and flowers around the ankles of America’s maples, beneath the poised hindquarters of her dogs and above her decks and patios, spilling out from white polyethylene hanging baskets. Today Americans plant more than 800 million impatiens every year, the equivalent of about 29 square miles. Virtually all those plants can trace their genes to plants grown by Claude Hope at Linda Vista.

A success of such magnitude is bound to inspire derision, and certainly the impatiens has found its ungrateful carpers. (Hello.) Except for the white ones, which have their place in the shade garden, I confess I share the plant snob’s active disdain for the flower. There’s something synthetic about the flat, Day-Glo hues they come in; also, the sheer relentlessness of an impatiens in bloom seems somehow suspect, and very quickly wearies. Planting a bed of impatiens is a step up from putting out plastic plants, I’ll grant you, but it seems to me the two acts exist on the same aesthetic continuum.

We humans tend to be hard on evolution’s winners—the crows and the pigeons, the weeds and the grasses and all the other cosmopolitans in nature who’ve gone far by hitching their wagons to our own. These species never seem to get the respect we shower on the wild, the rare and the vanishing. But the impatiens has prospered by giving us exactly what Claude Hope understood we were looking for in a flower, and if that has turned out to be a plant with the durability and bright relentlessness of plastic, this is not the impatiens’ failing so much as it is its genius.

I saw apples with the hue and heft of olives or cherries, next to glowing yellow Ping-Pong balls and dusky purple berries. I saw a whole assortment of baseballs, oblate and conic, some of them bright as infield grass, others dull as dirt. And I picked big, shiny red fruits that look just like apples, of all things, and seduce you into hazarding a bite.

Hazard is, unfortunately, the word for it: imagine sinking your teeth into a tart potato, or a mushy Brazil nut sheathed in leather (“spitters” is the pomological term of art here), and then tasting one that starts out with high promise on the tongue—now here’s an apple!—only to veer off into a bitterness so profound that it makes the stomach rise even in recollection.

Wild apples, indeed: all of these trees were grown from seeds gathered in Kazakhstan, in Central Asia, the wild apple’s Eden, where botanists now believe the domestic apple has its ancient roots in a species called Malus sieversii. The orchard where I made the acquaintance of M. sieversii is the United States Agriculture Department’s apple collection in Geneva, probably the world’s most comprehensive collection of apple trees.

Here, some 2,500 different varieties have been gathered from all over the world and set out in pairs, as if on a beached botanical ark. The card catalogue to this arboreal archive, on 50 acres, runs the gamut, from Adam’s Pearmain, an antique English variety, to the Zuccalmaglio, a German apple. A browser will find everything from the first named American variety (the 17th-century Roxbury Russet) to experimental crosses that bear only numbers. In this single orchard one can behold the apple’s past and also possibly glimpse its future, for the wild apples I tasted represent the latest accessions to the collection. And if the curator, Philip Forsline, is right, this new germ plasm—the genetic material contained in seeds—will alter the course of apple history.

The discovery in the last decade of the apple’s wild ancestors is big news in the apple world. Problematic as these apples might be on the palate, to breeders they represent unprecedented opportunity. Roger Way, Cornell University’s legendary apple breeder (the father of the Empire and the Jonagold, among many others), says that he expects the genes of these oddballs to yield new cultivars that will be “more disease and insect resistant, more winter hardy, and higher in eating quality” than the apples of today. Breeders are particularly hopeful that in M. sieversii they’ve found the genes that will help apples better withstand their numerous afflictions.

Anyone with an apple in his yard knows how pathetic these trees can be. By September, my own unsprayed apples are grossly deformed by cankers, rusts, pimples, scales, harelips and the exit wounds of coddling moths. No other crop requires quite as much pesticide as commercial apples, which receive upward of a dozen chemical showers a season. Asked how it is that apples seem so poorly adapted to life outdoors, Mr. Forsline said that it hasn’t always been the case, that a century of growing vast orchards populated by a small handful of varieties has rendered the apple less fit than it once was.

“Commercial apples represent only a fraction of the Malus gene pool,” he said, “and it’s been shrinking. A century ago there were several thousand different varieties of apples being grown; now, most of the apples we grow have the same five or six parents: Red Delicious, Golden Delicious, Jonathan, McIntosh and Cox’s Orange Pippin.”

That genetic uniformity makes the apple a sitting duck for its enemies. In the wild, a plant and its pests are continuously coevolving, in a dance of resistance and conquest that can have no ultimate victor. But coevolution freezes in an orchard of grafted trees, since they are genetically identical. The problem is that the apples no longer get to have sex, which is nature’s way of testing out fresh genetic combinations. The viruses, bacteria and fungi keep at it, however, continuing to evolve until they’ve overcome whatever resistance the apples may have once possessed.

Suddenly, total victory is in the pest’s sight, unless people come to the tree’s rescue with the heavy hand of modern chemistry.

THE solution is for us to help the apple evolve artificially,” Mr. Forsline explained, by bringing in fresh genes through breeding. Which is precisely why it is so important to preserve as wide a range of apple genes as possible. Since it takes decades to develop a new apple variety, it will be some time before we know for sure whether the Kazakh trees hold the key to a better apple. Already, though, plant pathologists at Cornell have determined that some of the wild trees are resistant to fire blight. The challenge now is to breed that trait into an edible apple.

“It’s a question of biodiversity,” Mr. Forsline said, as we walked down rows of antique trees, tasting apples as we talked. Every time an old apple variety drops out of cultivation, or a wild apple forest succumbs to development (as is happening today in Kazakhstan), a set of genes vanishes from the earth. There would be no Fuji today if apple fanciers hadn’t preserved the Ralls Janet, an antique apple (grown by Thomas Jefferson) that happens to contain a gene for late blooming that Japanese breeders were looking for. (The Fuji’s other parent is the Red Delicious.)

We’re accustomed to thinking of biodiversity in connection with wild species, but the biodiversity of the crop species on which we depend is no less important. The greatest biodiversity of any crop is apt to be found in the place where it first evolved, where nature first experimented with what an apple, or potato or peach, could be.

The recent discovery of the apple’s “center of diversity,” as botanists call such a place, was actually a rediscovery: in 1929, Nikolai I. Vavilov, the great Russian botanist, had identified the wild apple’s Eden in the forests near what was then Alma-Ata (now known as Almaty), in Kazakhstan. “All around the city one could see a vast expanse of wild apples covering the foothills,” he wrote. “One could see with his own eyes that this beautiful site was the origin of the cultivated apple.”

Vavilov fell victim to Stalinism’s wholesale repudiation of genetics (he died in prison in 1943), and his discovery was lost to science until the fall of Communism. In 1989, one of his last surviving students, Aimak Djangaliev, invited American plant scientists to Kazakhstan to see the wild apples that he had been studying during the years of Soviet rule. Mr. Djangaliev was 80 at the time, and wanted their help in saving the great stands of M. sieversii.

The American scientists were astonished to find 300-year-old trees 50 feet tall with the girth of oaks, some of them bearing apples as big and red as modern cultivars. “In the towns, apple trees were coming up in the cracks of the sidewalks,” Mr. Forsline said. “You see some of these apples and feel sure that you’re looking at the ancestor of the Golden Delicious, or the McIntosh.”

Mr. Forsline and his colleagues made several trips to the area, each time returning with cuttings and seeds. The Silk Route passed through Kazakhstan, and botanists now speculate that centuries ago nomads and traders took wild apples with them on their journeys west. Along the way, M. sieversii probably hybridized with at least two species of tiny, green sour apples, M. orientalis and M. sylvestris; the result is the apple domesticated by the Romans and eventually carried to America.

American settlers played a crucial part in the apple’s progress. Since their chief interest was hard cider, they didn’t bother much with grafts, planting apples instead from seed. Because of the vagaries of apple genetics, most seedling trees produce inedible fruit, good for little but cider. Yet if you plant enough of them, as Johnny Appleseed set about doing, you’re bound to get a few exceptional ones. And that Americans did.

Most of the great American varieties—the Newtown Pippin, Rhode Island Greening, Jonathan, Baldwin and Red Delicious—were chance seedlings found in cider orchards in the 18th and 19th centuries. The Geneva orchard is, among other things, a museum of the apple’s golden age in America; to wander along its leafy corridors is to set off on a multisensory voyage of the historical imagination.

I spent the better part of a recent morning browsing the rows of trees, tasting all the famous old apples I’d read about, fruits that, you quickly appreciate, are as much cultural as natural artifacts. One bite of an Esopus Spitzenberg disclosed Thomas Jefferson’s idea of the perfect apple: spicy and hard. I discovered that the original Delicious, called the Hawkeye by its discoverer, was crisper, paler and not nearly so saccharine as its flashier offspring. The aromatic Golden Russet, considered one of the great cider apples of all time, has the coarse flesh of a pear, running with juice as rich (and sticky) as honey. Much was lost when civilization decided that russeting—a matte brownish mottling of the skin—was a fatal flaw in an apple.

So, were the old apples better? It’s not quite that simple. Many of the ones I tasted were unqualified spitters, and only a few of the oldies could hold a candle to, say, the Macoun or the Jonagold. Yet the old apples offer a striking catalogue of flavors (apples tinged with nutmeg and riesling, mango and nuts) and colors, intriguing qualities that have been trampled in the rush to breed apples brimming with sugar and red pigment.

Tasting these relics, you realize just how much else an apple can do besides being sweet and red. You also realize what a high cultural achievement it is to transform a tart potato into a delight of the human eye and tongue. The Geneva orchard is a testament to domestication, our knack for marrying the fruits of nature to the desires of culture. Yet the story of the modern apple, which has become utterly dependent on us to keep its natural enemies at bay, suggests that domestication can be overdone.

When we rely on too few genes for too long, a plant loses some of its aptitude for getting along on its own. As Mr. Way, the Cornell apple breeder, put it, the modern apple’s “vulnerability to a surprise attack is tremendous.” A surprise attack is precisely what got the potato in Ireland in the 1840′s; what saved it from that particular blight were genes for resistance found in wild Peruvian potatoes.

But what happens when all the wild potatoes and wild apples are gone? All the biotechnology in the world can’t create a new gene. Which is why Mr. Forsline is bent on saving all manner of apples, good, bad, indifferent and, above all, wild.

In the best of all possible worlds, we’d be preserving the wild apples’ habitat in the Kazakh wilderness. In the next best world, though, we’d preserve the quality of wildness itself, something on which it turns out even domestication depends.

Luckily for us, wildness can be cultivated, can thrive even in the straight lines and right angles of an apple orchard.

HEADLINE: Going Resource-Picking

IF you are interested in growing antique varieties of apples, you can order trees from the Southmeadow Fruit Garden in Baroda, Mich., (616) 422-2411, or from the Sonoma Antique Apple Nursery in Healdsburg, Calif., (707) 433-6420.

To taste antique or otherwise unusual apples, you can call Applesource in Chapin, Ill., at (800) 588-3854. You can choose from a catalogue offering more than 100 varieties, each scrupulously characterized, or let Applesource put together a sampler. The company will ship apples now through January.

An excellent account of the history of the apple, from Kazakhstan to the Red Delicious and beyond, is “Apples: An Engaging Look at the World’s Most Popular Fruit,” by Frank Browning, just published by North Point Press ($24).

That’s right, there are no private lawns in Seaside. The town’s strict design guidelines prohibit them. So the set designers for “The Truman Show” had to rip out the garden of native plants surrounding Truman Burbank’s perfect little house on Natchez Street in order to roll out the carpet of Kentucky bluegrass his cliched existence demanded. For how was this perfectly ordinary American going to spend his Saturday mornings if he had no lawn to mow?

In the last few years a million or so words have been written pointing up the environmental and philosophical folly of the Great American lawn. Lawns consume unconscionable amounts of energy and chemicals, while producing little more than landscape conformity and social anxiety. People complain—but people continue to mow, as if it were their solemn civic duty.

Except, that is, in Seaside.

By permitting only native species in front yards, and by outlawing sod, Seaside has seceded from the great green river of lawn that joins Americans, yard by unfenced yard, from Maine to California. In March, I spent a couple of days at Seaside, and though it would be foolish to proclaim I’ve seen the future, I had a vision of what post-lawn America might look like.

Much about Seaside was revolutionary when it was founded 17 years ago, but perhaps nothing about it remains as radical as its landscape: the exuberant thickets of native plants (live oak, Southern magnolia, beach rosemary and a host of others) that threaten to burst their tidy picket enclosures. By now the town’s neotraditional houses look downright familiar, for the simple reason that Seaside helped bring back such traditional elements as the front porch.

At the same time the town-planning concepts that Robert Davis, Seaside’s developer, and Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, its designers, pioneered here—houses on tiny lots pulled up close to walkable streets leading to public spaces—have gone on to inspire a national movement.

But if the reach of Seaside’s influence has blunted the novelty of its architecture and layout, the town’s gardens—just now coming into their own—have lost none of their power to astonish. Seaside’s landscaping may well be the most revolutionary thing about the place. It’s one thing to challenge the architecture and planning of the American subdivision, but it’s quite another to abolish something as fundamental as the American front lawn.

When I asked Mr. Davis why a real estate developer hoping to sell houses to Americans would challenge their inalienable right to mow, he smiled. “I suppose I didn’t know enough to know how crazy it was,” he said.

Besides being a developer, Mr. Davis was a child of the 60′s, an ardent environmentalist who happened to inherit 80 acres of scrubby Gulf Coast beachfront and decided to experiment with them. When Douglas Duany, Seaside’s landscape architect (and Andres Duany’s younger brother), first met with Mr. Davis to discuss the town’s landscape style, Mr. Davis simply pointed out the window at the low, windswept scrub clinging to the sugary white sand and said, “I sort of like what’s out there now.”

This was 1982, years before nurseries in the area began carrying the sand live oak, woody goldenrod and wild lupins that make up the local scrub forest. Yet, growing turf on a barrier island would have been, in Mr. Davis’s words, “dumber than dirt.” For one thing, there was no dirt, only sand.

So Douglas Duany drew up a list of the plants Seaside would allow, and turf grass was not among them. To preserve as much of the existing vegetation as possible, builders were told they could disturb no more than a four-foot zone surrounding the house. “One contractor almost took my head off when I told him he couldn’t simply scrape the lot with a bulldozer and fix it later with grass and shrubs,” Mr. Duany told me.

Initially, Seaside’s sales force encountered some resistance, too, though they soon learned the “grass question” was a good way to identify serious buyers. “Prospects who gagged on the ‘no lawn’ rule usually had trouble with the rest of the concept, too,” one broker explained. Which makes sense: Seaside posed a challenge to the whole suburban regime of private castles surrounded by vast moats of lawn; those home buyers who welcomed the idea of shrinking their private realms were the ones least wedded to their Toros.

The fact that only a tenth of Seaside’s 300-plus families live here year round also helped, since the landscape rules promised homeowners almost complete freedom from yard chores.

AT first, I didn’t get it when Mr. Davis described Seaside’s garden style as “Gertrude Jekyll gone native.” Walking down one of Seaside’s older streets for the first time, I wasn’t sure these yards even qualified as gardens—many of them looked untended and disorganized, as if the “gardener” had merely thrown a fence around a patch of the scrub forest to keep it from escaping. Yet, the more I walked, the more these yards came into focus as exquisitely subtle gardens.

Actually, it wasn’t until I went for a jog through the scrub forest just beyond Seaside’s town line that I understood the Seaside yard wasn’t simply a restoration of the native plant community but a carefully edited representation of it. It was, like all gardens, a metaphor of nature.

Where the real scrub formed a low, impenetrable thicket, Seaside’s trees, protected from the salt spray by the architecture, have by now risen well above head height, creating an agreeably shady canopy that shelters walkers. The contorted branches of the live oaks throw webs of spooky shadows against the freshly painted houses. Since much of Seaside’s architecture tends to err on the side of sweetness and light, this unexpectedly Gothic inflection renders the houses more interesting, less wholesome.

The typical Seaside garden is layered vertically. Beneath the canopy of oak and magnolia leaves is a relatively open space at eye level that affords a welcome sense of prospect; then, around waist level, the density resumes, with informal plantings of beach rosemary, woody goldenrod, lupins, gopher apple and bluestem grass. A few small areas have been carved out for barbecues, benches or paths, but for the most part, human life is meant to take place on porches and decks—realms of Culture set within patches of seemingly unreconstructed Nature.

“Gardening by subtraction” is how Randy Harelson explained the method. A garden designer by training, Mr. Harelson moved from New England to Seaside six years ago. Nowadays he consults with the Town Council on horticultural issues, designs private gardens for homeowners and runs the Gourd Garden, a native-plant nursery two miles east of Seaside.

“The landscape here gets very little credit for putting Seaside on the map,” he told me. “But if you try looking at the architecture by itself, mentally removing the scrub and replacing it with lawn and foundation plantings, it gets boring very quickly.”

The point is proven by Truman Burbank’s intentionally trite yard, as well as by most of the new houses rising on the west side, where trees have yet to subdue the noisy parliament of Architectural Expression.

It’s the rub between the neat white picket fences and the luxuriant, heedless plantings that gives Seaside’s best gardens their power. Remove the tidy enclosures and the plantings would immediately look slovenly or go slack—the fate of all too many wild or native gardens.

Gertrude Jekyll understood it wasn’t enough to bring England’s native plants into the garden; they needed the frame of architecture if they hoped to make the leap from meadow to garden. The tight, controlling picket fences set off Seaside’s raucous planting much the same way that Sir Edwin Lutyens’s formal walls and paths set off Gertrude Jekyll’s relaxed perennial borders. At Seaside the juxtapositions reach an almost violent pitch that I suspect would have popped Miss Jekyll’s spectacles. But the underlying principle is the same.

MR. HARELSON says Seaside residents have taken the town’s landscape to heart, especially now that the tree canopy has matured. “The challenge was getting people to prune from below to create an understory, rather than from above, which is what most of us are accustomed to,” he said.

Definitive proof that Seaside’s landscape has set deep roots in the community came a few years back when the town planners decided that the scrub crowding the median strip of Seaside Avenue, a main axis, should be replaced with grass. Residents on the avenue rebelled, defending their corridor of wilderness in a battle that some say marked the moment when Seaside—residents and plants alike—slipped from the control of developers and designers.

Mr. Davis, for one, regards this as healthy, part of the town’s inevitable passing from idea into history. He described a recent conference at which a visiting English architect criticized Seaside’s landscaping. “He told us it was time to cut everything back—hard—since the foliage was now obscuring the architecture,” Mr. Davis said. “We had to explain that that’s exactly what people like about it. There are so many tourists passing by that our porches would be fishbowls if not for the trees.”

Thanks to the town’s celebrity, sure to increase with the release of “The Truman Show,” a porch wreathed in a tangle of oak and magnolia is a blessing. The sheer wildness of Seaside’s gardens is thus an inadvertent byproduct of the town’s success.

As I walked Seaside’s streets, I wondered why Seaside’s many imitators have so far failed to imitate it. Other New Urbanist communities have managed to shrink the front lawn and fence it in, but I don’t know of another town in America that has dared to do away with it entirely. In fact, at Disney’s town of Celebration—where Truman Burbank would have fit in without changing a thing—the rules actually require homeowners to maintain a minimum amount of lawn.

Seaside’s landscape is a special case, one that may not lend itself to imitation. It has taken everything from the abundance of gawkers to the paucity of humus to the conviction of its slightly naive developer to make lawns untenable here. It is also true that landscape styles, rooted as they are in the particularities of place, never traveled as easily as architectural styles. Even so, Seaside points a way, one way, and if we Americans ever do declare our independence from the tyranny of lawns, we will look back at Seaside as our exuberantly overgrown…

This notion that the garden is a path out into the larger world is a peculiarly American idea. For most of history, and in most of the rest of civilization, gardens have been conceived as walled-off refuges from the world, places of escape rather than engagement. Maybe that’s why Americans never went for the hortus conclusus, preferring to bring down the traditional walls and fences so that our gardens might, in every sense, connect. Our lawns and even our compost piles have a politics, and moral considerations color our choice of plants (useful or ornamental? native or exotic?) and horticultural practice (chemical or organic?). True, it can get to be a little much—and occasionally it does, as in a couple of this season’s more ideologically minded garden books. But when a writer is as deft as Allen Lacy, the connections traced between a cramped yard in southern New Jersey and such far-flung concerns as species extinction, the symbolism of the American front yard, the migration of plants, the act of naming and the rub of seasonal and biographical time in a garden can be thrilling to follow.

The best of this season’s garden books all share this inclination to find a world of meaning in even the most modest garden, though Lacy takes the prize for finding the greatest variety of meanings. Only when you get to the very end of “The Inviting Garden,” which unfolds as unhurriedly as a Saturday morning schmooze over the back fence with a particularly amiable neighbor, does the ambition of Lacy’s project emerge. He has written nothing less than a defense of gardening, in the classical sense of that word, the one that we associate with Philip Sidney. Lacy’s method is to show us the beauty of gardening’s three faces in turn: its ability to delight the senses (with a chapter each on the Big Five), instruct the intellect (taking up plant hunting, naming and symbolism, as well as American landscape design) and elevate the spirit (chiefly by planting us in time and place). Cynthia Woodyard’s ungushy photographs effectively underscore Lacy’s ideas.

But although “The Inviting Garden” is a genuinely philosophical book (Lacy was in fact a professor of philosophy long before he established himself as the dean of American garden writers), it doesn’t have a didactic, pushy or theoretical sentence in it. Lacy’s writing is a model of clarity and modesty, and all of his insights are rooted in the soil of his long experience growing specific plants in a specific place. (Whatever the horticultural equivalent of being well read is—well planted?—Lacy surely is that.) Both the new and the old gardener will find much to think about here, and to savor.

Laura Simon makes a different set of connections in DEAR MR. JEFFERSON: Letters From a Nantucket Gardener (Crown, $23). As the title suggests, her interest is historical, and her method epistolary: the book takes the form of a half-dozen letters to Thomas Jefferson, the secular patron saint of American gardeners. (“No occupation is so delightful to me as the culture of the earth,” he wrote in a letter most of us can recite by heart, “and no culture comparable to that of the garden.”) The conceit, which for the most part she manages to pull off quite nicely, allows Simon to write casually about doings in her own Nantucket garden (her passion, like Jefferson’s, is for vegetables) and to wander down some of the byways of American garden history. Simon follows in the tradition of Eleanor Perenyi and Katharine S. White, writers who departed from their accustomed lines of work to offer a single book about gardening, an avid testament by a confirmed yet highly knowledgeable amateur.

In Simon’s case, the garden book is a break from the writing of historical novels, and this background serves her well: the historical passages are swift, sure-footed and fascinating.

Those that work best are the ones in which Jefferson himself plays a role, like the history of the tomato (which he helped introduce to America—or, really, reintroduce, since its roots are Mexican); the development of mail-order seeds (Bernard M’Mahon, father of the seed catalogue, was T.J.’s Burpee) and the fate of the vegetable varieties that Jefferson grew at Monticello, some of which are still grown as heirlooms, while many others—like the Ravensworth pea he used to rave about—have been lost forever. Here planting and then tasting a tomato Jefferson cherished becomes an exercise of the historical imagination.

The conceit starts to creak only when Simon needs to impart information about Monticello her correspondent well knows, such as the length of the kitchen garden (1,000 feet) or the “interminable procession of friends, relatives and rubberneckers who would appear on your Palladian doorsteps.” At first her efforts to describe the modern world—McDonald’s, environmentalism, health fads—to someone living 200 years ago seemed a stretch, but after a while you get used to it, and start to appreciate how writing to Jefferson allows Simon to sneak up on our own times, see them afresh. Her account of the contemporary American kitchen garden, brimming with the food plants of a dozen different cultures and historical periods, not only would have wowed Thomas Jefferson, whose garden and table were as radically cosmopolitan as he was, but also succeeds in convincing the reader that we are indeed in the throes of “yet another gardening resurgence.”

STALKING THE WILD AMARANTH: Gardening in the Age of Extinction (Holt, $25) is, as the subtitle gives fair warning, a book with an agenda. Janet Marinelli, director of publishing at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, bids us to see the connections between our yards, teeming with exotic plants and smothered in lawn, and the worldwide decline of biological diversity. Our yards are part of the problem, having obliterated native habitats and contributed to the homogenization of the world’s flora, yet, reconceived, they might also become part of the solution. This is a tendentious premise, yet Marinelli is so reasonable, and such a breezy writer, that the reader is happy to follow her deep into the thickets of horticultural politics.

As the Communist Party was to the 30′s or the Vietnam War was to the 60′s, so native plants are the defining political issue to contemporary gardening. Do you believe it is morally responsible to plant a tea rose or burning bush in your yard at a time when so much of our native flora is threatened by the proliferation of such alien species? You might have thought those particular horses are already out of the barn and well down the road, as indeed they have been since 1492: perhaps a third of the plants one encounters in the landscape of the eastern United States, from the roadside day lilies and Queen Anne’s lace to the lawn grasses and the apple trees, are alien species. (Virtually everything still green in October is European in origin, having evolved under milder autumn circumstances.) Even so, the advocates of native-plant gardening contend that we’re obliged to undo the damage, and our yards are a good place to start. (In the interest of full disclosure, I should mention that Marinelli and the author of the next book here take me to task for a 1994 article in The Times Magazine in which I criticized native plantmania and drew a connection between nativism in horticulture and politics.)

In the most persuasive part of Marinelli’s gentle polemic, she argues that garden design has always reflected a civilization’s understanding of nature, yet our own esthetics have so far failed to keep pace with the lessons of ecology. (Garden practice is another matter: organic methods have become increasingly well established.) Most contemporary garden design can still be classified as either classical, expressing in its formal geometry a rationalist view of nature’s essential order, or romantic, modeled on our subjective experience of nature. What’s needed now is an ecological garden, one that “won’t try to imitate, like classical gardens, what nature is, or, like romantic gardens, what it looks like,” she writes. Rather it must “act like nature, must do what nature does.”

That this is easier said than done is amply demonstrated in PARADISE BY DESIGN: Native Plants and the New American Landscape (North Point/Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25), by Kathryn Phillips. Phillips, a journalist (she is the author of “Tracking the Vanished Frogs: An Ecological Mystery”) rather than a garden writer, has written a book that aims to be to landscape design what Tracy Kidder’s “House” was to carpentry. Her unobtrusive narrator trails Joni Janecki, a young California landscape architect, as she designs gardens for the Sands family in Montecito, the Hewlett-Packard Company’s corporate offices in Palo Alto and a public park in Salinas. Janecki is deeply committed to using native plants in her work, though the story of the Sands job suggests what an uphill struggle it is to persuade clients to give up on the Old World plants, lawns and all the other trappings of landscape tidiness that still dominate American dreams of paradise. The reader is surprised at the end of “Paradise by Design” when the Sands actually ditch most of Joni’s ecologically sensitive design in favor of a big old lawn with a sprinkler system.

Luckily for Phillips, Hewlett-Packard and the city of Salinas keep the environmental faith, and we get to look on as a series of habitat gardens take shape. (Though because there are no illustrations, we can only guess what they look like.) Phillips is a very good journalist, and she’s done her homework, not only on the habits of native and invasive plants but on the history and practice of landscape architecture and the workings of the American nursery industry (there’s a fascinating section on the marketing of the new carpet rose). The book makes you realize just how little legwork goes into most writing on gardening in this country, and it’s refreshing to read some genuine reporting on the subject instead of the usual first-person philosophizing. Phillips has been unfortunate in her choice of a hero, however, because much as we come to root for plucky Joni Janecki as she battles the forces of horticultural reaction, she doesn’t have what it takes to carry this book on her shoulders. Maybe it has something to do with being such a visual person, but Janecki is virtually inarticulate, both about the value of native plants and the process of design. “I can see it and I can see what it looks like,” she explains (if that is the right word) in the heat of designing the Sands’ garden, “but I don’t really know what it is. It would help to know that, I think, especially as I go along.” Agreed. Fortunately for us, Phillips keeps Joni’s lines to a wincing minimum and fills the second half of her book with rich, well-reported digressions on the tensions between the business and ecology of the American landscape.

Lest you conclude all gardeners have forsaken human pleasure for the sake of planetary health, I heartily recommend spending some time in A TUSCAN PARADISE (Stewart, Tabori & Chang, $35), a dazzling photographic essay that takes the coffeetable gardening book to a new level. Irresistible though they may be, picture books on gardens are seldom more than skin deep, the horticultural equivalent of fashion photography, if not pornography. Marina Schinz, whom readers, or lookers, may remember from her stunning work in “Visions of Paradise” (1985), has opted this time around for depth over breadth, choosing to train her lens on a single not-famous garden—Valle Pinciole, near Tuscany’s border with Umbria—over a period of three years. The result is a remarkably intimate portrait of a place that captures not only its considerable beauty, but also the rhythms of its seasons, as well as the everyday life and backstage labor that ordinarily don’t make it into published gardens. (What a novelty it is to see the gardener, Gian Paolo, pruning the boxwood hedges, clippings scattered beneath his plumb line.)

Valle Pinciole, which is the creation and weekend retreat of two Roman friends of Schinz, is a virtual encyclopedia of garden styles, a densely layered landscape of hedged outdoor rooms, pergolas, mazes, orchards, rosewalks (395 roses are in residence), olive groves, an orangerie, a white garden, an herb garden, a Japanese cherry garden and an English Jekyll garden—indeed, just about everything but a native plant garden. Think of it as a habitat garden for classically educated humans.

It would be easy to dismiss “A Tuscan Paradise” as yet another volume of Mediterranean fantasy for the Peter Mayle and Frances Mayes crowd. But Schinz’s accomplishment has been to make her subject seem romantic and completely real at the same time, to render a Pierre de Ronsard rose in such a way that it recalls the sumptuousness of all roses and yet is never anything less than its heartbreakingly specific, timebound self. Her scrupulous eye reminds us how a garden is a real place before it is a representation, which suggests another sort of connection our gardens encourage us to make, the one between the here-and-now of a place and the there-and-then of what Mirabel Osler once called the infinity of gardens.

Which reminds me that Osler’s 1989 book, A GENTLE PLEA FOR CHAOS (Arcade, $19.95), is one of two out-of-print classics of modern English garden writing that we’re fortunate to have back on the shelf this season. Not especially gentle, Osler’s volume of essays sent a blast of fresh air through the stuffy rooms of the English gardening world when it was first published. This is less a handbook of advice (though what there is of that is excellent) than a miscellany of “thoughts” that have “sprouted while I have been deadheading roses, visiting gardens or buying a pair of socks.” Starting out from the garden Osler made with her late husband, Michael, in Shropshire, the narrative comes and goes as freely a cat, touching down on everything from garden design to weather, the quirks of particular plants and gardeners, botanical illustration, laziness, the compulsion of water, garden visiting and even television westerns. This is a smart, spirited, gorgeously written and above all funny book, so open-minded (her outlook is refreshingly international), personal and passionate as to make one wonder if Mirabel Osler is really an English gardener after all.

By contrast, Graham Stuart Thomas’s TREES IN THE LANDSCAPE (Sagapress, $35) is English to its roots, an authoritative treatise on “how tree planting makes landscapes happen,” written in the great tradition of Humphry Repton and Capability Brown. Thomas, who has spent the better part of 30 years supervising the restoration of gardens for the National Trust, looks at big trees as if they were so many tubes of paint in the hands of the picturesque master, focusing on how the particular form, texture and color of the various species contribute to the look and mood of a landscape. This is gardening in broad strokes for the long haul, and while “Trees in the Landscape” reads as if it has been written for gardeners with lots of land and money and help, even the gardener planting a sapling would do well to consult this wise and handsomely illustrated volume about the trees that connect our gardens to the future.

At various times over the last several years, developers have threatened to slice up the valley’s picturesque views and sell them to weekenders from New York. Thanks largely to the efforts of the nine-year-old Kent Land Trust, a considerable chunk of the landscape has been saved from the overdevelopment that has already spoiled much of Route 7. These days, however, the threat to an agricultural landscape in New England comes from a new quarter: the second-growth forest, which is steadily marching down from the wooded hilltops to reclaim the fields for itself.

Kent’s little valley is an epitome of America’s middle landscape, poised between nature and civilization, and it is precisely this “middleness” that the Kent Land Trust is fighting to preserve. As Harmon Smith, the president of the trust, explained it: “To protect the rural character of a town like this, we realized it wasn’t enough to stop development. You also have to keep the farmland open.” The problem is, how do you keep farmland open when there are no longer enough farmers left to mow the fields and thin the hedgerows?

Like many conservation organizations around the country, the Kent Land Trust has discovered that it is no longer adequate to lock up a precious piece of land and throw away the key. To preserve America’s dwindling landscape of family farms it is often necessary to help out struggling farmers and, when that fails, to take up arms against the advancing forest. “You can’t go away and simply forget about these places,” Mr. Smith said, “because they won’t stay the same.”

Even wilderness preservation often requires human intervention—to reintroduce predators or weed out exotic species. Increasingly, people interested in saving the land find themselves not only defending it but actively “gardening” it—an approach that can get them into hot water with environmentalists who would just as soon let nature take its course. Who would think that touching up a hedgerow would be cause for controversy?

The Kent Land Trust’s latest venture into what might be called interventionist preservation is its Adopt-a-View program, whose kickoff brought a dozen or so of us out to the hedgerows lining Route 7 last month. Our purpose was to thin a forbidding tangle of grapevine, multiflora rose, sumac and maple saplings that had grown up between the roadside trees, blinding a picturesque vista of cornfields backed by the broad hump of Cobble Mountain. This particular view had been adopted by the Kent Greenhouse, a local garden center, which had contributed the services of a landscaping crew and equipment for the day. Thanks to the help, we had the hedgerow nicely edited, and the view of the fields restored, by the time we broke for lunch.

Claire Murphy, a retired public relations executive who dreamed up the Adopt-a-View program and stopped by to supervise, was delighted. She had instructed our team to “open up the hedgerows, but please, let’s not make it look like Scarsdale.” Ms. Murphy used to live in Scarsdale, and she has some of the bearing of a Westchester matron; I was reminded of an Irish Barbara Bush. “It should be tidy, I told them, but not too tidy,” she said.

In times past no one would have needed to “adopt” such a view or to make choices regarding its esthetics. It would simply have persisted, as it has for half a millennium, by dint of farmers going about their chores. The challenge today is to preserve the character of such countryside at a time when the farmers who maintained that character are mostly a memory. Suddenly, people find that they have no choice but to make choices and that they need chain saws and pruning shears to save the land from . . . well, from nature itself.

This particular irony has not escaped the critics of the Kent Land Trust. A recent editorial in The Litchfield County Times, a local weekly, took the Adopt-a-View program to task for, of all things, “endeavoring to subvert the natural order.” The editorial suggested there was something presumptuous, if not anthropocentric, about adopting and restoring views that nature had seen fit to reconquer. “Should blackberry briars be cut, for example, but not Queen Anne’s lace?” the editorial asked. “Who gets to decide which plants have merit and which don’t?”

Considering that The Litchfield County Times is as stout a champion of the environment as the Land Trust, its criticism came as something of a surprise. But like many environmentalists, the newspaper seems to regard what happens to any piece of land as a kind of zero-sum contest between Us and Nature, in which the gain of one party can come only at the expense of the other. Following this line of reasoning to its logical—and, to me, lunatic—conclusion, the editorial likened the Land Trust’s position “to that of a developer claiming a shopping plaza is more widely appreciated than a swamp.” In other words, if you’re going to introduce human preference you might as well go whole hog and put up a shopping mall.

When the issue is as clear-cut as a development that threatens a wilderness, the zero-sum model might fit the facts. But what happens when the alternatives are a little less stark, when the choice is between a 500-year-old working landscape and a second-growth forest?

I suppose that when you don’t trust yourself to make wise decisions about the land, letting nature decide the matter is an appealingly straightforward approach. And yet, while I was struggling to yank grapevines out of the trees, I wondered if it would really have been more “natural” for us to do nothing here, to instead let the forest have its way.

You see, I’d noticed that the hedgerow I was working on was teeming with nonnative species—Japanese honeysuckle, Russian olive, multiflora rose, even a vagrant euonymus vine—all brought by Europeans. These were the species that would triumph if we did nothing here. Yet, a landscape dominated by these exotics would be no less a cultural artifact—a product of human intervention—than a hedgerow or meadow.

In time, a century or longer, this field of exotic brush would be succeeded by second-growth forest—a kind of landscape that would be far more novel here than a patchwork of fields and hedgerows. For this particular landscape has been under continual cultivation for hundreds and possibly thousands of years. According to the English settlers who first laid eyes on it in 1730 it was “charming and picturesque” farmland even then. Human beings have been actively shaping this land for so long that to start excluding them now would be unnatural.

I’ve heard people in town say that preserving farmland just because it’s pretty is an exercise in nostalgia for a world that is not coming back. Certainly it’s easy to make light of city folk fighting to preserve farmland that their very presence has put in jeopardy—since it is partly the run-up in property values that has made farming unviable. The farmers who stick it out often find themselves working to keep other people’s land open expressly to gratify an urban taste for looking at farmland.

Dave Arno, who told me he is the last full-time farmer in Kent, farms several of the Land Trust’s fields; he also mows fields for Anne Bass, who owns several hundred acres of Kent farmland. It wouldn’t be wrong to say that Mr. Arno is now as much in the business of producing picturesque views as he is in producing milk.

The paradox is not lost on Mr. Arno; he understands full well that he has himself stepped into the picturesque view. “Cars will slow down on Route 7 when I’m cutting hay,” he told me, smiling. “People like to see a farmer.”

Part of what people like to see, I think, is a middle landscape where humans and nature long ago reached some sort of accommodation. There are sociobiologists who contend that the attraction of such land, which more closely resembles the open, tree-studded savannas on which humans evolved than the shadowy forests they have usually feared, is hard-wired into their nature. But even if the preference is purely cultural, it seems to me worth honoring. The very existence of a working landscape that has persisted quite this long is something to marvel at, and preserve, if only as a lesson or reminder. All this time, people have managed to keep this land in good health, taking care not to tip it too far in the direction of either wildness or civilization.

That balancing act is beautiful to behold. The farmers who performed it are disappearing from this picture, it’s true. But perhaps the gardeners, with their chain saws and loppers and bush hogs, can take over, keeping the memory, and the model, of the middle landscape alive.

Moral gardeners are still very much with us—just look at the countless tracts on “natural gardening” or the continuing battle over whether Americans should welcome “alien species” to our horticultural shores—but to judge by this season’s harvest of garden books, the party of pure gardening pleasure appears finally to be finding its voice. (Though perhaps I should say image, for most of these books rely as heavily on pictures as on words to tell their stories.) Could this be a sign of a new maturity in American gardening, an indication that we’re finally getting over our moral queasiness about altering the landscape for no loftier purpose than to please ourselves?

As it happens, this season’s most compelling case for the pleasures of the garden comes from England, though I can’t think of a garden book much less English than THE SENSUOUS GARDEN (Simon & Schuster, $32.50). Montagu Don is a rising star in English horticultural circles (he contributes a gardening column to The Observer and frequently appears on television), part of a generation of English gardeners who are willing to declare in public that Gertrude Jekyll is not God, that the Chelsea Flower Show is a bore, and that—most shocking of all—the rest of the world might actually have something to teach the English about gardening.

Indeed, “The Sensuous Garden” is the sort of exuberant, Emersonian book an American gardener might have written—if, that is, American gardeners had the perfect horticultural confidence of the British. “Have faith in your own responses and garden for your own private pleasure,” Don urges his readers. He can sound like Martin Luther nailing his theses to the High Church of English Gardening: “Throw away the gardening manuals and trust yourself,” he writes. “There is no examiner, no moral worth cast over your horticultural efforts. Gardening is like sex: if everyone involved is happy, then you are doing it right.”

This is a message we very much need to hear now, and Don packages it with exactly the sort of images to make converts of his readers: paging through “The Sensuous Garden” is itself a sensuous experience. The photographs are stunning, as they’d better be in such a book, but Don has put up more than the usual gorgeous garden wallpaper: most of these images are highly specific and factual, the kind that repay multiple looks. Fittingly, the book is organized according to the five senses (plus a sixth he calls “intuition”), and each section does an admirable job of evoking the faculty in question in words as well as images. You might expect the text of a book like this to be either vapid or gooey, but Don is a precise, observant and knowledgeable writer who keeps his metaphors and facts nicely poised. I learned things—that bees perceive red as black, that orange roses are doomed to fail because they “make an unhappy combination of brashness and sophistication”—but mostly I was reminded of things, such as the excellent fact that “stones smell, and gravel releases its own bony scent as it is raked.” Montagu Don wakes us up to the sensuous possibilities of our gardens, to the point where one begins seriously to entertain the possibility that the moralism and didacticism of so much garden writing may represent nothing more than repression.

Speaking of horticultural sex, there are now entire books devoted to this highly worthwhile area. NAKED: Flowers Exposed (HarperCollins, $60) is a frequently prurient exploration of “the secret thoughts that flowers can conjure up in our psyches,” as the jacket puts it. Walter Hubert, a floral designer, asked a hundred photographers and celebrities to create expressionistic portraits of flowers; proceeds from sales of the book will go to charity. The work is, predictably, a very mixed bag, ranging from the urban lyricism of Jack Pierson’s “Magnolias, Morton Street”—as winning an icon of a New York spring as I have seen—to the (far too many) effortful stabs at fashion-world decadence that aim to shock but wind up merely annoying. For all the nude models festooned with blossoms (and there are plenty), the sexiest shots turn out to be the ones that really are about flowers—Alison Duke’s tumescent amaryllis, Raymond Meier’s fleshy bisexual orchid and Ross Bleckner’s gritty Gothic close-up of a lily’s private parts. The text, thankfully, is limited to a line or two from the contributing artists (“Garden roses floating in a pool of water. / Hypodermic needles for sale on the street. / About 6 minutes apart”), and the book has been beautifully produced, but you close this volume with a sinking appreciation for just how hard it is for photographers (or celebrities) to see a symbol as freighted as the flower truly afresh.

The other new book devoted to sex in the garden focuses strictly on the entomological variety. John Alcock is a professor of zoology who decided one day to rip out his suburban lawn in Tempe, Ariz., and replace it with a rough approximation of desert habitat. IN A DESERT GARDEN: Love and Death Among the Insects (Norton, $27.50), with line drawings by Turid Forsyth, recapitulates what has become something of a convention in contemporary American garden writing—the exodus from the Lawn and return to the Garden—but Alcock has put a new spin on it. Making no claims to biocentric virtue, Alcock makes clear he’s in it for the voyeuristic pleasure of watching bugs court, mate and, when he’s lucky, bite each other’s heads off postcoitally. Alcock is a fine stylist, deftly joining the keen observation and scientific insight one expects from a nature writer to the lighter (and, let’s admit it, much funnier) voice of a garden writer. The result is a wonderful and informative narrative in which even the compost pile becomes a vibrant stage. Alcock has some of J. Henri Fabre’s gift for bringing insect life to life on the page, and a curiosity about “the frontiers that exist just outside the front door” that proves catching.

William Bryant Logan offers a very different take on the pleasures of nature in THE TOOL BOOK (Smith & Hawken/Workman, $40), an unexpectedly voluptuous garden book that has scarcely a blossom or bug in it. I have to admit I approached this Smith & Hawken production with skepticism. Smith & Hawken sells garden tools after all, so there was every reason to expect that “The Tool Book” would turn out to be little more than a 300-page infomercial—or, even worse, a catalogue we were expected to pay for. It is in fact much more than that. Logan, who is one of our best garden writers, has produced not only a real book but a scrupulously researched, handsomely designed and highly enjoyable one to boot. In pictures and prose, “The Tool Book” is eloquent testimony to the fact that the greatest part of the pleasure of gardening is the work itself, and nothing can deepen that pleasure quite like a well-conceived tool. Among other things, a good tool is a medium for the transmission of cultural knowledge across the generations, and when we use it properly—to dig, to prune, to cultivate—we avail ourselves of the wisdom it embodies. Logan is also very good on the precise physical qualities of different hand tools, able to distinguish the snick-snick of his edging shears from the deeper tock-tock of the hedge shears. The studio photographs of the tools, by Sean Sullivan, are almost anatomical in their precision but somehow manage also to evoke the specific heft and sheer rightness of a good tool in the hand. (The book’s other fine photographs, by Georgia Glynn Smith, show the tools in use in the garden, digging, clipping and chopping.) Sure, there may be more here about tools than anyone really needs to know, but I found myself happily wandering down such seemingly unpromising byways as the history of digging. (The design of different spades and shovels, it seems, closely reflects the genius of the place in which they originated.) By the end of “The Tool Book” I felt inspired to throw out all my discount tools, scrape clean and oil the few good ones that remain and regard them in a whole new light: not just as means to a gardening end but as satisfactions in themselves.

Another commercial force in the renaissance of American gardening has come forward this fall with an ambitious and handsome volume of its own: THE GARDEN DESIGN BOOK (Regan Books/HarperCollins, $50), by Cheryl Merser and the editors of Garden Design magazine. More than any other magazine, Garden Design has raised the level of sophistication of American gardening in the last few years, by showcasing the work of emerging regional designers, teaching gardeners how to apply the basic principles of landscape architecture and, it must be said, by shrewdly changing the image of the American gardener from something out of the pages of the Talbots catalogue to, say, J. Crew. The book is as useful and intelligent as the magazine, and just as calculated. Most of the photography is spectacular—the kind of pictures that are as instructive as they are beautiful—but there are just a few too many shots of the sort of well-heeled yupsters who look rather less like gardeners than targets of demographic opportunity. Occasionally, too, the text lapses into the self-congratulatory second-person platitudes of the catalogue copywriter (“You view the world differently when you’re looking at it with a gardener’s eye.”)

These are minor annoyances in a valuable and potentially important book that manages to demystify and democratize the esthetics of garden design. “The Garden Design Book” brims with inventive solutions and inspiring case studies that, taken together, go a long way toward proposing a specifically American vision of the garden. But what is perhaps most striking about “The Garden Design Book” is that it exists at all—for who could have imagined just a few years ago that a genuinely sophisticated book about American garden design could even court the charge of trendiness?

Still more encouraging news about the state of American garden design will be found in Page Dickey’s BREAKING GROUND: Portraits of Ten Garden Designers (Artisan, $45). Lo and behold, six of the profilees are Americans, and their work—as photographed by Erica Lennard—suggests that ground is indeed being broken, particularly out West. Most of these designers have triumphantly declared their independence from the English perennial border, turning in many cases to local species, but local species deployed in striking ways. It’s often assumed that native plants imply a demurely naturalistic design, but the best of the designers in “Breaking Ground”—Nancy Goslee Power in California, Patrick Chasse in Maine and Nancy McCabe in Connecticut—have found ways of going native without sacrificing a strong sense of form or personal expression. McCabe does it with her distinctive stonework and timber fences, Chasse with his brilliant tapestries of ground cover and Power with her weird and boldly sculptural plants, which prove a fair match for even Frank Gehry’s raucous architecture.

The work here is playful, undaunted by the classical tradition and far more concerned with sensory experience than academic correctness. Though most of these projects look decidedly deep-pocket, the excellent text and pictures—both of them journalistic, and not the least bit gushy—manage to extract from these gardens valuable lessons for those of us who will never be able to afford a Nancy McCabe. I came away convinced of just how much more can be accomplished by planting less, and confirmed in the view that subtlety in the garden is highly overrated. But perhaps the happiest lesson to take away from “Breaking Ground” is that there is no good reason that sensitivity to the environment need check exuberance in our dealings with nature.

It’s often said that flowers count for less and less the longer one gardens; so, I would add, does mere prettiness. Over time, you discover that there are other kinds of plants worth cultivating in the garden—and other stories about nature worth telling. This might explain why I seem lately to be developing a taste for the sort of plants one would expect to find in the Addams family border: the diabolical leaves of the cardoon, the sunlight-blotting blooms of a black hollyhock, the sinister eccentricity of the castor bean. Black flowers, malevolent leaves, bizarre and even poisonous plants: I want to offer a few words here on behalf of the gothic garden.

If the conventional ideal of the garden is an ever-blooming paradise of happiness, the gothic garden is a subtly haunted place where beauty is shadowed by intimations of mortality. This is not a new idea, only a half-forgotten one. Threading through the history of garden design in the West is a persistent gothic strain, offering a counterpoint to more mainstream notions of beauty. Indeed, it is only in modern times, when a relatively benign and sentimental view of nature emerges for the first time, that the gothic has been forced out of the garden. Go back a ways, and you find not only a more ambivalent view of nature, but also a belief that a garden should contain all the colors of human emotion, even the very darkest.

During the 18th century, when landscape design briefly moved to the center of English culture, gardens routinely made room for episodes of melancholy and even the occasional frisson of horror.

The great picturesque gardens were the theme parks of their time, their designers deploying all manner of special effects to evoke in the visitor a carefully orchestrated sequence of thoughts and feelings, from pastoral delight to reflections on death. For much the same reason we gravitate to horror movies, people used to stroll through gardens hoping for a good scare. And the garden makers obliged, erecting pseudo-decrepit ruins, horrific statuary and brooding grottoes, some of them manned by actual paid hermits—the forerunners of the costumed characters populating Disney World.

Granite monsters haunted Italian gardens, which classically had little use for flowers. In France, a certain M. de Brunois put his garden into mourning upon the death of his mother, replacing the water in his fountains with black ink. The story is recounted in Medlar Lucan and Durian Gray’s “The Decadent Gardener” (Sawtry, 1996), a somewhat eccentric history published in England that also describes a garden in Surrey with its own Valley of the Shadow of Death, guarded by gateposts made of stone coffins and human skulls. Of course, literature has always had its gothic gardens: think of the collection of gorgeous but deadly flowers in Hawthorne’s short story “Rappaccini’s Daughter” (“And down he hastened into that Eden of poisonous flowers”), or the consignment of horticultural monstrosities ordered by the hero of Huysman’s antiromantic novel, “A Rebours” (“Nidularium, whose sabre-like petals opened to reveal gaping wounds of raw flesh”).

Given this long history of metaphorical snakes in the garden, how did our own gardens ever become so wholesome? I suspect it was the Victorians, with their sentimental worship of flowers, who set our gardening on its present sunny path. With the Industrial Revolution came the belief that nature had been tamed by man, a conceit nowhere more eloquently expressed than in Victorian bedding schemes. Here flowers were massed by color and then arranged into elaborate, carpetlike patterns—unruly nature reduced to so many tractable tubes of paint. You begin to understand why someone like Thoreau would be moved to declare that he’d much rather live next to the most dismal swamp than the most lovely garden; I would too, if the garden told such a bowdlerized tale about nature.

Though looser, more naturalistic styles followed the Victorian fashion, even the so-called wild gardens of William Robinson and the cottage gardens of Gertrude Jekyll—perhaps the two most important influences on our own gardening—implied a nostalgic view of nature as a soft, pastoral refuge from the hard edges and rigid geometries of industrial life. It was Jekyll, a painter by training, who taught us to think of gardens in terms of harmony and subtlety and pretty pictures.

In our own time, environmentalism has instructed us to regard nature as fragile and gardening as a virtuous pastime. Proponents of natural gardening talk of serving the planet by simulating natural habitats and expelling any trace of exoticism. The gardener’s calling is to nurture and defend the nation’s delicate native species, who without our care would be promptly set upon by hordes of “invasive aliens.”

What we have here, of course, is a classic gothic narrative—native innocence besieged by foreign evil—except that in this case all the drama is kept safely outside the garden gate. Out, out purple loosestrife! Molest not our fair natives!

Wouldn’t it be much more interesting if a little of this repressed gothic anxiety could begin to find its way into our gardens? I’m not talking about literally throwing the garden gate open to all manner of botanical horror, to actual weeds and diseases. A garden is an idealized version of nature, but that doesn’t mean it couldn’t stand some unbuttoning, so that it might disclose a few of our less-polite passions as well as nature’s own occasional awfulness. What I have in mind are botanical metaphors of invasiveness, leafy figures of malevolence, green tropes of strangeness and threat—all qualities in which, I’m discovering, the world of plants abounds.

The first truly gothic character of my horticultural acquaintance was the sanguineous castor bean, a plant that in a single season can metamorphose from a fat, mottled—and incidentally poisonous—seed that looks like a tick into a 10-foot-tall carmine-leaved specter. I’ve come to think of the castor bean (the source of the purgative from which generations of children have recoiled in disgust) as the evil twin of the sunflower, its principle rival for airspace in my annual bed. While the sunflower’s cheery disk follows the sun across the sky like a smiley face, the castor bean refuses to ingratiate itself, keeping its spiky Day-Glo pink flower—a contraption such as Dr. Seuss might conceive—under wraps, down below the eight-fingered hands of its darkly gorgeous leaves. In the baleful presence of a castor bean, the smile of a sunflower becomes positively heartbreaking.

Many gothic plants are like that: they throw a startling new light on familiar flowers, rendering the pretty almost poignant. Probably my favorite corner of the garden this season is the one where a stiletto-sharp fountain of gray cardoon leaves rises up from a bed of near-black foliage: a deep purple sweet-potato vine, a mass of opal basil, saw-toothed perilla and a handful of maroon lettuce plants—Merlot, the very darkest I could find—that I’ve let go to seed. It sounds weird, I know, but against the backdrop of so many sunlight-sucking leaves, the cardoon looks to be electrified with light, as if plugged into a live socket.

Elsewhere in the garden I’ve assembled a collection of gothic giants, what a friend likes to call my “N.B.A. border.” Here, easily dwarfing their six-foot-plus gardener, looms a silvery Scotch thistle, possibly the scariest-looking plant this side of the cactus family; a clump of hollyhock nigra, eight-foot towers topped with single blackish disks that look fully capable of tuning in radio signals from other worlds, and a crowd of ice-cold plume poppies, whose dusty blue leaves look like monstrous paws, particularly when matched with the warmer upturned palms of the castor bean. To step among these behemoths is to be reminded that nature has better things to do than to flatter our sense of self-importance or to make us feel at home.

My gothic garden is just begun, but everywhere I turn these days I seem to find new ideas for it. I’m saving up for Hillside Black Beauty, a pricey, patented black cimicifuga that I spotted in the Wayside Gardens catalogue.

Just up the road, in the theatrically gothic garden of Michael Trapp, I saw a blackish, serrate-leaved angelica whose maroon flowers uncurl themselves from creepy pods right out of “Men in Black.” An Internet search turned up a whole gothic gardening Web site with helpful plant lists and theme-garden ideas (“the garden of ill omens”).

And out on Long Island a few months ago, I encountered the ultimate in gothic garden furniture. In the garden of a woman somewhat embittered by a recent divorce, I spied two Adirondack chairs, one of which had been rendered painfully uninviting by a spiny cotoneaster that she had trained to grow up over the seat. Next to its still-comfortable companion, such a chair makes a point about a marriage, obviously. But by itself it is a kind of memento mori, telling of nature’s inexorable power to reclaim for itself what is, after all, only temporarily our own.

I don’t know if I’m quite ready to plant such a mannered chair in my garden. But to see that bristling seat is to realize just how many other faces of nature and shades of feeling our gardens might display, if only we would release them from their accustomed obligations to niceness.

As for me, I’m afraid that, at least in the eyes of the law, I’m already lost, having now tasted of the forbidden fruit of poppy knowledge. Indeed, the more I learned about poppies, the guiltier my poppies became—and the more fearful grew my days and to some extent also my nights. Until the day last fall, that is, when I finally pulled out my poppies’ withered stalks and, with a tremendous feeling of relief, threw them on the compost, thereby (I hope) rejoining the ranks of gardeners who don’t worry about visits from the police.

It started out if not quite innocently, then legally enough. Or at least that’s what I thought back in February, when I added a couple of poppy varieties (P. somniferum as well as P. paeoniflorum and P. rhoeas) to my annual order of flowers and vegetables from the seed catalogues. But the state of popular (and even expert) knowledge about poppies is confused, to say the least; mis- and even disinformation is rife. I’d read in Martha Stewart Living that “contrary to general belief, there is no federal law against growing P. somniferum.” Before planting, I consulted my Taylor’s Guide to Annuals, a generally reliable reference that did allude to the fact that “the juice of the unripe pod yields opium, the production of which is illegal in the United States.” But Taylor’s said nothing worrisome about the plants themselves. I figured that if the seeds could be sold legally (and I found somniferum on offer in a half-dozen well-known catalogues, though it was not always sold under that name), how could the obvious next step—i.e., planting the seeds according to the directions on the packet—possibly be a federal offense? Were this the case, you would think there’d at least be a disclaimer in the catalogues.

So it seemed to me that I could remain safely on the sunny side of the law just as long as I didn’t attempt to extract any opium from my poppies. Yet I have to confess that this was a temptation I grappled with all last summer. You see, I’d become curious as to whether it was in fact possible, as I’d recently read, for a gardener of average skills to obtain a narcotic from a plant grown in this country from legally available seeds. To another gardener this will not seem odd, for we gardeners are like that: eager to try the improbable, to see if we can’t successfully grow an artichoke in Zone 5 or make echinacea tea from the roots of our purple coneflowers. Deep down I suspect that many gardeners regard themselves as minor-league alchemists, transforming the dross of compost (and water and sunlight) into substances of rare value and beauty and power. Also, one of the greatest satisfactions of gardening is the independence it can confer—from the greengrocer, the florist, the pharmacist, and, for some, the drug dealer. One does not have to go all the way “back to the land” to experience the satisfaction of providing for yourself off the grid of the national economy. So, yes, I was curious to know if I could make opium at home, especially if I could do so without making a single illicit purchase. It seemed to me that this would indeed represent a particularly impressive sort of alchemy.

I wasn’t at all sure, however, whether I was prepared to go quite that far. I mean, opium! I’m not eighteen anymore, or in any position to undertake such a serious risk. I am in fact forty two, a family man (as they say) and homeowner whose drug-taking days are behind him. Not that they aren’t sometimes fondly recalled, the prevailing cant about drug abuse notwithstanding. But now I have a kid and a mortgage and a Keogh. There is simply no place in my grownup, middle-class lifestyle for an arrest on federal narcotics charges, much less for the forfeiture of my family’s house and land, which often accompanies such an arrest. It was one thing, I reasoned, to grow poppies; quite another to manufacture narcotics from them. I figured I knew where the line between these two deeds fell, and felt confident that I could safely toe it.

But in these days of the American drug war, as it turns out, the border between the sunny country of the law-abiding—my country!—and a shadowy realm of SWAT teams, mandatory minimum sentences, asset forfeitures, and ruined lives is not necessarily where one thinks it is. One may even cross it unawares. As I delved into the horticulture and jurisprudence of the opium poppy last summer, I made the acquaintance of one man, a contemporary and a fellow journalist, who had had his life pretty well wrecked after stepping across that very border. In his case, though, there is reason to believe it was the border that did the moving; he was arrested on charges of possessing the same flowers that countless thousands of Americans are right now growing in their gardens and keeping in vases in their living rooms. What appears to have set him apart was the fact that he had published a book about this flower in which he described a simple method for converting its seedpod into a narcotic—knowledge that the government has shown it will go to great lengths to keep quiet. Just where this leaves me, and this article, is, well, the subject of this article.

1.

Before recounting my own adventures among the poppies, and encounters with the poppy police, I need to tell you a little about this acquaintance, since he was the inspiration for my own experiments in poppy cultivation as well as the direct cause of the first flush of my paranoia. His name is Jim Hogshire. He first came to my attention a few years ago, when this magazine published an excerpt from Pills-a-go-go, one of the wittier and more informative of the countless “zines” that sprang up in the early Nineties, when desktop publishing first made it possible for individuals single-handedly to publish even the narrowest of special-interest periodicals. Hogshire’s own special interest—his passion, really—was the world of pharmaceuticals: the chemistry, regulation, and effects of licit and illicit drugs. Published on multicolored stock more or less whenever Hogshire got around to it, Pills-a-go-go printed inside news about the pharmaceutical industry alongside firsthand accounts of Hogshire’s own self-administered drug experiments—”pill-hacking,” he called it. The zine had a strong libertarian-populist bent, and was given to attacking the FDA, DEA, and AMA with gusto whenever those institutions stood between the American people and their pills—pills that Hogshire regarded with a reverence born of their astounding powers to heal as well as to alter the course of human history and, not incidentally, consciousness.

Hogshire’s reports on his drug experiments made for amusing reading. I particularly remember his description, reprinted in this magazine, of the effects of a deliberate overdose of Dextromethorphan Hydrobromide, or DM, a common ingredient in over-the-counter cough syrups and nighttime cold remedies. After drinking eight ounces of Robitussin DM, Hogshire reported waking up at 4:00 A.M. and determining that he should now shave and go to Kinko’s to get some copies made.

That may seem normal, but the fact was that I had a reptilian brain. My whole way of thinking and perceiving had changed. . . .

I got in the shower and shaved. While I was shaving I “thought” that for all I knew I was hacking my face to pieces. Since I didn’t see any blood or feel any pain I didn’t worry about it. Had I looked down and seen that I had grown another limb, I wouldn’t have been surprised at all; I would have just used it. . . .

The world became a binary place of dark and light, on and off, safety and danger. . . . I sat at my desk and tried to write down how this felt so I could look at it later. I wrote down the word “Cro-Magnon.” I was very aware that I was stupid. . . . Luckily there were only a couple of people in Kinko’s and one of them was a friend. She confirmed that my pupils were of different sizes. One was out of round. . . .

I knew there was no way I could know if I was correctly adhering to social customs. I didn’t even know how to modulate my voice. Was I talking too loud? Did I look like a regular person? I understood that I was involved in a big contraption called civilization and that certain things were expected of me, but I could not comprehend what the hell those things might be. . . .

I found being a reptile kind of pleasant. I was content to sit there and monitor my surroundings. I was alert but not anxious. Every now and then I would do a “reality check” to make sure I wasn’t masturbating or strangling someone, because of my vague awareness that more was expected of me than just being a reptile—.

My interest in Hogshire’s drug journalism was mild and strictly literary; as I’ve mentioned, my own experiments with drugs were past, and never terribly ambitious to begin with. I’d been too terrified ever to try hallucinogens, and my sole experience with opiates had accompanied some unpleasant dental work. I’d grown some marijuana once in the early Eighties, when doing so was no big deal, legally speaking. But things are different now: growing a handful of marijuana plants today could cost me my freedom and my house.

We may not hear as much now about the war on drugs as we did in the days of Nancy Reagan, William Bennett, and “Just Say No.” But in fact the drug war continues unabated; if anything, the Clinton Administration is waging it even more intensely than its predecessors, having spent a record $15 billion on drug enforcement last year and added federal death penalties for so-called drug kingpins—a category defined to include large-scale growers of marijuana. Every autumn, police helicopters equipped with infrared sensors trace regular flight paths over the farm fields in my corner of New England; just the other day they spotted thirty marijuana plants tucked into a cornfield up the road from me, less than a hundred yards, as the crow flies, from my garden. For all I know, the helicopters peered down into my garden on their way; the Supreme Court has recently ruled that such overflights do not constitute an illegal search of one’s property, one of a string of recent rulings that have strengthened the government’s hand in fighting the drug war.

Overflights and other such measures have certainly proved an effective deterrent with me. And anyway, the few times I’ve had access to marijuana in the last few years, my biggest problem was always finding the time to smoke it. Whatever else it may be, recreational drug use is a leisure activity, and leisure is something in woefully short supply at this point in my life. No small part of the pleasure I got from reading Hogshire’s drug adventures consisted of nostalgia for a time when I could set aside a couple of hours, even a whole day, to see what it might feel like to have a reptilian brain.

Nowadays what leisure time I do have tends to be spent in the garden, a passion that in recent years has turned into a professional interest—I am, among other things, a garden writer. I mention this to help explain the keen interest I took in Jim Hogshire’s subsequent project: a somewhat unconventional treatise on gardening titled Opium for the Masses, published in 1994 by an outfit in Port Townsend, Washington, called Loompanics Unlimited. The book’s astonishing premise is that anyone can obtain opiates cheaply and safely and maybe even legally—or at least beneath the radar of the authorities, who, if Hogshire was to be believed, were overlooking something rather significant in their pursuit of the war on drugs. According to Hogshire’s book, it is possible to grow opium from legally available seeds (he provided detailed horticultural instructions) or, to make matters even easier, to obtain it from poppy seedpods, which happen to be one of the more popular types of dried flowers sold in florist and crafts shops. Whether grown or purchased, fresh or dried, these seedpods contain significant quantities of morphine, codeine, and thebaine, the principal alkaloids found in opium.

Hogshire’s claim flew in the face of everything I’d ever heard about opium—that the “right” kind of poppies grow only in faraway places like the Golden Triangle of Southeast Asia, that harvesting opium requires vast cadres of peasant workers armed with special razor blades, and that the extraction of opiates is a painstaking and complicated process. Hogshire made it sound like child’s play.

In addition to the horticultural advice, Opium for the Masses offered simple recipes for making “poppy tea” from either store-bought or homegrown poppies, and Hogshire reported that a cup of this infusion (which is apparently a traditional home remedy in many cultures) would reliably relieve pain and anxiety and “produce a sense of well being and relaxation.” Bigger doses of the tea would produce euphoria and a “waking sleep” populated by dreams of a terrific vividness. Hogshire cautioned that the tea, like all opiates, was addictive if taken too many days in a row; otherwise, its only notable side effect was constipation.

As for the legal implications, Hogshire was encouragingly vague: “Opium, the juice of the poppy, is a controlled substance but it’s unclear how illegal the plant itself is.” Here is how I figured one might be able to toe the line safely between the cultivation of opium poppies, routine enough in the gardening world, and felony possession of opium: if opium is the extruded sap of the unripe seedpod, then the dried heads used to make tea by definition did not involve one with opium. Hogshire didn’t go quite that far, but he did write that “it is unclear whether it is illegal to brew tea from poppies you’ve purchased legally from the store.” As will soon become evident, Jim Hogshire is no longer unclear on either of these points.

Last winter Hogshire’s lively little paperback joined the works of Penelope Hobhouse (On Gardening), Gertrude Jekyll (Gardener’s Testament), and Louise Beebe Wilder (Color in My Garden) on my bedside table. Winter is when the gardener reads and dreams and draws up schemes for the borders he will plant come spring, and the more I read about what the ancient Sumerians had called “the flower of joy,” the more intriguing the prospect of growing poppies in my garden became, aesthetically as well as pharmacologically. From Hogshire I drifted over to the more mainstream garden writers, many of whom wrote extravagantly of opium poppies—of their ephemeral outward beauty (for the blooms last but a day or two) and their dark inward mystery.

“Poppies have cast a spell over gardeners and artists for many centuries,” went one typical garden writer’s lead; this was, inevitably, quickly followed by the phrase “dark connotations of the opium poppy.” But nowhere in my reading did I find a clear statement that planting Papaver somniferum would put a gardener on the wrong side of the law. “When grown in a garden,” one authority on annuals declared, somewhat ambiguously, “the cultivation of P. somniferum is a case of Honi soit qui mal y pense. (Shame to him who thinks ill.)” In general the garden writers tended to ignore or gloss over the legal issue and focus instead on the beauty of somniferum, which all concurred was exquisite.

Reading about poppies that winter, I wondered if it was possible to untangle the flower’s physical beauty from the knowledge of its narcotic properties. It seemed to me that even the lady garden writers who (presumably) would never think of sampling opium had been subconsciously influenced by its mood-altering potential; Louise Beebe Wilder tells us that poppies set her “heart vibrating with their waywardness.” Merely to gaze at a poppy was to feel dreamy, to judge by the many American Impressionist paintings of the flower, or from the experience of Dorothy and company, who you’ll recall were interrupted on their journey through Oz when they passed out in a field of scarlet poppies. If ever there was an innocent angle from which to gaze at the opium poppy, our culture seems long ago to have forgotten where it is.

By now I too was falling under the spell of the opium poppy. I dug out my college edition of De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, and I reread Coleridge’s descriptions of his opium dreams (“. . . how divine that repose is, what a spot of enchantment, a green spot of fountains and flowers and trees in the very heart of a waste of sands”). I read accounts of the Opium Wars, in which England went to war for no loftier purpose than to keep China’s harbors open to opium clipper ships bound from India, whose colonial economy depended on opium exports. I read about nineteenth-century medicine, in whose arsenal opium—usually in the form of a tincture called laudanum—was easily the most important weapon. In part this was because the principal goal of medical care at that time was not so much to cure illness as to relieve pain, and there was (and is) no better painkiller than opium and its derivatives. But opium-based preparations were also used to treat, or prevent, a great variety of ills, including dysentery, malaria, tuberculosis, cough, insomnia, anxiety, and even colic in infants. (Since opium is extremely bitter, nursing mothers would induce babies to ingest it by smearing the medicine on their nipples.) Regarded as “God’s own medicine,” preparations of opium were as common in the Victorian medicine cabinet as aspirin is in ours.

Is there another flower that has had anywhere near the opium poppy’s impact on history and literature? In the nineteenth century, especially, the poppy played as crucial a role in the course of events as petroleum has played in our own century: opium was the basis of national economies, a staple of medicine, an essential item of trade, a spur to the Romantic revolution in poetry, even a casus bell).

Yet I had to canvass dozens of friends before I found one who’d actually tried it; opium in its smokable form is apparently all but impossible to obtain today, no doubt because smuggling heroin is so much easier and more lucrative. (One unintended consequence of the war on drugs has been to increase the potency of all illicit drugs: garden-variety marijuana has given way to powerful new strains of sinsemilla; and powdered cocaine, to crack.) The friend who had once smoked opium smiled wistfully as he recalled the long-ago afternoon: “The dreams! The dreams!” was all he would say. When I pressed him for a more detailed account, he referred me to Robert Bulwer-Lytton, the Victorian poet, who’d likened the effect to having one’s soul rubbed down with silk.

There was no question that I would have to try to grow it, if only as a historical curiosity. Okay, not only that, but that too. Again, you have to understand the gardener’s mentality. I once grew Jenny Lind melons, a popular nineteenth-century variety named for the most famous soprano of the time, just to see if I could grow them, but also to glean some idea of what the word “melon” might have conjured in the mind of Walt Whitman or Chester Arthur. I planted an heirloom apple tree, “Esopus Spitzenberg,” simply because Thomas Jefferson had planted it at Monticello, declaring it the “finest eating apple in the world.” Gardening is, among other things, an exercise of the historical imagination, and I was by now eager to stare into the black heart of an opium poppy with my own eyes.

So I began studying the flower sections of the seed catalogues, which by February formed a foot-high pile on my desk. I found “breadseed poppies” (whose seeds are used in baking) for sale in Seeds Blum, a catalogue of heirloom plants from Idaho, and several double varieties (that is, flowers with multiple petals) described as Papaver paeoniflorum in the catalogue of Thompson & Morgan, the British seed merchants. Burpee carries a breadseed poppy called “Peony Flowered,” whose blooms resemble “ruffled pom-poms.” In Park’s, a large, mid-market seed catalogue from South Carolina (their covers invariably feature scrubbed American children arranged in a sea of flowers and vegetables), I found a white double poppy called “White Cloud” and identified as “Papaver somniferum paeoniflorum.” Although I didn’t know it at the time, all these poppies turn out to be strains of Papaver somniferum.

In Cook’s, the catalogue from which I usually order my seeds for salad greens and exotic vegetables, I found paeoniflorum and rhoeas, as well intriguing varieties of somniferum: “Single Danish Flag,” a tall poppy that, judging from the catalogue copy, closely resembles the classic scarlet poppies I’d read about and seen in Impressionist paintings; and “Hens and Chicks,” about which the catalogue was particularly enthusiastic: “the large lavender blooms are a wonderful prelude to the seed pods, which are striking in a dried arrangement. A large central pod (the hen) is surrounded by dozens of tiny pods (the chicks).” More to the point, Hogshire had indicated in Opium for the Masses that “Hens and Chicks” might prove especially potent.

This was an issue I had wondered about: the ornamental varieties on sale in the catalogues had obviously been bred for their visual or, in the case of the breadseed poppies, culinary qualities. It seemed likely that, as breeders concentrated on these traits to the neglect of others, the morphine and codeine content of these poppies might have dwindled to nothing. So what were the best varieties to plant for opiates?

I couldn’t very well pose this question to my usual sources in the gardening world—to Dora Galitzki, the horticulturist who answers the help line at the New York Botanical Garden or to Shepherd Ogden, the knowledgeable and helpful proprietor of Cook’s. So I tried, through a mutual friend, to get in touch with Jim Hogshire himself. I e-mailed him, explaining what I was up to and asking for recommendations as to the best poppy varieties as well as for advice on cultivation. As I would do with any fellow flower enthusiast, I asked him if he had any seeds he might be willing to share with me and told him about the varieties I’d found in the catalogues. “How can I be confident that these seeds—which have obviously been bred and selected for their ornamental qualities—will `work’?”

As it turned out, I picked the wrong time to ask. One morning a few days later, and before I’d had any response to my e-mail, I got a call from our mutual friend saying that Hogshire had been arrested in Seattle and was being held in the city jail on felony drug charges. It seems that on March 6 a Seattle Police Department SWAT team had burst into Hogshire’s apartment, armed with a search warrant claiming that he was running a “drug lab.” Hogshire and his wife, Heidi, were held in handcuffs while the police conducted a six-hour search that yielded a jar of prescription pills, a few firearms, and several bunches of dried poppies wrapped in cellophane. The poppies had evidently come from a florist, but Hogshire was nevertheless charged with “possession of opium poppy, with intent to manufacture and distribute.” The guns were legal, but one was cited in the indictment as an “enhancement”: another product of the drug war is the fact that the penalties on some narcotics charges rise steeply when the crime “involves” a firearm, even when that firearm is legal or registered. Neither Jim nor Heidi Hogshire had ever been arrested before. Now Jim was being held on $10,000 bail; Heidi, on $2,000. If convicted, Jim faced ten years in prison; Heidi faced a two-year sentence on a lesser charge.

Forgive me for the sudden upwelling of naked self-interest, but all I could think about was that e-mail of mine, buried somewhere on the hard drive of Hogshire’s computer, which no doubt was already in the hands of the police forensics unit. Or maybe the message had been intercepted somehow, part of a DEA tap on Hogshire’s phone or a surveillance of his e-mail account. I could hardly believe my stupidity! Suddenly I thought I could feel the dull tug of the underworld’s undertow, felt as if I’d been somehow implicated in something, though exactly what that might be I couldn’t say. Yet my confidence that I stood firmly on the sunny side of the law had been shaken. They had my name.

But this was crazy, paranoid thinking, wasn’t it? After all, I hadn’t done anything, except order some flower seeds and write a mildly suggestive piece of e-mail. As for Hogshire, surely there had to be more to this bust than a bunch of dried poppies; it didn’t make any sense. I asked our mutual friend if he would be in touch with Hogshire anytime soon, because I was eager to talk to him, to learn more about his peculiar case.

“Also,” I added, as casually as I could manage, “would you mind asking him whether he’s gotten any e-mail from me?”

2.

My poppy seeds arrived a couple of weeks later. My plan was to sow them, see if I could get flowers and pods, and decide only then whether to proceed any further. I’d been spooked by Hogshire’s arrest, doubly spooked to learn from our friend that in fact he had never received my e-mail—undelivered e-mail being highly unusual in my experience. But I still had little reason to doubt that growing poppies for ornamental purposes was legal, and so on an unseasonably warm afternoon in the first week of April I planted my seeds—two packets, each containing a thimbleful of grayish-blue specks. They looked exactly like what they were: poppy seeds, the same ones you find on a kaiser roll or a bagel. (In fact, it is possible to germinate poppy seeds bought from the supermarket’s spice aisle. Also, eating such seeds prior to taking a drug test can produce a positive result.)

I’d prepared a tiny section of my garden, an area where the soil is especially loamy and, somewhat more to the point, several old apple trees block the view from the road. Papaver somniferum is a hardy annual that grows best in cool conditions, so it isn’t necessary to wait for the last frost date to sow; I read that in the South, in fact, gardeners sow their poppies in late fall and winter them over. Sowing is a simple matter of broadcasting, or tossing, the seeds over the surface of the cultivated soil and watering them in; since the seeds are so tiny, there’s no need to cover them, but it is a good idea to mix the seeds with a handful of sand in order to spread them as evenly as possible over the planting area.

Within ten days my soil had sprouted a soft grass of slender green blades half an inch high. These were soon followed by the poppies’ first set of true leaves, which are succulent and spiky, not unlike those of a loose leaf lettuce. The color is a pale, vegetal, green-tinged blue, and the foliage is slightly dusted-looking; “glaucous” is the horticultural term for it.

The poppies came up in thick clumps that would clearly need thinning. The problem was, how much thinning, and when? Hogshire’s book was vague on this point, suggesting a spacing of anywhere from six inches to two feet between plants. My “straight” gardening books advised six to eight inches, but I realized that their recommendations assumed that the gardener’s chief interest was flowers. I, of course, was less interested in floriferousness than in, um, big juicy pods. Eventually I called one of the seed companies that sell poppies and delicately asked about optimal spacing, “assuming for the sake of argument someone wanted to maximize the size and quality of his poppy heads.” I don’t think I aroused any suspicion from the person I talked to, who advised a minimum of eight inches between plants.

Around the time I first thinned my poppies, late in May, a friend who knew of my new horticultural passion sent me a newspaper clipping that briefly stopped me in my tracks. It was a gardening column by C. Z. Guest in the New York Post that carried the headline JUST SAY NO TO POPPIES. Guest wrote that although opium poppy seeds are legal to possess and sell, “the live plants (or even dried, dead ones) fall into the same legal category as cocaine and heroin.” This seemed very hard to believe, and the fact that the source was a socialite writing in a tabloid not known for its veracity made me inclined to disregard it.

But I guess my confidence had been undermined, because I decided it wouldn’t hurt to make sure Guest was wrong. I put in a call to the local barracks of the state police. Without giving my name, I told the officer who answered the phone that I was a gardener here in town and wanted to double-check that the poppies in my garden were legal.

“Poppies? Not a problem. Poppies have been declared a flower.”

I told him the ones I had planted were labeled somniferum, and that a neighbor had told me that that meant they were opium poppies.

“What color are they? Are they orange?” This didn’t seem especially relevant; I’d read that opium poppies could be white, purple, scarlet, lavender, and black, as well as a reddish-orange. I told him that mine were both lavender and red.

“Those are not illegal. I’ve got the orange ones in my garden. About two feet tall, came with the house. What you’ve got to understand is that all poppies have some opium in them. It’s only a problem if you start to manufacture opium.”

“Like if I slit open a head?”

“Nah, you can cut one of them open and look inside. It’s only if you do it with intent to sell or profit.”

“But what if I had a lot of them?”

“Say you planted two acres of poppies—just for scenery looks? It’s not a problem—until you start manufacturing.”

I was happy to have the state trooper’s okay, but by now a seed of doubt had been planted in my mind. Whether it was C. Z. Guest or the waylaid e-mail—that stupid, incriminating query careening unencrypted through cyberspace—I’d started to get the willies about my poppies. A mild case, to be sure—except for one harrowing night in May when I was caught in the grip of a near-nightmare. In my dream I awake to the sound of police car doors slamming out in front of my house, followed by footsteps on the porch. I leap out of bed and race out the back door into the garden to destroy the evidence. I start eating my poppies, which in the dream are already dried, dry as dust in fact, but I stuff the pods and the stems and the leaves into my mouth as fast as I possibly can. The chewing is horrible, Sisyphean, the swallowing almost impossible; I feel like I am eating my way through a vast desert of plant material, racing madly to beat the clock.

My first impulse on waking was to rip out my poppies right away. My second impulse was to laugh: so this was my first opium dream.

3.

When Jim Hogshire entered my life, in April, my poppies were six inches tall and thriving, their bed a deep, lush carpet of serrated green. I’d heard that Hogshire had raised bail, and our mutual friend was trying to put us in touch; I wanted to talk to him about his case, which I was now thinking of writing about, but I also still hoped to pick up some horticultural tips. I couldn’t phone Hogshire, because he’d been thrown out of his apartment. It seems that Washington, like many states, has a law under which tenants charged with drug crimes may be summarily evicted; after the bust, someone from the sheriff’s office had paid Hogshire’s landlady a visit, notifying her of her “rights” in this regard and urging her to serve the Hogshires with an eviction notice. It sounded to me like a violation of Hogshire’s right to due process—after all, he hadn’t been found guilty of anything. This was my first introduction to what civil-liberties lawyers have taken to calling “the drugs exception to the Bill of Rights.” Over the past several years, in cases involving drugs, the Supreme Court has repeatedly upheld the government’s new crop of laws, penalties, and police tactics, thereby narrowing the scope of due process as well as long-established protections against illegal search, double jeopardy, and entrapment.

Hogshire began calling me at odd hours of the day and night. He sounded like a man who had been brought to the end of his tether, edgy and distrustful; disquisitions on Papaver nomenclature drifted into diatribes about the indignities his pet birds had suffered at the hands of the police. The voice on the phone was a far cry from the urbane and funny character I’d been reading in Pills-a-go-go. But then, Hogshire’s bust had left him broke and homeless, bouncing from one friend’s couch to another, and adrift on uncharted legal waters—for no one had ever been prosecuted before for possessing dried poppies bought from a florist. Much of what he told me sounded paranoid and crazy, an improbable nightmare featuring a “snitch letter” to the police from a disgruntled houseguest; a search warrant alleging, among other things, that Hogshire was making narcotics out of Sudafed(!); and a police officer who waved Hogshire’s writings in his face and asked, “With what you write, weren’t you expecting this?” Listening to Hogshire’s fantastic account over the phone made me more than a little skeptical, and yet everything he told me I subsequently found confirmed in the court records.

According to documents filed by the prosecutor’s office, it was indeed an informant’s letter that led to the March 6 raid on the Hogshires’ apartment; the letter, sent to the Seattle police by a man named Bob Black, was cited along with Hogshire’s published writings as “probable cause” in the search warrant. Bob Black is the disgruntled houseguest, the black hat in Hogshire’s bizarre tale. A fellow Loompanics author (The Abolition of Work and Other Essays), Black is a self-described anarchist whom the Hogshires met for the first time when he arrived to spend the night on February 10; Loompanics owner Mike Hoy had asked the Hogshires if, as a personal favor, they’d be willing to put Black up in their apartment while he was in Seattle on assignment.

The evening went very badly. Accounts differ on the particulars, as well as on the chemical catalysts involved, but an argument about religion (Hogshire is a Muslim) somehow degenerated into a scuffle in which Black grabbed Heidi Hogshire around the throat and Jim threatened his guest with a loaded M-1 rifle. Ten days later, Black wrote to the Seattle police narcotics unit “to inform you of a drug laboratory . . . in the apartment of Jim Hogshire and Heidi Faust Hogshire.” The letter, a denunciation worthy of a sansculotte, deserves to be quoted at length.

The Hogshires are addicted to opium, which they consume as a tea and
by smoking. In a few hours on February 10/11 I saw quarts of the tea, and
his wife smaller amounts. He also took Dexandrine and Ritalin several
times. They have a vacuum pump and other drug-manufacturing tech.
Hogshire told me he was working out a way to manufacture heroin from
Sudafed.

Hogshire is the author of the book Opium for the Masses which explains
how to grow opium and how to produce it from the fresh plant or from
seeds obtainable from artist-supply stores. His own consumption is so
huge that he must be growing it somewhere. I enclose a copy of parts
of his book. He also publishes a magazine Pills a Go Go under an alias
promoting the fraudulent acquisition and recreational consumption of
controlled drugs.

Should you ever pay the Hogshires a visit, you should know that they
keep an M-1 rifle leaning against the wall near the computer.

Largely on the strength of this letter, the police were able to get a magistrate to sign a search warrant and raid the Hogshires’ apartment. It was quarter to seven in the evening, and Jim Hogshire was reading a book in his living room when he heard the knock at the door; the instant he answered it he found himself thrown up against a wall. Heidi, who was at the grocery store at the time, arrived home to find her husband in handcuffs and a SWAT team, outfitted in black ninja suits, ransacking her apartment. The SWAT team was so large—twenty officers, by Jim’s estimate—that only a few could fit into the one-bedroom apartment at a time; the rest lined up in the hall outside.

“Do you publish this?” Jim recalls one officer demanding to know, as he waved a copy of Pills-a-go-go in his face. And then, “Where’s your poppy patch?” Jim pointed out that it was wintertime and asked the officer, “Why should I grow poppies when they’re on sale in the stores?”

“You’re lying.”

This particular SWAT team specialized in raiding drug labs, which may have been what they expected to find in the Hogshires’ apartment. They had to settle, however, for dried poppies: a sealed cardboard box containing ten bunches wrapped in cellophane. The police refused to believe that Hogshire had bought them from a store. The police also found the vacuum pump Black had mentioned (though they didn’t bother to seize it), the jar of pills, two rifles and three pistols (all legal), a thermite flare that Hogshire had bought at a gun show, a box of test tubes, and several copies of Opium for the Masses.

The Hogshires spent three harrowing days in jail before learning of the charges filed against them. Heidi was charged with possession of a Schedule II controlled substance: the opium poppies. Jim was charged with “possession of opium poppy, with intent to manufacture or distribute,” an offense that, with the firearms enhancement, carries a ten-year sentence.

At a preliminary hearing in April, Jim Hogshire was fortunate enough to come before a judge who raised a skeptical eyebrow at the charges filed against him. The hearing had its comic moments. In support of the government’s assertion that Hogshire had intent to distribute, the prosecutor, apparently unfamiliar with the literary reference, cited the title of his book: “It’s not called `Opium for Me,’ `Opium for My Friends,’ or `Opium for Anyone I Know.’ It’s called `Opium for the Masses.’ Which indicates that it’s opium for a lot of people.”

The judge, a man who evidently knew a thing or two about gardening, found the language in the indictment particularly dubious: the state had accused Hogshire not of manufacturing opium but of manufacturing opium poppies. “How do you manufacture an opium poppy?” the judge asked, and then answered his own question: “You propagate them—it’s the only way.” By “propagate” the judge meant planting and growing, yet, as he pointed out, the state had presented no evidence that Hogshire had been doing any such thing. “If you had him with a field of poppies, then I think you’ve got him propagating them in some way. Particularly with the cut poppies and extracting the chemical.” But without evidence that Hogshire had actually grown the poppies, the judge reasoned, there was no basis for the manufacturing charge.

The prosecutor sought to recover by citing snapshots seized in the raid that showed Hogshire in an unidentified garden with live poppies whose heads had been slit; he also claimed that “there are poppies outside of his apartment.” (There may have been an element of truth to this: according to Hogshire, his landlady had had opium poppies in her garden—though in early March, at the time of the raid, it would have been too early in the season for them to have come up.)

The judge was unpersuaded: “Can you tell me whether those are the relevant genus and species? My mom has poppies outside of her house.” The prosecutor could not satisfy the judge on this point, so the judge granted the defense’s motion to dismiss the sole charge against Hogshire.

One might think that this would have been the end of Jim Hogshire’s ordeal. But the state evidently wasn’t through with him, for in June, after dropping charges against Heidi in exchange for a statement asserting that everything seized in the raid belonged to her husband, the prosecutor refiled charges—this time for simple possession of opium poppies—and also added a new felony count to the amended indictment: possession of an “explosive device,” citing the thermite flare found during the raid. An arraignment on the new charges was scheduled for June 28. When Hogshire failed to appear, a warrant was issued for his arrest.

4.

I read through the court papers with a mounting sense of personal panic, for the squabble in the Seattle courtroom did not in any way seem to challenge the underlying fact that growing or possessing opium poppies was apparently grounds for prosecution. I called Hogshire’s attorney, who confirmed as much and directed me to the text of the Federal Controlled Substances Act of 1970.

The language of the statute was distressingly clear. Not only opium but “opium poppy and poppy straw” are defined as Schedule II controlled substances, right alongside PCP and cocaine. The prohibited poppy is defined as a “plant of the species Papaver somniferum L., except the seed thereof,” and poppy straw is defined as “all parts, except the seeds, of the opium poppy, after mowing.” In other words, dried poppies.

Section 841 of the act reads, “[I]t shall be unlawful for any person knowingly or intentionally . . . to manufacture, distribute, or dispense, or possess with intent to manufacture, distribute, or dispense” opium poppies. The definition of “manufacturing” includes propagating—i.e., growing. Three things struck me as noteworthy about the language of the statute. The first was that it goes out of its way to state that opium poppy seeds are, in fact, legal, presumably because of their legitimate culinary uses. There seems to be a chicken-and-egg paradox here, however, in which illegal poppy plants produce legal poppy seeds from which grow illegal poppy plants.

The second thing that struck me about the statute’s language was the fact that, in order for growing opium poppies to be a crime, it must be done “knowingly or intentionally.” Opium poppies are commonly sold under more than one botanical name, only one of which—Papaver somniferum—is specifically mentioned in the law, so it is entirely possible that a gardener could be growing opium poppies without knowing it. There would therefore appear to be an “innocent gardener” defense. Not that it would do me any good: at least some of the poppies I’d planted had been clearly labeled Papaver somniferum, a fact that I have—perhaps foolishly—confessed in these very pages to knowing. The third thing that struck me was the most stunning of all: the penalty for knowingly growing Papaver somniferum is a prison term of five to twenty years and a maximum fine of $1 million.

So C. Z. Guest had been right after all, and Martha Stewart (and the state trooper) wrong: the cultivation of opium poppies, regardless of the purpose, is indeed a felony, no different in the eyes of the law than manufacturing angel dust or crack cocaine. It didn’t matter one bit whether I slit the heads or otherwise harvested my poppies: I had already crossed the line I thought I could safely toe—had crossed it, in fact, back on that April afternoon when I planted my seeds. (What’s more, I was vulnerable to the very charge that hadn’t stuck to Hogshire—manufacturing!) I was, potentially at least, in deep, deep trouble.

Or was I? For had anyone besides Jim Hogshire ever actually been arrested for the possession or manufacture of poppies? A Nexis search fumed up no other case; nor did calls to more than a dozen lawyers, prosecutors, civil libertarians, and journalists who keep tabs on the drug war. Several were unaware that cultivating poppies was even against the law; when so informed, nearly all had precisely the same slightly bemused reaction: “Don’t you think the government has better things to do?” I certainly hoped that this was the case, but there the menacing statute was, right there on the books.

I called several experienced gardeners too, hoping to get a clearer picture of the risk involved in growing poppies. One told me a story about a DEA agent on vacation in Idaho who’d tipped off the county sheriff that poppies were being grown in local gardens; another had heard that the DEA had recently ordered the removal of the poppies growing at Jefferson’s Monticello. (Both stories sounded apocryphal, but both turned out to be true.) I phoned a radio call-in gardening show, asking the resident expert whether I needed to worry about the opium poppies growing in my garden, “I’m not a lawyer,” she said, “but wouldn’t it be a shame if gardeners had to pass up such a magnificent flower?”

No one had heard of an actual bust, and most of the gardeners I spoke to seemed blithely unconcerned when I apprised them of the theoretical peril. Some treated me carefully, as though it were paranoid of me to worry. The answer-lady at the New York Botanical Garden tried to reassure me (a bit patronizingly, I thought) by saying that, to her knowledge, there were no “poppy patrols out there.” Wayne Winterrowd, the expert on annuals who’d written “Shame to him who thinks ill” of the poppy grower, likened the crime to tearing the tags off pillows and mattresses, another federal offense no one ever seemed to do time for. Laughing off my worries, he offered to send me seeds of a “stunning” jetblack opium poppy he grew in his Vermont garden. He also confirmed (as did a botanist I spoke to later) that “breadseed poppies” as well as Papaver paeoniflorum and giganteum were botanically no different than Papaver somniferum. I’d planted a handful of paeoniflorum, and had had no idea what they were—until now.

I took no small comfort in Winterrowd’s mattress-tag analogy, if only because I really did not want to have to rip out my poppies, at least not now. For my first poppy was on the verge of bloom. It was the first week of July when I noticed at the end of one slender, downward-nodding stem a bud the size of a cherry, covered in a soft, hairy down. The bud’s outer covering, or calyx, had split open, and I could see the scarlet petals folded inside, packed as tightly as a parachute. By the following morning the stem had drawn itself up to its full four-foot height and the petals—five deltas of rich red silk freaked with black—had completely unfurled, casting off their calyx and fuming to face the sun. That solitary exquisite bloom was followed the next day by three more equally formidable dabs of pigment, then six, then a dozen, until my poppy patch was a terrific, traffic-stopping blur of color, of a red so red as to be platonic. Now I knew what Robert Browning meant when he spoke of “the poppy’s red effrontery”: this hue was a shout. The lavender blooms of another variety followed a few days later, a cooler but no less pure jolt of color. When the sun stood behind them, toward evening, the petals were as luminous as stained glass.

“It is a pity,” Louise Beebe Wilder wrote, “that Poppies are in such haste to shed their silken petals and display their crowned seedpods.” Having seen them, I would have to disagree with her, and not only on pharmacological grounds. The poppy’s seedpods are scarcely less arresting than its flowers: swelling blue-green finials poised atop neat round pedestals (called stipes), each pod crowned with an upturned anther like a Catherine wheel. For most of the month of July my whole poppy patch was alive with interest. All at once and side by side you had the drooping sleepy buds, the brilliant flags of color, and the stately upright urns of seeds, all set against the same cool backdrop of dusty green foliage. I couldn’t decide what was more beautiful: leaf, bud, flower, or seedpod. I did decide that this poppy patch was as gorgeous as anything I’d ever planted.

My fellow gardeners were making me feel foolish for even thinking of cutting down these flowers; indeed, as I admired my poppies in their full midsummer glory, this unexpectedly lavish gift of nature, it was difficult to credit the notion that they could possibly be illegal—that for the purposes of the law I might just as well be admiring packets of white powder on a table in some dingy uptown drug factory. But this, I knew, was indeed the case. And what a metamorphosis this was!—that an act as ordinary and blameless as the planting of a handful of common and perfectly legal seeds could somehow transport one into the country of criminality.

Yet this was a metamorphosis that required not only the physical seed and water and sunlight but, crucially, a certain metaphysical ingredient too: the knowledge that the poppies I beheld were, in fact, of the genus Papaver and the species somniferum. For although ignorance of the law is never a defense, in the case of poppies, ignorance of botany may be. True, I had planted seeds I knew to be Papaver somniferum and then blabbed that fact to the world. But what if instead I had planted “breadseed poppies,” or the poppy seeds on a poppy-seed bagel? What if I had planted only the Papaver paeoniflorum I’d ordered, the one I’d had no idea was really somniferum? As I stood there admiring the extravagantly doubled blooms of this poppy, I realized that growing it was no more felonious than growing asters or marigolds—for as long, that is, as I remained ignorant of the fact that this poppy, too, was somniferum. But it’s too late for me now; I know too much. And so, dear reader, do you.

It was precisely this knowledge that inspired the slightly cracked logic behind what I now decided to do. I had not planned to slit even one of my poppies, for fear that it was the step that would take me across the line into criminality. But now I knew I had already taken the fateful step. In for a dime, in for a dollar. I know, this wasn’t even a remotely rational approach to the situation: a slit seedpod in my garden would constitute proof that I knew exactly what kind of poppies I had. Yet that particular summer afternoon, as I stood there alone with my ravishing poppies, in what, after all, was my garden, this logic seemed strangely compelling. So I combed my little stand of poppies for the fattest, most turgid seed head and bent it toward me. Taking the warm, plumsize pod between my thumb and forefinger, I nicked its skin with a thumbnail. After a moment a small bead of milky sap formed on the surface; the wound continued to bleed for a minute or two, the sap darkening perceptibly as it oxidized, and then it slowed, clotting. I dabbed the drop of opium with my forefinger. touched it to my tongue. It was indescribably bitter. The taste lingered on my palate for the rest of the afternoon.

5.

When I finally met Jim Hogshire in mid-July, it had been two weeks since his missed court date. He was staying in Manhattan, a good place to be anonymous, as he mulled over his next move.

On a hot summer morning we met for coffee on West Twenty-third Street, afterward, we planned to visit the flower district, to shop for dried poppies and check out a rumor that Hogshire had heard about a crackdown on imports of dried poppies. Hogshire was dressed all in white, a slender thirty-eight-year-old with long blond hair gathered in a neat ponytail. His face was handsome but careworn; his fine, angular features were lined, and his deep-set eyes, which are a striking shade of gray, were ringed with shadows. In conversation I found him alternately expansive and wary, though only rarely did he ask to speak off the record. For someone who had no place to live, who was one traffic stop away from going to jail, Hogshire seemed surprisingly composed—or at least a lot more composed than I would be under the circumstances.

Hogshire is passionate about poppies, and we covered that mutual interest for a while, shuttling from Papaver horticulture to jurisprudence, Papaver nomenclature to chemistry. I learned about the thirty-eight different alkaloids that have been found in somniferum, the “biogenetic pathways” from thebaine to morphine (he lost me here), and the “incredible potential” of the “Bentley compounds” that have been synthesized from Papaver bracteatum. He told me that he’d first heard about poppy tea from a friend, a gardener whose Russian grandmother had brewed it as a home remedy. Hogshire started experimenting with poppies that he found growing “literally right outside the door of my apartment.”

“The first few times I got it all wrong—I didn’t grind the poppies up, and I was indiscriminate, using the leaves and stems as well as the pods. I also tried smoking all the various parts, using myself and my wife as guinea pigs. I proved to myself empirically that the heads are undoubtedly the most potent part of the plant.” I realized that Hogshire regarded himself as heir to a great tradition of self-experimentation in Western medicine. Eventually he learned how to make a potent tea from dried poppies, pulverizing a handful of heads in a coffee grinder and then steeping the powder in hot water. I asked him to describe the effects of a cup of poppy tea.

“It’s not a knock-you-on-your-ass sort of thing, not like smoking opium. In fact, a lot of people will tell you they forget that they are high. It starts with a tickling feeling in the stomach that then rises up into the shoulders and head—this feeling of just . . . joy. You feel optimistic about things, energetic but at the same time relaxed. You’ll remain functional: you won’t say anything stupid and you’ll remember everything that happens. You won’t nod out, though you will feel a strong desire to close your eyes. Any pain you have will go away; the tea will also relieve exogenously caused depression. That’s why poppy tea is served at funerals in the Middle East. It can make sadness go away.”

It’s hard to believe that commercially available flowers could produce such effects, and at times the claims in Hogshire’s book had reminded me of earlier “household highs”—smoking banana peels, for instance (“they call me mellow yellow,” Donovan had purred back in 1967), eating morning-glory seeds (purported to be a hallucinogen), or sipping cocktails made from Coca-Cola and aspirin. Could it be there was some sort of placebo effect at work here? Hogshire showed me a scientific article, from the Bulletin on Narcotics, that stated plainly that commercially sold dried poppies did indeed contain opiates, in significant quantities. He also pointed out that it was possible to become addicted to poppy tea. In his book he says, “Opium withdrawal hurts, but the pain will end, usually within three to five days…. Those are indeed hard days for the kicking addict but it is no worse than a nasty case of the flu.” This certainly didn’t sound like the effects of a placebo.

If Hogshire was right, then opium was hidden in plain sight in America—which certainly would explain why the government would take an interest in the author of Opium for the Masses. He and his small-press book had punctured a set of myths that have served the government well since 1942, when Congress decided that the best way to control opiates was to ban domestic cultivation of Papaver somniferum and force pharmaceutical companies to import opium (which they use to produce morphine and other opiates) from a handful of designated Asian countries. Since then the perception has taken hold that this legislative stricture is actually a botanical one—that opium will grow only in these places. The other myth Hogshire had exploded is that the only way to extract opiates from opium poppies is by slitting their heads in the field, a complex and time-consuming process that, I heard over and over again from law-enforcement officials and gardeners alike, made the domestic production of opium impractical.

The durability of these myths has obliterated knowledge about opium that was common as recently as a century ago, when opium was still a popular nonprescription remedy and opium poppies an important domestic crop. As late as 1915, pamphlets issued by the U.S. Department of Agriculture were still mentioning opium poppies as a good cash crop for northern farmers. A few decades before, the Shakers were growing opium commercially in upstate New York. Well into this century, Russian, Greek, and Arab immigrants in America have used poppy-head tea as a mild sedative and a remedy for headaches, muscle pain, cough, and diarrhea. During the Civil War, gardeners in the South were encouraged to plant opium for the war effort, in order to ensure a supply of painkillers for the Confederate Army. The descendants of these poppies are thriving to this day in southern gardens, but not the knowledge of their provenance or powers.

What Hogshire has done is to excavate this vernacular knowledge and then publish it to the world—in how-to form, with recipes. As far as I can tell, the knowledge in his book hasn’t seeped too far into the drug culture—Opium for the Masses has sold between eight and ten thousand copies, and I turned up no evidence of widespread tea-brewing in drug circles—yet I was curious to know just how far knowledge about his knowledge had spread in law-enforcement circles. As Hogshire and I strolled the few blocks up Sixth Avenue to the flower district, he told me that, since the book’s publication in 1994, the price of dried poppies had doubled and the DEA had launched a “quiet” investigation into the domestic poppy trade. Agents had paid visits to dried-flower vendors, as well as to the American Association for the Dried and Preserved Floral Industry, a trade group based in Westport, Connecticut. All this sounded to me like either boastfulness or paranoia—until, that is, we got to the flower district.

Manhattan’s flower district is modest, a picturesque couple of blocks of lower Sixth Avenue where a few dozen dried- and cut-flower wholesalers have their showrooms at street level. As a pedestrian reaches Twenty-seventh Street, what had been a particularly dreary stretch of Manhattan suddenly erupts into greenery and bloom. Buckets of dried lotus heads and hydrangeas line the storefronts, gardenias in hanging baskets perfume the air, and clusters of potted ficus trees briefly transform the grubby sidewalk into a fair copy of a garden path. On Twenty-eighth Street we stopped in a narrow, cluttered shop that specializes in dried flowers. Hogshire surveyed a long wall of cubbies stuffed with unlabeled bunches of dried flowers—yarrow, lotus, hydrangeas, peonies, and roses in a dozen different hues—until he spotted the poppies: four different grades, their seedpods ranging in size from marbles to tennis balls, most of them in bunches of ten wrapped in cellophane. The smallest ones still wore a green tint and had a few crunchy leaves wrapped around their stems. The larger poppy heads were buff-colored and strikingly sculptural. They reminded me of a botanical photograph by Karl Blossfeldt, the early-twentieth-century German photographer whose portraits of stems and buds and flowers make them look as if they’d been cast in iron. Hogshire asked the woman at the register if she’d had any problems lately obtaining poppies. She shrugged.

“No problems. How many you need?” I took a bunch, for $10. I felt weirdly self-conscious about my purchase, and the plastic sack she offered me was too short for the long stems, so before we stepped back out onto the street I turned the bunch head-down in the bag.

We heard a very different story across the street, at Bill’s Flowers. Bill told us that he couldn’t get poppies anymore: according to his supplier, the DEA—or the USDA, he wasn’t sure—had banned imports a few months before, “because kids were smoking the seeds or something.” The supplier had told him that it was okay to sell whatever inventory he had left but that there’d be no more poppies after that. Bill’s story was my first indication that the federal authorities were, as Hogshire had claimed, doing something about the poppy trade—though it would take me several more weeks to figure out exactly what that something was.

Before the morning was over, Hogshire invited me up to his room; the day was getting hot, and he wanted to change his shirt. Most nights since his eviction he’d spent in the apartments of friends, far from home. Tomorrow he expected to be staying somewhere else. I’d asked him earlier why he hadn’t stayed to face the charges in Seattle.

“I would go back in a second if I thought they were going to fight fair—if I could be sure they wouldn’t manufacture evidence or slap me back in jail at my arraignment. But the fact that they wouldn’t just drop this thing after the first charge was thrown out shows me they’re being vindictive.” (By February, Hogshire had had a change of heart. He said that he’d retained a new lawyer and that he was planning to go back to Seattle to face the charges against him.)

I sat on the bed while Hogshire changed his shirt. Looking around the cramped room, I could see he was traveling light, with little more than a change of clothes, his laptop computer, some books, a stack of articles about poppies, and a sheaf of legal papers about his case. I wondered what it would be like to slip underground—not to be able to go home, not to have your stuff around, not even to know exactly where you would be spending the next night, week, month.

6.

Easy as it may have been to distance myself from Hogshire’s underground existence, riding home on the commuter train I found myself wondering just how much circumstantial distance really stood between Jim Hogshire and me. It was less than meets the eye, and far too little for comfort. I had poppies growing in my garden, after all, and I was preparing an article that would not only acknowledge that fact but would also reprise the very information that had gotten Hogshire into so much hot water. With what you publish, the officer had asked Hogshire as they hauled him off to jail, weren’t you expecting this? So what, exactly, set us apart? For one thing, my life wasn’t lived as close to society’s margins as Jim’s appeared to be; for another, I was writing for a national magazine rather than the fringe press. And this: I didn’t associate with people like Bob Black.

I clung to these distinctions in the weeks that followed as I made a concerted effort to learn just how strongly the DEA really felt about poppies—whether, as Hogshire had suggested, the government had launched an investigation and crackdown on domestic opium growing. My curiosity on this point was journalistic but also somewhat more self-interested, and urgent, than that. For by discovering what the DEA was up to, I hoped to learn whether the paranoid fantasies gnawing at me had any basis in reality. I needed to know whether I should be getting rid of my poppies as quickly as possible or whether I could safely let them ripen and then perhaps experiment with poppy tea.

I started checking out Hogshire’s leads. At the American Association for the Dried and Preserved Floral Industry, Beth Sherman confirmed that a DEA agent by the name of Larry Snyder had indeed paid the group a visit in 1995. “He asked us to put an article in our newsletter advising people not to carry this certain kind of poppy,” she told me. The poppy had always been illegal, the agent had explained to them, but “prior to this they didn’t enforce it. They were trying to correct something that had gotten out of hand, but they were trying to do it in a low-key way.” The association agreed to publish an article supplied by the DEA informing their membership that it was illegal to possess or sell Papaver somniferum.

Hogshire had told me that a Seattle-area flower shop called Nature’s Arts, Inc., had also been contacted by the DEA. I got in touch with Don Jackson, the shop’s owner. Jackson, who has been in the dried-flower business for forty-five years, told me that a local DEA agent named Joel Wong had visited his shop in March of 1993. The agent had told Jackson that he was investigating poppies and wanted to know what kind his store carried and where they came from.

“He took away several poppies and had them tested. A few weeks later he told me that they were of the opium type and that someone could get high on it, but he didn’t say I had to stop selling them.” Since then, Jackson had heard rumors of a crackdown and said that he knew of several big domestic growers who had stopped planting poppies for fear of having their crops confiscated. Jackson was concerned about the disappearance of somniferum from the trade: “We don’t have anything to replace it with,” he explained. “That seedpod is so nice and big and round. It’s just what people are looking for as a focal point in an arrangement.”

When I tried to get in touch with Joel Wong I learned that he’d recently retired. Another agent in his office took my call but insisted, at the end of a fifteen-minute chat, that I not quote him by name. Under the circumstances, I think I’ll oblige. Agent Anonymous seemed to be unaware of his predecessor’s investigation into dried poppies, so I changed the subject to poppy growing.

“It’s illegal to grow opium poppies,” the agent said, “but frankly I don’t see it becoming a big problem, only because it’s so labor-intensive to harvest the opium. You’ve got to go out early in the morning and slit the pods, then wait until the gum oozes out, and then you have to scrape it off pod by pod. Why would you do all this when you can go down to First and Pike and score some black tar?” (Black tar is a cheap form of heroin from Mexico.) “I say, let ‘em at it—it’s not going to be a big problem.”

It was a friendly enough chat, so I figured I’d ask the agent what advice he’d give a gardener of my acquaintance who had opium poppies growing in his garden. “I’d tell him it’s illegal and he’s running a risk of getting his front door kicked. But I’ve got priorities. If he’s a University of Washington botanist who’s growing poppies, he’s not going to have his door kicked; on the other hand, if this professor’s scoring the pods, his door most likely will be kicked. It’s on a case-by-case basis.

“But I would also tell him, Why grow this illegal plant when there are so many other beautiful plants you can grow? That would be my advice: Why grow the opium when you can put your energy into bonsai plants or orchids, which are so much more challenging? Because how many people can grow an orchid?”

I had told him that I was a garden writer, and he seemed eager to talk about orchid growing, his hobby; he mentioned he kept an orchid on his desk. But when I pressed him about my hypothetical opium-poppy grower, he turned distinctly less amiable.

“What if this poppy grower is also publishing articles about how to make poppy tea?”

“Then his door is going to be kicked. Because he’s trying to promote something that’s illegal.”

It was a chilling conversation. I was reminded of something Hogshire had said about the laws governing opium poppies. “It’s as if they had on the books a twenty-miles-per-hour speed limit that was never posted, never enforced, never even talked about. There’s no way for you to know that this is the law. Then they pick someone out and say, Hey, you were going fifty. Don’t you know the speed limit is twenty? You broke the law—you’re going to jail! But nobody else is being stopped, you say. That doesn’t matter—this is the law and we have the discretion. The fact that your car is covered with political bumper stickers that we don’t like has nothing to do with it. This isn’t about free speech!” Whatever else they may be, the drug laws are a powerful weapon in the hands of an Agent Anonymous or, for that matter, a Bob Black. With the speed limit set so low, all it takes is an angry government agent or a “citizen informant” to get you pulled over—to get your door kicked.

It was soon after my conversation with Agent Anonymous that I had my second opium dream. July was nearly over, and I’d come down with a case of Lyme disease, so my nights were already frightful enough, a roller coaster of fevers and bone-rattling chills. In the dream I awake to find faces pressed against the windows of my bedroom, five panes filled with five round white heads: slightly elfin, slightly Slavic-looking. It’s a raid, I realize; they’re looking for poppies. All night long they search my house, and then, at daybreak, they begin to scour my vegetable garden. They’re examining every inch of soil, they’re even dusting the leaves of my cabbages for fingerprints. My tormentors are peculiarly non-menacing, and in this dream I’ve already pulled out my poppies, so I should have nothing to worry about. Even so, I’m trying as hard as I can to watch all five of them at once, just to make sure they don’t “plant” anything, but no matter which way I move, one of them is always blocking my view of the others. I move this way, then that, and the frustration of not being able to see what they’re up to builds until I think I’m going to explode. And then all of a sudden I spot a single, gorgeous lavender poppy in full bloom on the other side of the garden fence: an escapee. Will they notice it? I wake before I find out, the bedclothes drenched with perspiration.

Maybe the Lyme disease explains the nightmare—I’d had intense, fevered dreams all that week—but it could also have been the call I received from Jim Hogshire earlier that day, announcing that he was thinking of coming up to my place “to help out with the harvest.” By comparison, the dream was a walk in the park, for here was a genuine nightmare: I was sick with a 103-degree fever, my joints so stiff I could scarcely turn my head, and a man who was wanted by the police and had no place to live was proposing to come over to help me harvest a crop that could land me in jail. My mind careened as I considered precisely how terrible an idea this was. Did I really want someone who might well, at some point, come under intense pressure from the police (all right, Hogshire, who else can you finger?) to see my garden? And once he had unpacked, how was I ever going to get my houseguest to leave? (The Cable Guy was in the movie theaters that week.) This is, I know, terribly unfair to dim Hogshire, who strikes me as a decent-enough fellow, but I kept thinking about something disturbing that he’d told me: that, after his eviction, he had given some serious thought to turning in his landlady for growing opium poppies. I was also flashing on the figure of Bob Black, the Houseguest from Hell. I rifled my brain for a polite and halfway credible excuse, but this was a summit that social etiquette had not yet scaled. In the end I merely spluttered something pathetic about being too sick to think about having people over right now and needing to check with my wife before extending any invitations.

I also told Hogshire that I wasn’t sure whether I was ever going to harvest, which was true. I didn’t yet have a good enough fix on the DEA’s intentions regarding poppies and, therefore, on the risk harvesting might entail. It appeared that the DEA was up to something, but what, exactly? I knew I should contact the DEA’s Washington, D.C., headquarters, but knowing how opaque its agents can be (and being more than a little nervous about alerting them to my existence and interests while my plants were still in the ground), I decided it might be best first to find out as much as I could about the scope of their domestic poppy campaign.

I called Shepherd Ogden at Cook’s, one of the seed companies that sells opium poppies. He’d heard rumors that the DEA had sent letters to seed companies requesting they stop selling somniferum, though he hadn’t received one himself. Ogden reiterated what I already knew: that the sale of seeds is perfectly legal. Beyond that he was uncertain. He suggested that I check with the Association of Specialty Cut Flower Growers, a trade group in Oberlin, Ohio. As it turned out, the president of the association, a northern California flower grower named Will Fulton, had just drafted a column for the latest issue of the association’s newsletter alerting members to the DEA letter, which had been received by “one of our most reputable seed companies.” The column quoted the letter’s first paragraph:

It has come to the attention of the United States Department of Justice,
Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), that in certain parts of the
United States the opium poppy (Papaver Somniferum L.) is being
cultivated for culinary and horticultural purposes [the italics are Fulton's].
The cultivation of opium poppy in the United States is illegal, as is the
possession of “poppy straw, (all parts of the harvested opium poppy except
the seeds). Certain seed companies have been identified as selling opium
poppy seeds, some with instruction for cultivation printed on the retail
packages. Before this situation adds to the drug abuse epidemic, DEA
is requesting your assistance in curbing such activity.

Judging by the spirited polemic that followed, Will Fulton is the Tom Paine of the cut-flower world. “Wait a minute!” he wrote. “Where’s the mens rea [criminal intent] here?” Imagine yourself in the interrogation room, he asked his members: “`So, you admit that you intended to cultivate for culinary or horticultural purposes.’

“Why is it illegal to plant a seed, a gift from nature, when your only intention is to grow it for its physical beauty, yet at the same time it is perfectly legal to purchase an AK-47 when your only intention is gopher control?” True, the Founding Fathers had provided for a specific right to bear arms, but the only reason they’d had nothing to say “about the right to plant seeds [was] . . . because it never would have occurred to them that any state might care to abridge that right. After all, they were writing on hemp paper.

When I reached Fulton at his flower farm in northern California, he identified the recipient of the DEA letter as Thompson & Morgan, a venerable British-owned company with offices in New Jersey. Lisa Crowning, the chief horticulturist at Thompson & Morgan, confirmed having received the letter, which she regarded as “intimidating” and “worrisome.” Sent by registered mail in late June, the letter was signed by “Larry Snyder, Chief, International Drug Unit”—the same man who’d paid a visit to the American Association for the Dried and Preserved Floral Industry. Thompson & Morgan hadn’t yet made a final decision on the DEA’s request, but Crowning hoped the firm would continue to offer opium poppies, which she told me she grows in her own garden. Crowning had telephoned Larry Snyder, hoping that there might be “some halfway measure” that would satisfy the DEA (she mentioned putting a warning in the catalogue, or removing growing instructions from the packets) but found him completely inflexible. “We don’t want to offend the DEA,” she told me, “but we feel we are completely within our rights to sell these seeds.”

The full text of Snyder’s letter to Thompson & Morgan brought the alarming news that the DEA was indeed arresting poppy growers. It alluded to “a recent DEA drug seizure involving a significant quantity of poppy plants . . . many with scored seed pods . . . [that] revealed a supply of poppy seeds noting the date of the shipment and the name and address of your company as the supplier. You should be aware that supplying these seeds for cultivation purposes may be considered illegal.” After that thinly veiled threat, Snyder called for a “voluntary cessation of the sale of Papaver Somniferum L.”

By October the horticultural grapevine was abuzz with poppy talk and what sounded to me like rumors of war. From Beth Benjamin at Shepherd’s Garden Seeds I learned that the police had seized poppies from a public garden project for the homeless that the firm had backed in Santa Cruz. From Will Fulton I learned about a grower in northern California who had had his crop plowed under by the DEA. From the American Seed Trade Association (ASTA) I learned that the DEA—in the person of Larry Snyder—had formally requested that the group call for a voluntary ban on sales of poppy seeds; the association had complied, a staffer told me, “as a civic-duty type of thing.” From Katie Sluder, an importer of dried flowers based in North Carolina, I learned that a container load of poppies that she had ordered from a grower in Holland had been turned back by U.S. Customs.

A crackdown was under way, but it was an oddly muffled crackdown. Rather than stage a few well-publicized raids, the DEA seemed to be pursuing a far more subtle strategy. It was working within the industry (in some cases by intimidating companies engaged in legitimate trade) to stanch supplies of both seeds and dried flowers without making any noise in public, much less publicizing exactly what people might be doing with poppies. The subtle hand behind these efforts apparently belonged to Larry Snyder, and I decided the time had come for me to talk to him. When I spotted his phone number printed in ASTA’s newsletter, I felt as though I had stumbled upon the Wizard of Oz’s direct line.

After I introduced myself as a garden writer, Snyder agreed to an interview. I began by asking his advice on the poppies growing in my garden. He came right to the point: “My advice is not to grow them. It is a violation of federal law. I would get rid of them.” He added that “we’re not going into Grandma’s garden and taking samples of her poppies” and confirmed that a gardener had to be growing P. somniferum with knowledge and intent before the deed became a crime.

Perhaps trying to be helpful, Snyder pointed out that there are 1,200 other species of poppies I could be growing instead, including “rhoeas and giganteum and a jillion others.” Giganccum? Wasn’t that the one Wayne Winterrowd had said was just a strain of somniferum? 1 asked him to describe it. “It’s got an even bigger capsule than somniferum. I’ve got one of them sitting right here on my desk.”

Snyder acknowledged that the DEA had done nothing to enforce the laws against poppy growing until recently, after receiving “some information coming in out of the Northwest and California that people were making a tea from dried and fresh poppies.”

Was he familiar with a book called Opium for the Masses?

After what felt to me like an uncomfortably long pause, he said simply, “We see most of the publications.”

I might be mistaken, but it was my impression that Snyder grew suddenly curt with me at this point in our conversation. He refused to say anything more about the seizure mentioned in his letter to the seed companies, on the ground that it was “still an active case.” When I wondered on what authority the DEA could stop seed companies from selling legal seeds, he cut me off: “If they sell for cultivation purposes, that is illegal.” It was hard to see what other reason a seed company would have for selling seeds.

Then I asked Larry Snyder if he worried that his efforts might alert people to just how easy it is to obtain opiates in this country.

“There’s always a risk that as more people become aware, some people will try it. It’s kind of like announcing that the bank leaves the vault open at nine o’clock in the morning. Is that going to induce someone to rob the bank? Draw your own conclusions.”

7.

The conclusion I drew was that the DEA was indeed trying to implement a quiet crackdown, attempting to shut down supplies of poppies, fresh as well as dried, without calling attention to the fact that, as I had discovered with Jim Hogshire’s help, they are commonly available and easily converted into a narcotic. What was in the bank vault that Snyder alluded to was this very knowledge, still shut up behind a high wall of misinformation and myth. The DEA appears to be intent on keeping it there, making sure that domestic opium disappears before the knowledge gets out that it is, in fact, hidden in plain sight.

The government would seem to be walking a torturously narrow path here, attempting to send one message to those who are in the know and a very different one to those who are not. This delicate balancing act was on full display in the seizure that Larry Snyder wouldn’t discuss with me. I’m fairly sure that I now know what bust Snyder was talking about—or not talking about. On June 11, a few weeks before my own poppies had bloomed, the DEA and local law-enforcement agents in Spalding County, Georgia, raided the garden of Rodney Allen Moore, a thirty-one-year-old unemployed man, and his wife, Cherie. Agents seized 258 poppy plants, many of them with their seed capsules scored; two dozen marijuana seedlings; and several ounces of bagged marijuana. A search of the trailer in which the Moores lived turned up records indicating that the poppy seeds had been ordered from Thompson & Morgan and two other firms, as well as a copy of Opium for the Masses. Moore was charged with manufacturing morphine and possession of marijuana. Although he had no prior arrest record, he was (and as of February is still being) held on $100,000 bail.

It does not appear that Moore’s bust was part of any organized crackdown on people who grow poppies; acting on an anonymous tip, agents had come looking for a plantation of marijuana and apparently stumbled upon the poppies. But the way the raid was handled is, I think, indicative of the government’s two-pronged strategy with respect to domestic opium. While with one hand the DEA took advantage of the bust to track down and apply pressure to the companies that had (legally) sold Rodney Allen Moore his poppy seeds, with the other it sought to spread a thick cloud of disinformation about poppies before the public.

AGENTS TO CHECK ON HOW POPPIES ENTERED THE COUNTRY, read the page-one headline in the Griffin Daily News, alongside a photo of one of Moore’s scored poppy heads. The article made no mention of the well-known seed catalogues found in Moore’s trailer, which, of course, proved that his poppies had not “entered” the country at all. Instead it quoted Vincent Morgano, a DEA agent, claiming that the growing of opium poppies in this country was unheard of: “In my 25 years with the agency I have never seen it grown in the United States.” Clarence Cox, head of the Griffin-Spalding Narcotics Task Force, assured the press that the confiscated poppies are not the same kind that are commonly grown in American flower gardens, Spalding County Sheriff Richard Cantrell said that each of the 258 seedpods seized in the raid could, if properly harvested and processed, yield up to a kilo of heroin apiece. (Talk about alchemy!) Bill Maloney, also with the DEA, explained to a reporter that extracting narcotics from the pods entailed a very complicated and dangerous procedure: “I don’t even think someone with a Ph.D. could do it.” He also said that opium poppies were extremely rare in the southeastern United States. “The climate has to be just right,” he explained. “The temperatures have to be warm and you have to have the right amount of water.”

All these assertions I read in the Griffin Daily News, which had taken them on faith. And why not? What reason would government officials have to lie about horticulture? Yet several of these statements I had already disproved in my own garden. I knew for a matter of fact that the poppies in question—Papaver somniferum—are indeed the same kind commonly grown in American gardens, and that growing them anywhere in the country is not by any stretch a horticultural challenge. And although I did not yet have direct knowledge that these poppies could be made into a narcotic tea, James Duke, a botanist I contacted at the United States Department of Agriculture, had told me that ordinary, garden-variety opium poppies did contain morphine and codeine, and that these alkaloids could easily and effectively be extracted from fresh or dried seedpods by infusing them in hot water—by making a tea. Duke, who has done extensive work on poppies and is something of a legend in botanical circles, further suggested that alcohol would make a better solvent for extracting alkaloids from poppies than water, which made sense: laudanum is a name for just such a tincture of opium. “You can get the equivalent of a shot of heroin from a good green pod dissolved in a glass of vodka,” Duke told me. “So you can see why they might be concerned.”

And why they might be inclined to lie. If opium is so easy to grow, and opium tea so easy to make, the best—perhaps the only—way for the government to stop people from growing and making their own is to convince them that it can’t be done.

I had every reason to believe that James Duke and Jim Hogshire were right, and to doubt the statements of the government agents in Georgia. But it still seemed to me that, in light of the ever-thickening mist of mis- and disinformation swirling around the subject of poppies, the best way to nail down the last piece of poppy knowledge would be to perform a simple experiment on the flowers in my garden. I understood by now that the laws governing poppy cultivation had already expelled me from the country of the law-abiding, indeed had done so even before I knew it had happened. Since those laws drew no distinction between growing poppies and making poppy tea, there seemed to be no good reason not to take the steps needed to satisfy my curiosity.

Drinking tea was unlikely to put me in any greater jeopardy than I already was. But what about writing about the experience? It was with that troubling question in mind that I went in search of some legal advice.

Many pages ago I mentioned that civil liberties lawyers now speak in terms of a “drugs exception” to the Bill of Rights, and in the last few weeks I have had a chilling education into exactly what that means, under the tutelage of several criminal lawyers and one former district attorney. Throughout this whole expert meet, my worst-case scenario, inspired largely by Jim Hogshire’s experience, has been the midnight visit from the police; the seed of my paranoia, the germ of my opium dreams, had always been the team of agents armed with a search warrant, tearing up my house and garden while my family and I look on helplessly. I had always assumed, though, that the government would need some physical evidence (surely the poppies themselves) or at least an eyewitness—some sort of independent corroboration of the fact that I grew poppies—before it could bring charges against me.

But after two decades of war against drugs, the power of the government to move against its citizens has grown even greater than many of us realize. According to the lawyers I’ve talked to, a search warrant may turn out to be the least of my worries. It is at least conceivable that a federal prosecutor could charge me with manufacturing a Schedule II controlled substance with no more evidence than the contents of this article. And then there is this even more disturbing fact: under federal asset-forfeiture laws amended by Congress in 1984 and upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court, the government could seize my house and land and evict my family from our home without convicting me of any crime, indeed without so much as charging me with one. My house and garden can be “convicted” of the crime of manufacturing opium poppies regardless of whether I am ever charged, let alone convicted, of that offense. That’s because under the civil-forfeiture statute the standard of proof is much lower than in a criminal prosecution; the government need only demonstrate “probable cause” that my property was involved in a violation of the drug laws in order to confiscate it. What would it take to establish that probable cause? In the opinion of some of the lawyers who have read it, nothing more than the article you hold in your hand.

To borrow an expression from Jim Hogshire, I have exceeded the twenty-mile-an hour speed limit that the government has posted (or not posted) over the growing of poppies; that much this article has established. By publishing it, I enter a zone where the government possesses the means by which to make a mess of my life. Will its agents avail themselves of those means, will they pull me over? Obviously there’s no way of knowing; a huge uncertainty has entered my life. But the decision now is theirs. And it is a decision that will be shaped by certain facts of a political and even rhetorical nature that I would be foolish to ignore.

I happen to believe that it would be no big deal to harvest a couple of seedpods from my garden, to crush and steep them in a cup of hot water, and to taste the resultant tea. (It certainly wouldn’t take a Ph.D.) I happen also to think that it wouldn’t be wrong to describe that tea as little more than an interesting home remedy—a powerful analgesic that also produces a mild sensation of euphoria. But that’s my description. And now that I have made myself vulnerable to the government’s police power, I am forced to weigh, if not honor, the government’s very different description of those same acts: that making poppy tea is “manufacturing narcotics”; that printing its recipe and describing its effects in any but the most horrific terms would be “promoting drug abuse.” The decision whether or not to prosecute a per son turns not only on what crimes he may or may not have committed but also on what sort of story a prosecutor can tell about him. If I were to describe here the brewing and tasting of poppy tea, it would be that much easier for a prosecutor to tell a story in which I appear less like the countless thousands of poppy-growing gardeners to whom the police turn a blind eye each season and more like, well, Jim Hogshire.

Hogshire still calls and e-mails me now and then, from wherever. (“Before I say anything else,” one recent communique began, “I wanna make sure I remembered your e-mail [address] right so write me back and tell me something you know . . .”) In our last conversation he urged me to be “extremely careful what you write, man.” Hogshire’s experience certainly suggests that it is not my experiments with poppies that are apt to get me in trouble; it is the act of publishing an account of those experiments—the one act that, ironically enough, is constitutionally protected. Would Jim Hogshire have been prosecuted for the possession of store-bought dried poppies had he never published an upbeat how-to called Opium for the Masses? It seems doubtful.

We’ll kick his door, Agent Anonymous had memorably vowed when I described to him a hypothetical author of articles about making poppy tea. Why? Because that’s promoting something illegal. As the cases of Jim Hogshire and Rodney Allen Moore suggest, the government appears every bit as concerned with the supply of poppy information as it is with the supply of poppies themselves. With what you write, the arresting officer had asked Jim Hogshire as they drove him off to jail, weren’t you expecting this? This is not a question I ever want to hear.

8.

It was on a chilly afternoon last fall that I set to work pulling up my withered poppies. By now they had dried on their stalks, forming crinkled brown pods the size of walnuts. Examining the seedpods, I could see that the tiny portals circling the anther at the top of each capsule had opened, releasing the poppy seeds to the wind. The seed portals looked like the little observation windows circling the crown of the Statue of Liberty. By now the seeds had probably been dispersed all over the neighborhood and would probably come up on their own, willy-nilly, next spring. (What, I wondered, would be the legal status of poppies that had planted themselves?) I made a mental note to weed very carefully next season.

I was unsure exactly what to do with this crop of dead flowers—this evidence. I’d read that police no longer needed a warrant to search my garbage (another juridical fruit of the drug war), so throwing the poppies out with the trash was not an option. The seedpods I decided simply to crush in my fists; it was blowing fitfully that day, and the brown shards, light as chaff, were carried off on the wind. That left only the anonymous-looking stalks, which I decided to compost—somewhere off my property.

As I gathered up the poppy stalks, I reflected on the season’s unusual harvest. Pride is a common enough emotion among gardeners at this time of year—that, and a continuing amazement at what it is possible to create, virtually out of nothing, in one’s garden. I still marvel each summer at the achievement of a Bourbon rose or even a beefsteak tomato—how the gardener can cause nature to yield up something so specifically attractive to the human eye or nose or taste bud. So it was with these astonishing poppies: how can it be that such an inconsequential speck of seed could yield a fruit in my garden with the power to lift pain, alter consciousness, “make sadness go away”?

We have the scientist’s explanation: the alkaloids in opium consist of complex molecules identical to the molecules that our brain produces to cope with pain and reward itself with pleasure, though it seems to me that this is one of those scientific explanations that only compounds the mystery it purports to solve. For what are the odds that a molecule produced by a flower out in the world would turn out to hold the precise key required to unlock the physiological mechanism governing the economy of pleasure and pain in my brain? There is something miraculous about such a correspondence between nature and mind, though it too must have an explanation. It might be the result of sheer molecular accident. But it seems more likely that it is the result of a little of that and then a whole lot of co-evolution: one theory holds that Papaver somniferum is a flower whose evolution has been directly influenced by the pleasure, and relief from pain, it happened to give a certain primate with a gift for horticulture and experiment. The flowers that gave people the most pleasure were the ones that produced the most offspring. It’s not all that different from the case of the Bourbon rose or the beefsteak tomato, two other plants whose evolution has been guided by the hand of human interest.

There was a second astonishment I registered out there that autumn afternoon, this one somewhat darker. As I threw my broken stalks on the compost and fumed them under with a pitchfork, I thought about what it could possibly mean to say that this plant was “illegal.” I had started out a few months ago with a seed no more felonious than the one for a tomato (indeed, they had arrived in the same envelope), and, after planting and watering it, thinning and weeding and performing all the other ordinary acts of gardening, I had ended up with a flower that rendered its cultivator a criminal. Surely this was an alchemy no less incredible than the one that had transformed that same seed into a chemical compound with the power to alter the ratio of pleasure and pain in my brain. Yet this second transformation had no basis in nature whatsoever. It is, in fact, the result of nothing more than a particular legal taxonomy, a classification of certain substances that appear in nature into categories labeled “licit” and “illicit.” Any such taxonomy, being the product of a particular culture and history and politics, is an artificial construct. It’s not difficult to imagine how it might have been very different than it is.

In fact it once was, and not so long ago. Not far from my garden stands a very old apple tree, planted early in this century by the farmer who used to live here, a man named Matyas, who bought this land in 1915. (The name is pronounced “matches.”) The tree still produces a small crop of apples each fall, but they’re not very good to eat. From what I’ve been able to ream, the farmer grew them for the sole purpose of making hard cider, something most American farmers had done since Colonial times; indeed, until this century hard cider was probably the most popular intoxicant—drug, if you will—in this country. It shouldn’t surprise us that one of the symbols of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union was an ax; prohibitionists like Carry Nation used to call for the chopping down of apple trees just like the one in my garden, plants that in their eyes held some of the same menace that a marijuana plant, or a poppy flower, holds in the eyes of, say, William Bennett.

Old-timers around here tell me that Joe Matyas used to make the best applejack in town—100 proof, I once heard. No doubt his cider was subject to “abuse,” and from 1920 to 1933 its manufacture was a federal crime under the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution. During those years the farmer violated a federal law every time he made a barrel of cider. It’s worth noting that during the period of anti-alcohol hysteria that led to Prohibition, certain forms of opium were as legal and almost as widely available in this country as alcohol is today. It is said that members of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union would relax at the end of a day spent crusading against alcohol with their cherished “women’s tonics,” preparations whose active ingredient was laudanum—opium. Such was the order of things less than a century ago.

The war on drugs is in truth a war on some drugs, their enemy status the result of historical accident, cultural prejudice, and institutional imperative. The taxonomy on behalf of which this war is being fought would be difficult to explain to an extraterrestrial, or even a farmer like Matyas. Is it the quality of addictiveness that renders a substance illicit? Not in the case of tobacco, which I am free to grow in this garden. Curiously, the current campaign against tobacco dwells less on cigarettes’ addictiveness than on their threat to our health. So is it toxicity that renders a substance a public menace? Well, my garden is full of plants—datura and euphorbia, castor beans, and even the stems of my rhubarb—that would sicken and possibly kill me if I ingested them, but the government trusts me to be careful. Is it, then, the prospect of pleasure—of “recreational use”—that puts a substance beyond the pale? Not in the case of alcohol: I can legally produce wine or hard cider or beer from my garden for my personal use (though there are regulations governing its distribution to others). So could it be a drug’s “mind-altering” properties that make it evil? Certainly not in the case of Prozac, a drug that, much like opium, mimics chemical compounds manufactured in the brain.

Arbitrary though the war on drugs may be, the battle against the poppy is surely its most eccentric front. The exact same chemical compounds in other hands—those of a pharmaceutical company, say, or a doctor—are treated as the boon to mankind they most surely are. Yet although the medical value of my poppies is widely recognized, my failure to heed what amounts to a set of regulations (that only a pharmaceutical company may handle these flowers; that only a doctor may dispense their extracts) and prejudices (that refined alkaloids are superior to crude ones) governing their production and use makes me not just a scofflaw but a felon.

Someday we may marvel at the power we’ve invested in these categories, which seems out of all proportion to their artifice. Perhaps one day the government won’t care if I want to make a cup of poppy tea for a migraine, no more than it presently cares if I make a cup of valerian tea (a tranquilizer made from the roots of Valeriana officinalis) to help me sleep, or even if I want to make a quart of hard apple cider for the express purpose of getting drunk. After all, it wasn’t such a long time ago that the fortunes of the apple and the poppy in this country were reversed.

As I made sure the stalks were well interred beneath layers of compost, close enough to the heat at the center of the pile to blast them beyond recognition, I thought about how little had changed in my garden since Joe Matyas tended it during Prohibition, a time we rightly regard as benighted—and wrongly regard as ancient history. If anything, those of us living through the drug war live in even stranger times, when certain plants themselves have been outlawed from our gardens with no regard for what one might or might not be doing with them. Prohibition never outlawed Joe Matyas’s apple trees (nor did it threaten this property with confiscation); it wasn’t until Matyas made his cider that he crossed the line.

But there it was, then as now, a line through the middle of this garden. Thanks to two national crusades against certain drugs that can be easily produced in it, both he and I found a way to violate federal law without so much as stepping off the property, and jeopardized our personal freedom simply by exercising it. In addition to inhabiting this particular corner of the earth, Matyas and I presumably had a few other things in common. There is, for example, the desire to occasionally alter the textures of consciousness, though I wonder if that might not be universal. And then there’s this: the refusal to accept that what happens in our gardens, not to mention in our houses, our bodies, and our minds, is anyone’s business but our own. Fifteen years ago, when I first moved into this place, some of the crumbling outbuildings dotting the property still bore crudely lettered warnings directed, I liked to think, at the dreaded “Revenuers” and anyone else the old farmer judged a threat to his privacy—to his liberty. KEEP OUT! went one, an angry scrawl painted in red on the side of a shed. My sentiments exactly.

Why is it that the biggest and most lavish garden books always seem to get published in the spring—at precisely the season when reading is the last thing a gardener has time for, and legitimate gift-receiving occasions are so few? Whatever the reason, the more quirky or scholarly garden books that would be lost in the spring flood of garden porn—all those tempting volumes of sumptuous but not entirely real (and certainly unattainable) gardens—stand a much better chance of catching our eye this time of year. Here are seven that caught mine.

PARADISE TRANSFORMED: The Private Garden for the Twenty-first Century (Monacelli, $60) is fully as gorgeous as any work of garden porn I’ve ever thumbed, yet it’s a whole lot more provocative. Guy Cooper and Gordon Taylor, partners in a London landscape design firm, have produced an eye-popping international survey of contemporary landscape architecture, from the coolly elegant modernist compositions of Dan Kiley to the occasionally wacky post-modern gardens of Martha Schwartz. The accent here is on design rather than horticulture—most of these gardens are decidedly post-plant. “Gardens should be freed from the boxwood of history,” declares one of these paradise transformers, and the work of the 30-odd designers featured here is nothing if not original, eloquently refuting the common view that nothing much has happened in landscape architecture since Roberto Burle Marx and Luis Barragan. Don’t miss Ms. Schwartz’s dadaist “bagel garden” in Boston, where a front lawn has been transformed into a tidy parterre of clipped box, purple aquarium gravel and, yes, a double row of lacquered plain bagels.

If “Paradise Transformed” makes a case for the vitality of contemporary landscape design, SO FINE A PROSPECT: Historic New England Gardens (University Press of New England, $45) brings proof that an earlier group of American paradise transformers—the makers of great private gardens in New England in the 18th and 19th centuries—accomplished a lot more than they’ve usually got credit for. Bringing together the insights of the social historian, the biographer and the gardener, Alan Emmet has added a significant new dimension to our understanding of American garden history, once treated as little more than a shallow tributary of English garden fashion. A wilder landscape and climate, combined with a powerful moral imperative inherited from the Puritans, gave New England gardens their own special character, even when their designers had one eye on changing European fashions (the hemline of horticultural fashion being a garden’s relative formality). Ms. Emmet skillfully demonstrates how gardens as diverse as Hollis Hunnewell’s Italianate extravaganza in Wellesley, Mass., and Celia Thaxter’s florid Impressionist gem on Appledore Island, Me., were both the distinct American reflections of an individual, a landscape and a time. “So Fine a Prospect” deserves a place on the short shelf of recent histories—alongside May Brawley Hill’s “Grandmother’s Garden” and Mac Griswold’s “Golden Age of American Gardens”—that have helped us recover a largely forgotten gardening heritage.

There’s often an inverse relationship between the beauty and the usefulness of a gardening book; not so in the case of Bunny Guinness’s CREATING A FAMILY GARDEN (Abbeville, $29.95), a book that somehow manages to marry romance and practicality—precisely the challenge facing every gardener with young children. How, in other words, does one make peace between the play equipment and the perennials? Ms. Guinness, a young British designer who won a gold medal for her “Wind in the Willows” garden at the Chelsea Flower Show in 1994, has demonstrated how a well-designed sandbox can actually add something to a garden; she does the same favor for the tree house, the swing set and the kiddie pool, all of which she manages to fold into winning grown-up gardens from which every last molecule of blue and yellow plastic has been exiled. Seductive photographs trade off with clever do-it-yourself plans and a text that evinces a real empathy for children; there’s even a list of plants that kids love, and a menu of desiderata that includes such essentials as “areas of long grass for stalking games.” (I guess Lyme disease hasn’t come to England yet.)

A book I can imagine having an equally dramatic effect on my garden next spring (not to mention my wallet) is the second volume of the Garden Club of America’s PLANTS THAT MERIT ATTENTION. Volume 2: Shrubs (Timber Press, $59.95). (Volume 1 was “Trees.”) Drawing on the expertise of hundreds of American horticulturists and gardeners, Janet Meakin Poor and Nancy Peterson Brewster have compiled a magisterial reference that should finally break the stranglehold of that small handful of hackneyed shrubs currently choking our yards and nurseries. Here are literally hundreds of gardenworthy alternatives to the usual yews, rhodos and forsythias, each given a good photograph and a brief but authoritative textlet setting forth its landscape uses and culture. The shrubs are presented alphabetically, but at the back of the book you’ll find a truly awesome set of appendixes breaking down the cultivars by hardiness zone, shade tolerance, pest and disease resistance, fragrance, floriferousness, soil preference, environmental stress resistance—everything but deer-withstanding ability. A model of just how good a plant reference can be, “Shrubs” also directs readers to the public gardens where each of the featured shrubs is on display, and then on to the nurseries that offer it for sale. This is the sort of book that could quietly revolutionize a garden, even a landscape.

A somewhat less sophisticated, but no less ambitious, new reference work is THE BOOK OF OUTDOOR GARDENING (Workman, cloth, $28.95; paper, $18.95), by the editors of Smith & Hawken, a book that aspires to become the pre-eminent one-volume primer for beginning American gardeners. Comprehensive, lively, accessible and even inspiring, this is precisely the sort of book to give someone who’s recently fallen headlong into the dirt. Some experienced gardeners will bridle at this book’s occasionally annoying blend of trendiness and environmental rectitude (if the Smith & Hawken catalogue sets your teeth on edge, this will too), but the scope, handsomeness and convenience of this primer should earn it many devoted readers.

Another impressive feat of editorial enterprise is on display in A PHOTOGRAPHIC GARDEN HISTORY (Random House, $55), by Roger Phillips and Nicky Foy, though this one is a good deal more eccentric. This inviting visual history of world gardening, consisting of several hundred photographs and long captions, simultaneously unfolds along two completely different conceptual paths, sort of like a CD-ROM between hard covers. The first path is chronological and cultural (the pageant of Western gardening from ancient Rome to the present, followed by sections on Chinese and Japanese gardening), while the second is thematic and cross-cultural. What this means for the reader, or viewer, is that our stately march from “Dutch Baroque” to “Romantic/Picturesque” will be suddenly interrupted by a two- or three-page visual digression on the theme of, say, “Borrowed Landscape,” in which we are invited to contrast the long prospects at Stourhead with those at Bi Shu Zhan Zhuang. Taken together, these often brilliant little photographic essays, which touch on everything from grottoes to water staircases, follies to parterres, are the best parts of this odd volume, underscoring the power of a few simple landscape ideas to endure across time and culture.

All the books mentioned thus far have more to offer the eye than the ear; every one of them is copiously illustrated and fat enough to commandeer a coffee table. Nothing wrong with that, except that it seems to me the winter bookshelf should also have at least one small and personal volume on it, a one-byline book propelled farther by its passion than its authority, and written in the sort of voice that is the literary equivalent of a chat over the back fence. As it happens, Margery Fish’s WE MADE A GARDEN (Sagapress/Timber Press, $19.95), one of my all-time favorite first-person gardening books, has just been published in this country for the first time, some 40 years after it appeared in England. Cause to cheer—and to wonder how American publishers could ever have let this one fall through the cracks for so long.

The “we” of the title is Margery Fish and her somewhat cranky late husband, Walter, a former editor of The Daily Mail; and the garden they made was in Somerset, where they bought a wreck of a house and two acres of limey clay in 1937, when “my husband decided there was a likelihood of war.” Margery Fish is the most congenial of garden writers, possessed of a modest and deceptively simple voice that manages to delicately layer memoir with horticultural how-to. The book was first published in 1956, and Margery Fish comes across as every inch the 50′s wife, patiently enduring Walter’s interminable lectures on the importance of structure in the garden—walls, lawns, paths—and the relative inconsequentiality of her own cherished flowers. But lurking just beneath the surface of Margery’s submissiveness is a subversive streak—imagine Gracie Allen wielding a pair of secateurs. Even the garden paths required negotiations: “I should have preferred to fill our cracks with a mixture of sand and fine soil so that tiny green plants would creep along all the stones but this was one thing Walter would not have at any price,” she confides. “Time has improved things and a lot of the Somerset cement has become loosened, some of it helped, I admit, by a crowbar, and now I have little plants creeping and crawling in and out of nearly every crevice. Between the lines of this captivating little book one can make out the story of a marriage (Walter dies before the garden is completed) and the distant war that spirits off one “garden boy” after another, leaving Margery to roll the gravel on Walter’s beloved paths alone. Much more than a period piece, “We Made a Garden” is a gentle reminder that plants are only a small part of what a garden is. The good ones are autobiographies written in green.

Sunday afternoon’s panel discussion had just adjourned, and gardeners were milling in small knots among the potted marijuana plants that dotted the room like ficus trees in a hotel lobby. Brian R., a grower in his 20′s who is originally from Washington and now lives in the Netherlands, was showing off a bud from his garden, pointing out its exceptional “calyx to leaf ratio.” With his oversize glasses, basement complexion and a taste for the kind of button-down short-sleeve shirt that usually keeps company with a plastic pocket protector, Brian looked more like a computer programmer than a gardener. But then, the most sophisticated marijuana gardening today takes place indoors, where technological prowess counts for as much as horticultural skill.

Brian noted proudly that his bud had been produced under a 600-watt sodium light in 60 days, a fact that clearly impressed a beefy older gardener from Florida. “Would you just look at that bud structure,” the fellow said, drawing me closer. The bud looked like a lump of hairy, desiccated animal scat. “See how tight it is? All those crystals? That’s one very pretty little bud.” The gardener from Florida passed it under his nostrils, appraising it like a cork. “I’d say this man clearly knows what he’s doing.” Brian smiled broadly and offered his new friend a taste. Now trading impressions gleaned from a joint the size of a small cigar, the two gardeners fell headlong into an arcane discussion of light levels and cellular cloning, proper curing technique and the relative merits of Cannabis sativa and Cannabis indica. I think of myself as fairly knowledgeable gardener, but I was lost.

The occasion was the Cannabis Cup, a convention, harvest festival and industry trade show sponsored by High Times magazine and held each year over Thanksgiving weekend in Amsterdam, where the cultivation and possession of small amounts of marijuana, while technically illegal, are tolerated. On the first floor of the Pax Party House, a catering hall and meeting center in a residential section of the city, panels convened each afternoon to discuss the latest trends in marijuana horticulture and review developments in the hemp fiber industry. Upstairs in the exposition hall, hundreds of convention-goers strolled past booths displaying high-tech gardening equipment, marijuana seed catalogues and wholesale lines of hemp clothing, hemp foods and hemp cosmetics. Multiply the number of booths, pump in large quantities of marijuana smoke and the scene might have been the Jacob Javits Center, thronged with pushy exhibitors rehearsing their pitches, handing out samples, writing up orders. Things got very mellow in the evenings, however, when the delegates assembled in the main hall for comparison tastings of new hybrid strains, ultimately casting their votes for the world’s best marijuana. Seeds of the winning cultivars would be smuggled home with the gardeners, to be planted as part of next season’s crop.

I had come to Amsterdam to meet some of these gardeners and learn how, in little more than a decade, marijuana growing in America had evolved from a hobby of aging hippies into a burgeoning high-tech industry with earnings that are estimated at $32 billion a year. That makes it easily the nation’s biggest cash crop. Unlike corn ($14 billion) or soybeans ($11 billion), however, modern marijuana farming depends less on soil and sunlight than technology, allowing it to thrive not only in the fields of the farm belt but in downtown apartments and lofts, in suburban basements and attics, even in closets.

Fewer than 20 years ago, virtually all the marijuana consumed in America was imported. “Home grown” was a term of opprobrium—”something you only smoked in an emergency,” as one grower old enough to remember put it. Today, thanks in no small part to the efforts of the people assembled in this hall—as well as to the Federal war on drugs, which gave the domestic industry a leg up by protecting it from foreign imports and providing a spur to innovation—American marijuana cultivation has developed to the point where the potency, quality and consistency of the domestic product are considered as good as, if not better than, any in the world.

In an era of global competition, the rise of a made-in-America marijuana industry is one of the more striking—if perhaps least welcome—economic success stories of the 1980′s and 90′s. Domestic growers now dominate the high end of a market consisting of at least 12 million occasional users; on Wall Street, in Hollywood, on colleges campuses, consumers pay $300 to $500 an ounce for the re-engineered home-grown product, and even more for the “connoisseur”‘ varieties grown by the kind of small, sophisticated growers on hand for the Cannabis Cup. Peering through the haze at the conventioneers milling in the Pax Party House, Brian R. declared in a tone of deep reverence, “There are a lot of true pioneers in this room.”

Home Grown Grows Up

A bit of historical perspective, by way of a confession: Not only did your correspondent once inhale but, like a great many other gardeners (and nongardeners) of my generation, I also once grew. It was more than a decade ago, and in a very different time. Only a few years before, in 1977, President Carter had endorsed decriminalization of marijuana and even the Drug Enforcement Administration was entertaining the idea; 10 states, including New York, had already taken that step, though mine—Connecticut—was not one of them.

My own experience growing pot was a fiasco. In my backyard, I’d planted a couple of seedlings sprouted from some “Maui Zowie” given to me by my sister’s boyfriend. Within months, my avid weeds had ballooned to the size of small trees, rendering them uncomfortably conspicuous. The plants continued to grow at an alarming rate right into fall, though for some reason they refused to flower. This didn’t greatly trouble me, however, since in those days people still smoked marijuana leaves. (When I mentioned this quaint practice to Brian, he roared with laughter. Nowadays, only sinsemilla—the seedless bud of a female plant—is considered worth smoking; all the rest, called “shake,” is usually thrown out.)

My days as a marijuana farmer ended abruptly one October morning, when a fellow delivering a cord of firewood happened to let drop that he was the police chief of a neighboring town—this while standing in my driveway, a single well-aimed glance away from my 12-foot marijuana plants. I managed just barely to steer him off the property before he spotted them. Immediately thereafter, I harvested my first and last crop: a couple of pounds of leaves that I literally could not give away.

What had been a mildly humorous close call in 1980 (for all my paranoia, I risked little more than a fine and some embarrassment) would be distinctly unamusing in 1995. Today, the penalty for the cultivation of a kilo—2.2 pounds—or more of marijuana in the state of Connecticut is a five-year mandatory minimum sentence. Like most states, Connecticut rewrote its drug laws during the late 1980′s to impose heavy new penalties for marijuana crimes, but Connecticut’s are by no means the harshest: in Oklahoma, cultivating any amount of marijuana can result in a life sentence. And jail time is not the only penalty I would face were the police chief to find a couple of pot plants on my property today. Regardless of whether or not I was ultimately convicted of any crime, his department could seize my house and land and use the proceeds in any way it saw fit: a new cruiser, a pay raise, whatever.

This is America in the time of the drug war. A relatively little-known aspect of that war is that many Federal and state laws have been rewritten to erase the distinction between marijuana and hard drugs like heroin and cocaine, on the Reagan-era theory that the best approach to the drug problem is “zero tolerance.” Today, the Federal penalties for possession of a hundred marijuana plants and a hundred grams of heroin are identical: a mandatory 5- to 40-year sentence, without chance of parole. An American convicted of murder can expect to spend, on average, less than nine years behind bars.

Many Americans, perhaps recalling the legal and cultural climate of the 70′s, wrongly assume that marijuana has not been an important front in the drug war. Yet under the crime bill passed last summer, the cultivation of 60,000 marijuana plants is an offense punishable by death. Nowadays, marijuana is seldom grown on that scale; pot farming is by and large a cottage industry in which a thousand plants would be considered a big “grow.” Even so, there are more than 30 people in the country serving life sentences for the crime of growing marijuana.

With so much more at stake, the techniques of growing marijuana, as well as the genetics of the marijuana plant itself, have been revolutionized in the last 10 to 15 years—as one glance at the potted marijuana plants on display in the convention hall made plain. Apart from the familiar leaf pattern, these plants looked nothing like the plants I had grown. They looked more like marijuana bonsai—no larger than a patio tomato plant and yet fully mature, their stems bending under the weight of buds thick as fists.

While I was examining these specimens, wondering how the feat of miniaturization had been achieved, Brian drifted over to chat. He explained that plants such as these were in all likelihood clones of a modern hybrid strain that had been grown indoors in a completely artificial environment. By manipulating the amount, intensity and even the wavelength of the light the plant received, the carbon dioxide content of the air it breathed and the nutrients supplied to its roots, a skillful gardener can foreshorten the life cycle of a marijuana plant to the point where it will produce a heavy crop of flowers in less than two months on a plant no bigger than a table lamp.

Several dozen such plants can be grown in a square yard, Brian told me. His own current garden in Holland contained 100 plants in an area slightly more than six feet square—smaller than a pool table. This sort of densely planted indoor table-top garden is known among growers as the “Sea of Green” and it represents more or less the state of the art in marijuana horticulture. I asked Brian if I could pay a visit to his garden. He put me off—growing commercially is dangerous even here. But I could see he was tempted; most gardeners are showoffs at heart. “Let me talk to my roommate.”

To the Sea of Green

Without a doubt, one of the pioneers in Brian’s industry is Wernard, the proprietor of a leading marijuana garden center in Amsterdam. Now a professorial-looking fellow in his 40′s, Wernard was present at the creation of the Sea of Green, working with expatriate American growers (and their seeds) to perfect the indoor cultivation of marijuana. On Saturday afternoon, he offered a packed hall of gardeners—a surprisingly eclectic group that included, besides the expected array of aging and aspiring hippies, several middle-aged farmers, grad students and even a few sport-jacketed retirees—an informative slide lecture on its history and development.

What is perhaps most striking about the recent history of marijuana horticulture is that almost every one of the advances Wernard covered is a direct result of the opening of a new front in the United States drug war. Indeed, there probably would not be a significant domestic marijuana industry today if not for a large-scale program of unintentional Federal support.

Until the mid-70′s, most of the marijuana consumed in this country was imported from Mexico. In 1975, United States authorities began working with the Mexican Government to spray Mexican marijuana fields with the herbicide paraquat, a widely publicized eradication program that ignited concerns about the safety of imported marijuana. At about the same time, the Coast Guard and the United States Border Patrol stepped up drug interdiction efforts along the nation’s southern rim. Many observers believe that this crackdown encouraged smugglers to turn their attention from cannabis to cocaine, which is both more lucrative and easier to conceal. Meanwhile, with foreign supplies contracting and the Mexican product under a cloud, a large market for domestically grown marijuana soon opened up and a new industry, based principally in California and Hawaii, quickly emerged to supply it.

At the beginning, American growers were familiar with only one kind of marijuana: Cannabis sativa, an equatorial strain that can’t withstand frost and won’t reliably flower north of the 30th parallel. Eager to expand the range of domestic production, growers began searching for a variety that might flourish and flower farther north, and by the second half of the decade, it had been found: Cannabis indica, a stout, frost-tolerant species that had been cultivated for centuries in Afghanistan by hashish producers.

Cannabis indica looks quite unlike the familiar marijuana plant: it rarely grows taller than 4 or 5 feet (as compared to 15 feet for some sativas) and its deep bluish green leaves are rounded, rather than pointed. But the great advantage of Cannabis indica was that it allowed growers in all 50 states to cultivate sinsemilla for the first time.

Initially, indicas were grown as purebreds. But enterprising growers soon discovered that by crossing the new variety with Cannabis sativa, it was possible to produce hybrids that combined the most desirable traits of both plants while playing down their worst. The smoother taste and what I often heard described as the “clear, bell-like high” of a sativa, for example, could be combined with the hardiness, small stature and higher potency of an indica. In a flurry of breeding work performed around 1980, most of it by amateurs working on the West Coast, the modern American marijuana plant—Cannabis sativa x indica—was born.

Beginning in 1982, the D.E.A. launched an ambitious campaign to eradicate American marijuana farms. Yet despite vigorous enforcement throughout the 1980′s, the share of the United States market that was home-grown actually doubled from 12 percent in 1984 to 25 percent in 1989, according to the D.E.A.’s own estimates. (The figure may be as high as 50 percent today.) At the same time, D.E.A. policies unintentionally encouraged growers to develop a more potent product. “Law enforcement makes large-scale production difficult,” explains Mark A. R. Kleiman, a drug policy analyst who worked in the Reagan Justice Department. “So growers had to figure out a way to make a living with a smaller but better-quality crop.” In time, the marijuana industry came to resemble a reverse image of the automobile industry: domestic growers captured the upscale segment of the market with their steadily improving boutique product while the street trade was left to cheap foreign imports.

The Reagan Administration’s war on drugs had another unintended effect on the marijuana industry: “The Government pushed growers indoors,” says Allen St. Pierre, assistant national director of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws. “Before programs like CAMP”—the Campaign Against Marijuana Planting, which targeted outdoor growers in California from 1982 to 1985—”you almost never heard about indoor grass.”

The move indoors sparked an intensive period of research and development, including selective breeding for potency, size and early harvest, and a raft of technological advances aimed at speeding photosynthesis by manipulating the growing environment. Gardeners also learned how to clone their best female plants, thereby removing the unpredictability inherent in growing from seed. All these developments coalesced around 1987 in the growing regimen known as the Sea of Green, in which dozens of tightly packed and genetically identical female plants are grown in tight quarters under carefully regulated artificial conditions. Near the end of his lecture, Wernard flashed slides of several such gardens he’d tended: green seas of happy-looking dwarf plants holding aloft enormous buds that elicited actual oohs and ahs from the gardeners in the audience.

As Wernard was quick to acknowledge, authorship for the Sea of Green belongs to no one horticulturist but rather to hundreds of gardeners working independently in the States and in the Netherlands and then sharing what they’d learned, often in the columns of High Times and Sinsemilla Tips, a defunct quarterly that many growers refer to as “the bible.” By 1989, their collective efforts had yielded exponential increases in the potency of American marijuana and earned the grudging respect of at least one D.E.A. agent, W. Michael Aldridge, who told a reporter on the eve of yet another crackdown (this time on indoor growers): “I hate to sound laudatory, but the work they’ve done on this plant is incredible.”

A Brilliant Career

Located in the red-light district directly across the street from a police station, the Greenhouse Effect is one of the 400 coffee shops in the Netherlands that serve marijuana. The place is little more than a dimly lighted corridor decorated in the Santa Fe style, with a cozy bar in the back. In addition to fruit drinks and snacks and an alarming-looking psychoactive pastry called “space cake,” its menu offers a dozen different kinds of marijuana and hashish, sold either by the gram or the joint. The Greenhouse Effect is one of a handful of Amsterdam coffee shops that carry Brian’s product, and one afternoon he agreed to meet me here to talk about his career.

Brian showed up for our appointment a half an hour late (few of the people interviewed for this article were ever on time), carrying the plastic shopping bag that serves as his briefcase. While we sat at a cafe table sipping soft drinks, a selection of his buds laid out between us in Tupperware containers, Brian retraced the path that had brought him to Amsterdam from an upper-middle-class childhood in a suburb of Washington.

The oldest son of two doctors, Brian was a member of his high school’s math and computer club when he began growing marijuana in 1986, though it was a friend in the drama club who got him started. The friend had been complaining about the price of marijuana, something Brian had never seen before, much less smoked. “I said: ‘Wait. This is a plant, right?’ He says: ‘Yeah, but it won’t grow here. I’ve tried.’ ” Brian was already a gardener—he raised tomatoes in his parents’ backyard—and growing marijuana seemed like an interesting challenge. “It was something to get me out of the computer club, put me on a slightly different level.” He tracked down a growing manual at an adult bookstore in D.C. and soon figured out that his friend had probably been trying to grow an equatorial sativa, when only an indica could be expected to flower in Maryland. “Now I was on a mission. I wanted to get the right seeds.”

His mission took him to a performance by the Grateful Dead, whose concerts served in the 1980′s as informal trading posts for the new indica hybrids being developed on the West Coast. Brian located the seeds he wanted, but he found the sight of so many Dead Heads strung out on drugs deeply unpleasant. “It left me with a bad taste about the whole experiment.” Disgusted at the scene, he made a point of changing the names of the seeds he bought (“hippie-dippy names like ‘Purple Flower Power’ “) to the more scientific system of letters and numbers he uses today: ST3, PB#3, B-Skunk x NL5.

Brian’s first crop of seedlings died after his little brother, worried the police would put his parents in jail, poured a bottle of Brut after-shave over them. Deciding he’d better move the operation out of his house, Brian recruited a couple of kids from his Hebrew school class (“I thought I could trust them a little more than the kids in my high school”) and together they planted a string of backyard gardens. In October, they harvested their first crop, manicuring the buds according to the instructions in the book and hanging them to dry in one of the partner’s attics. Many indicas exude a powerful, skunky smell and the parents quickly discovered the marijuana. “They told us to get it out of the house,” Brian said. “So we moved the grass out to the shed with the lawn mower, which was good enough for them. It was like saying you were kosher even though you had Chinese food in a refrigerator out in the garage.”

Since Brian still had no interest in smoking marijuana (“I was the farthest thing from drugs ever”), he sold his share of the harvest, clearing several thousand dollars. “More money than I’d ever seen in my life. I felt very elated and slightly guilty at the same time.” Elated because his product was so popular it soon made a local name for itself and guilty because he knew some of it was finding its ways into the hands of young kids. “This was heavy-duty pot and it caused some serious problems—at least one accident that I knew about. But I didn’t know how responsible I was, because at the time I still hadn’t smoked the stuff.”

As we talked, a modest parade of customers made its way to the bar to purchase marijuana, some for takeout, others to smoke in. Even now, years after becoming a smoker, Brian is careful not to romanticize the drug. “Smoking anything isn’t good for you,” he says, “and smoking marijuana makes you stupid.” Certainly the convention floor at the Cannabis Cup provided several cases in point, including one badly wasted fellow who introduced himself to me on five separate occasions, always with the same line: “I’m a smoker 32 years, living proof this weed doesn’t damage you.”

But Brian’s disdain for drugs yielded before his fascination with the intricacies of growing and then breeding marijuana, something he soon discovered he had a talent for. Investing $1,000 of the proceeds from their first crop in a mail-order hydroponic growing system, Brian and his partners set out 100 plants in an unused sauna in one of their homes. Brian soon noticed that one of the plants was very unusual: it had dark purple stamens and a smell that overpowered the garden. He kept scrupulous records on each plant (storing his notes on a Macintosh computer equipped with an encryption program) and noted that the purple-haired plant was also one of the earliest to flower and heaviest yielding. It also turned out to be the most potent.

Brian brought his “Potomac Indica” with him to college, where the response of his classmates convinced him that “what I had was very special.” Now working independently, he rented a house off campus and equipped it with a sophisticated growing system. Through a process of trial and error, Brian learned how to clone his Potomac Indica and more or less stumbled on the Sea of Green method for growing it. Through selective breeding, Brian developed several new strains, including one that he claims tested at 14 percent THC; THC, or delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol, is the principal psychoactive compound in marijuana. According to the D.E.A., the THC content of marijuana during the 70′s was between 0.5 and 2 percent; the average for indoor-grown sinsemilla today is between 8 and 10 percent. Brian’s new strain was as potent as anything on the market.

By his junior year, Brian had a thriving business but his grades were suffering. He was also now a smoker. “I said, ‘O.K., you can do well in school or you can do well with the growing.’ I made the wrong decision, I think.”

Brian dropped out of college in 1989 and turned professional. He opted for a highly decentralized operation, setting up a series of gardens in rented houses and apartments throughout the Washington area. Potomac Indica soon acquired a reputation. Brian reinvested his profits in the business, eventually building what amounted to a marijuana-growing franchise in towns up and down the Eastern Seaboard. In each region, Brian would select a local partner, set him up with equipment and clones, instruct him in the intricacies of the Sea of Green and then make regular on-site consultations in return for a percentage of the profits. Brian says he put 250,000 miles on a new car visiting grow rooms—exactly how many, he wouldn’t say—spread out over a 1,200-mile stretch of Interstate 95.

“I did well with the growing,” Brian offered, as he delicately minced a bud of his B-Skunk x ST4 with a pair of nail scissors and rolled a filtered joint. “The quality of my life has been one of extreme paranoia, however.”

Discriminating Tastes

On the third afternoon of the convention, growers gathered in the main hall for a panel discussion covering some of the finer points of the Sea of Green. Picture a university lecture hall in a dream by Cheech and Chong. Although the panelists—Wernard and two other growers—started out as somber and technical as botany professors, over the course of their presentations they rolled and lit up a succession of huge joints and these eventually took their toll. By the end of the session, a cloud of marijuana smoke had spread out over the room, forcing me at one point to slide down off my chair in search of a vein of cool, non psychoactive air. For audio-visual aids, there were slides and potted cannabis plants on stage that the lecturers occasionally referred to with a pointer. It was all a little surreal, never more so than when Wernard mentioned his company’s policy of requiring all employees to be marijuana smokers. It fell to an American in the back of the room to ask the inevitable question: “Do you make them take urine tests?”

The topic before the group was “Bio Versus Hydro.” According to Steven Hager, the editor of High Times, “a great schism” has opened between the increasing number of indoor gardeners who grow in soil, often organically, and those who stand by chemical-based hydroponic methods. Wernard made a strong case for the superior quality of bio-grown marijuana; he claimed that hydroponic marijuana had a harsher, more chemical taste. Arjan, the owner of a popular coffee shop, pointed out that hydro yields were far greater. Even so, he acknowledged that in a taste test he had conducted among his patrons, bio had enjoyed a slight edge: of 810 smokers, 83.14 percent expressed a preference for bio, compared to 81.4 percent for hydro. No one seemed to notice that the percentages added up to a lot more than 100; evidently the respondents felt very positively about both samples in the test.

I was surprised that, in the course of a two-hour panel discussion on marijuana growing, the subject of potency received relatively little attention. “People may not need much stronger grass at this point,” Brian later suggested. “So growers are concentrating on other qualities—taste, variety, esthetics.” Many of the conventioneers I talked to could discuss the distinctive qualities of various marijuanas with the passion and inventiveness of wine connoisseurs. Even the unsmoked buds were closely examined and intently sniffed—this one admired for its rust-colored stamens, that one for the “notes” of citrus or nutmeg in its bouquet.

During the convention, I met a burly Manhattan dealer and law student who was eloquent on the subject of marijuana taste. When I asked his impressions of a new variety that had won a Cannabis Cup award, he praised its pronounced “Afghani” taste. “Afghani is a big heavy smoky taste, really rich,” he elaborated. “But it has what I think of as a ‘pinpoint effect.’ Swirling around inside that big taste is something else—something sharper and thinner. The best way I can describe it is by analogy. You’re familiar with Ben & Jerry’s chocolate swirl? Well, it’s got this great big overpowering chocolate taste, but then within that taste, you get the counterpoint of those fine swirls of fudge. That’s the pinpoint effect.”

He described the mental effects of the winning variety with almost as much exactitude. It produced a “rapid, enveloping high,” he said, yet it had all the clarity of a fine sativa. Connoisseurs will often characterize a particular variety by situating it on a spectrum of marijuana highs ranging from the distinctly physical, narcotic effects of the archetypal indica to the comparatively stimulating, cerebral effects of a sativa. By manipulating the proportion of sativa genes to indica genes, breeders can design strains with precisely the effects they seek. Brian distinguishes between “blue collar” and “white collar” marijuanas. Customers who do physical work for a living “want to put their feet up at the end of the day and smoke a big, heavy indica,” he told me; an urban professional might prefer something more “uppy.”

Connoisseurship of this order tends to complicate one’s view of marijuana as a drug, especially when you think about the sort of bootleg product Prohibition is remembered for—just about anything with alcohol in it, some of it poisonous enough to blind or kill. Interestingly, most of the pot smokers I met expressed distaste for pills and white-powder drugs and disdain for their users. Marijuana connoisseurship suggests that, at least in this particular corner of the “drug culture,” the accent is as much on the culture as it is on the drug.

The Indoor Drug War

Few recent trends in the marijuana industry can be fully understood without reference to an event known among growers as “Black Thursday”: Oct. 26, 1989. That was the day the Bush Administration officially began Green Merchant, the first organized offensive in the drug war to take direct aim at indoor marijuana growers—and not only growers but also the legitimate companies that supplied their equipment and the publications that supplied much of their know-how. Along with a new Federal law that for the first time imposed mandatory sentences based on the number, rather than weight, of plants seized (5 years for 100 plants, 10 years for 1,000), Green Merchant radically altered the rules by which indoor growers operate. Six years later, the industry is still adapting to the new environment.

A D.E.A. agent named Jim Seward conceived Green Merchant in 1987 while thumbing through a copy of High Times. As he told a reporter in 1989, the magazine “just seemed to be a middleman in a dope deal.” By that time, the indoor marijuana industry was so large and well established, and so easy to enter thanks to the mail-order equipment stores and seed companies advertising in High Times and Sinsemilla Tips, that the Administration felt compelled to act. In the last week of October 1989, the D.E.A. raided hundreds of indoor growers and dozens of retail garden supply stores in 46 states, seizing equipment and customer lists. Virtually all the stores targeted by Green Merchant had advertised in High Times or Sinsemilla Tips, and the raids scared off enough advertisers to push Sinsemilla Tips out of business.

Using customer records seized from the grow stores, as well as 21,000 additional leads that the D.E.A. says it obtained from the United Parcel Service, law enforcement agencies undertook investigations of thousands of indoor growers, who soon discovered they weren’t as safe in their homes as they’d assumed. Now merely ordering garden supplies from the wrong company could bring drug agents to your door, as scores of African violet and orchid fanciers have been astonished to discover.

With the names and addresses of tens of thousands of suspects now in hand, law enforcement agencies developed a large appetite for indoor marijuana busts. “Marijuana growers are easy targets,” Allen St. Pierre of Norml says. As criminals, many of them are docile and amateurish, leaving behind a trail of U.P.S. records and credit card receipts as they set up their gardens; once established, a marijuana garden is much easier to find than any white-powder drug operation and arresting officers are far less likely to encounter resistance. Another powerful incentive is the asset forfeiture rules, which were liberalized during the drug war to allow agencies to keep the proceeds of whatever they seize. Since the crime of growing marijuana is by its very nature tied to a particular place—a house and a plot of land—seizing the assets of pot growers is particularly easy. All these factors help explain why, according to Norml, there were more arrests in 1994 for crimes involving marijuana than for all other illicit drugs combined.

I was curious to know how the D.E.A. explained its priorities, but the agency did not respond to repeated requests for an interview. However, in a recent internal report, entitled “California Cannabis Cultivation: Marijuana in the 90′s,” the agency defended Green Merchant, and its war on marijuana generally, as a necessary response to “a rapidly escalating problem.” The report claimed that marijuana was a “gateway drug” leading to the use of more serious drugs; that THC posed “potential health hazards,” which the increasing “quality and quantity” of domestic marijuana were making even worse, and that chemical runoffs from marijuana farms posed a threat to the environment. “There is good scientific reason,” the report concluded, for “grouping marijuana with other very serious and harmful drugs.”

Whatever the rationale, the war against marijuana is expensive—as much as $1.7 billion in criminal justice costs each year, by one estimate. And that fact, sooner than any shift in the ideological climate, is what could prove its undoing. In an era of shrinking government budgets, locking up nonviolent drug offenders becomes harder to rationalize. Last month, Gov. George E. Pataki of New York, looking to slash government spending, proposed relaxing the state’s mandatory minimum sentences for nonviolent drug offenders, some of whom may even be released. If they aren’t already, marijuana growers should probably be voting Republican, since Republicans alone have the financial incentive, and the political cover, to reassess the costs and benefits of the drug war they started.

Like D.E.A. campaigns before it, Green Merchant failed to close down the marijuana industry, but it has altered the way it operates. One response to the post-Green Merchant environment was Brian’s: to decentralize operations, keeping each grow room as small as possible—ideally, fewer than 100 plants. As Brian reasoned, even if one garden were raided, others would continue to generate cash for a defense. In the wake of Green Merchant, growers also began paying attention to such mundane things as “effluents”—especially odors and heat—and kilowatt hours, since judges will now issue warrants to search houses emitting unusual amounts of heat or consuming large amounts of electricity.

By 1991, Brian felt he “was sitting on top of a very large time bomb.” Friends had also begun to tell him he was wasting his life. But what Brian most wanted was to be legitimate, not to give up growing and breeding marijuana. So he sold his gardens, told his parents about his secret life (“I was excommunicated”) and moved to Amsterdam. Here, he joined a community of emigre Americans that revolves around the culture of marijuana in much the same way earlier communities of emigres in Europe sprang up around avant-garde literature or painting while awaiting acceptance at home. At least that’s how some of them choose to see it. Marijuana growers are almost touching in their faith that America will soon come to its senses and legalize their trade. Prohibition, so quickly recognized as folly, is their great sustaining myth.

Into the Cybergarden

On my last day in Amsterdam, Brian took me on a tour of his expatriate world. The community’s epicenter—its La Coupole—is the C.I.A.: Cannabis in Amsterdam, a combination shop, gathering place and hemp store located in a large second-story loft a short walk from Central Station. The afternoon Brian and I dropped by was the last day of the Cannabis Cup and Americans were lining up to buy seeds to take home. (Tiny and odorless, marijuana seeds are not difficult to smuggle.) With their glossy, four-color photographs and extravagant promises, the catalogues they consulted might have been published by Burpee. I asked Adam Dunn, one of the two Americans who run the C.I.A., what had been his big sellers that week. Hindu Kush had sold out, he said, and AK 47 was moving briskly, even at $30 a seed. (The 47 refers to the number of days till harvest.) Everybody was also asking for a variety called Bubble Gum, which smells more like Bazooka than marijuana, making it one of the safest—that is, least detectable—indoor varieties to grow.

Next, Brian suggested we stop by Positronics, Wernard’s garden center, where Brian occasionally shops. Positronics is a sleek, sprawling showroom and factory, offering the indoor grower everything from specially blended and aged organic soil mixes to state-of-the-art carbon dioxide systems and a selection of clones—robust four-inch-tall marijuana plants sold in peat pots for $3 to $6 apiece.

Wernard escorted us through a warren of white-tiled rooms where employees working in a small assembly line cut, trimmed and rooted clones, producing several thousand each week. Watching the gardeners at work in their windowless cubicles, deftly transforming one plant into a dozen over and over again, I understood why the Netherlands had become such an important model for indoor marijuana growers. Horticulture in Holland has always been a matter of artifice, of forcing nature in every sense. Almost all of Holland’s farmland is man-made, reclaimed from the North Sea (the recent flood notwithstanding) by dint of effort and technology. Cursed with little sunlight and even less space, the Dutch have also had to master the art of indoor growing—of, essentially, combining large quantities of electricity and chemical fertilizer with the best plant genetics available to create gorgeous flowers, picture-perfect tomatoes and, now, some of the world’s most refined marijuana plants.

Sipping tea in Positronics’ gleaming showroom, Wernard and Brian fell to talking about the future of their industry. Both agreed that the Sea of Green was here to stay, though there was still room for improvement, particularly in the areas of safety (with more sophisticated effluent controls) and yield. Wernard claimed that yields of 800 grams per square meter, already attainable by top growers using carbon dioxide, will soon be routine and that advances in genetics could add another 150 grams to that—almost a kilo of sinsemilla every two months in a space no bigger than a phone booth.

Perhaps the most important advances in marijuana cultivation involve computerization, which promises to revolutionize growing and vastly complicate the work of law enforcement agencies. Over dinner, Brian limned his vision of the ultimate post-Green Merchant grow room: the cybergarden. Sensors will monitor the five important environmental factors (light, water, humidity, carbon dioxide levels and temperature) and feed the information to a personal computer. Using solenoid switches, a so-called “smart interface” and a bit of customized programming, the computer can track and automatically adjust all these variables, either according to a preset program or to instructions typed in by the gardener. Add a modem and a remote-access program, and the grower can tend his garden from anywhere in the world.

I was skeptical; it sounded a lot like the kind of rococo fantasies that pot smokers have always liked to spin—in this one, the 60′s drug culture joins forces with the 90′s hacker culture to outwit a common enemy. But Brian referred me to a recent series of articles on computer gardening in High Times and The Growing Edge, a magazine for legal high-tech growers (published by the former publisher of Sinsemilla Tips), that described similar setups. He also told me about a company in New Hampshire where, I later confirmed, one could purchase both the hardware and software needed to set up exactly the kind of cybergarden Brian had outlined.

Brian also talked about incorporating security features in his garden: a motion detector and a “Mayday” program that would dial his beeper number in the event of a security breach, bringing the news never to return. But wouldn’t the police be able to trace the gardener through information on the computer? Not if the data stream were sent through a remailer first, Brian explained. Remailers are anonymous mail drops that computer hackers have set up on the Internet, untraceable E-mail addresses where one can send or receive encrypted data. An article in the October High Times offered plans for a similar security system, adding one diabolical twist. By incorporating a computer virus like Viper or Deicide in the system, the computer could be programmed essentially to self-destruct as soon as it detected a security breach and alerted the gardener, rendering it worthless as evidence.

High Times describes cybergardening as “an exciting technology that has raced far ahead of ethics, law enforcement and government and corporate control.” Indeed. The technology will make it possible for a grower like Brian to tend his franchise gardens from the safety of a computer in Amsterdam; theoretically at least, he would need to visit the grow room only to plant and to harvest. In the future, the D.E.A. may find the gardens but not the gardeners.

A Garden Tour

On my last night in Amsterdam, Brian finally consented to let me visit his garden. Evidently the gardener’s reflexive exhibitionism had triumphed over the outlaw’s professional discretion. I remembered something Allen St. Pierre of Norml had told me: that the most common way for a grower to get caught is by boasting about his garden. He had shown me snapshots of prize plants that gardeners had mailed to Norml, sometimes in envelopes marked with return addresses.

The garden was in a working-class village half an hour north of Amsterdam. On the train, seated next to his plastic shopping bag, Brian explained that one of the reasons he chose to grow in this particular town is that it is home to a candy factory, a bakery and a chemical plant; together, they produce a cacophony of odors that overwhelms the smell emanating from his garden—important since the Dutch police sometimes raid marijuana gardens.

Brian also talked excitedly about his plans for the future, which include a legitimate seed company that will specialize in strains of medical marijuana geared toward specific ailments. “The same strain that helps glaucoma patients might not be the best one for polar disorders, and vice versa,” he said. The week before, Brian had told his parents of his business plans, and their reaction had been positive. “After five years, I’m finally getting recognition from my family,” he had told me earlier. Evidently, the two doctors and their son the marijuana grower had reconciled. “I’m going to be helping people.”

From the station, we walked through a tightly packed development of tiny cookie-cutter houses pressed up against the street. The Dutch shun curtains, and each gleaming picture window presented a diorama of Dutch life, illuminated by the glow of a television screen. We came to a modest, gambrel-roofed house and Brian showed me upstairs. At the end of a dark, narrow and hopelessly cluttered corridor, he opened a tightly sealed door. I was hit full in the face by a blast of searing white light and an overpowering stench: sweaty, vegetal, sulfurous, sickening.

After my eyes adjusted to the light, I stepped into a windowless room not much bigger than a walk-in closet, crammed with electrical equipment, snaked with cables and plastic tubing and completely sealed off from the outside world. More than half the room was taken up by Brian’s Sea of Green. The six-foot table was invisible beneath a jungle of dark, serrated leaves oscillating gently in an artificial breeze. There were a hundred clones, each scarcely a foot tall but already sending forth a thick finger of hairy calyxes. A network of plastic pipes supplied the plants with water, a tank of carbon dioxide sweetened their air, a ceramic heater warmed their roots at night and four 600-watt sodium lamps bathed them in a blaze of light for 12 hours of every day. During the other 12, they were sealed in perfect darkness. The briefest lapse of light, Brian noted gravely, could ruin the whole crop.

There was nothing of beauty here in this cramped chamber, and yet to a gardener there was much to admire. I don’t think I’ve ever seen plants that looked more pleased, this despite the fact they were being forced to grow under the most unnatural of circumstances—overbred, overfed, overstimulated, sped up and pygmied all at once. “More!” the marijuana plants seemed to say, sucking up the carbon dioxide, gorging on the fertilizer, throwing themselves at bulbs so hot and bright I finally had to look away. In return for a regimen of encouragement few plants have ever known, these 100 eager dwarfs would oblige their gardener with three pounds of sinsemilla before the month was out. Thousands of dollars worth of flowers.

It was all a little bit mad, and yet a gardener couldn’t help but be impressed, even as I counted the minutes before I could politely make my exit and draw an ordinary breath. Only later, on the train back to Amsterdam, did I fix on what may be the maddest part of all: that the credit for this most dubious of achievements belonged not only to the gifted, obsessed gardener and his willing plants but to the obsessions of a Government as well.