The New York Times Magazine
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The twilight struggle between Life and Design surely counts as one of the great long-running stories of the century now ending. This clash of terms has given us battles drenched in both tragedy and farce, on fronts as different as the Iron Curtain and the curtain wall, Soviet collective farms and Corbusian villas, American urban-renewal…
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Planting Today I planted something new in my vegetable garden — something very new, as a matter of fact. It’s a potato called the New Leaf Superior, which has been genetically engineered — by Monsanto, the chemical giant recently turned ”life sciences” giant — to produce its own insecticide. This it can do in every…
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The sun was barely up over the brand-new town of Celebration, Fla., and the Rotarians had gathered in the clubhouse at the golf course for their weekly breakfast meeting. I’d come fully expecting to meet a bunch of white guys in polo shirts who’d remind me of my father, and there were quite enough of…
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One morning in May, Sgt. Scott Savage of the San Jose Police Department’s narcotics unit paid a visit to the newest tenant in the modest one-story professional building at the corner of Meridian and San Carlos: the Santa Clara County Medical Cannabis Center. Sergeant Savage, who has the upbeat demeanor of a young suburban cop…
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I NEEDED A PLACE TO WORK. THAT AT least is the explanation I prepared for anybody who asked about the little building going up, very slowly, in the woods behind my house. I was building a “home office,” an enterprise so respectable that the Government gives you a tax deduction for it. The fact that…
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In a rented hall on the outskirts of Central Amsterdam, a couple of hundred American gardeners gathered over a holiday weekend not long ago to compare horticultural notes, swap seeds, debate the merits of various new hybrids and gadgets and, true to their kind, indulge in a bit of boasting about their gardens back home.…
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MORE THAN A few eyebrows were raised in the world of gardening earlier this year when White Flower Farm, the tony Connecticut nursery, included a selection of annuals in its catalogue for the first time. Anywhere else, an offering of annuals—flowers that germinate, bloom, set seed and die in a single season—would be unremarkable: in…
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On a Monday morning in August 1883, a volcano erupted on the Pacific island of Krakatau, smothering its flora and fauna under a blanket of sulfurous ash more than 100 feet thick in some places. Krakatau had been literally sterilized; what remained of the island was about as dead as a place on this earth…
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THE STRAIGHT LINE IS IN BAD ODOR IN AMERICAN horticulture these days, along with just about anything else that smacks of Old World influence or the hand of man. This was first impressed on me rather violently a couple of years ago, after I published in these pages an account of a disastrous attempt at…
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THIS IS THE SEASON OF THE garden seed, that time of pure promise when the entire contents of a quarter-acre patch of vegetables—the yield of which will burden a small truck come August—can still fit inside an envelope and be sent cross-country by Fed Ex. The seeds themselves betray no sign of the prodigies they…
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Without question, the dinkiest plant in my garden these last few seasons has been the American elm tree my father-in-law gave me three years ago. I realize that “dinky” is not a word often attached to elm trees—”graceful” or “venerable” or even, in recent years, “dead” are a lot more like it. But there is…
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PREPARING A BED FOR ROSES IS A LITTLE LIKE getting the house ready for the arrival of a difficult old lady, some biddy with aristocratic pretensions and persnickety tastes. The stay is bound to be an ordeal, and you want to give as little cause for complaint as possible. All of a sudden the soil…