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THE GIFT OF GARDENING
By WILLIAM S. ELLIS

Sometime just before the advent of Easter week, I came to be on a
road in central Vermont, and there were men and women in the yards of
the houses along the way tilling and spading and acting for all the
world as if they were in control of that still cold and flinty earth.
I wasn't surprised.  As a gardener, I knew it was the time of year
when a gardener's passion flares unbridled, a time to emerge from the
shadows of winter in search of the first signs of renewal (already
presaged, of course, by Mr.  Burpee's seeds bursting from their
window-bound cells of warm growing mix).

Among those out that day there were some, I knew, who held the
chilling fear that winter would tarry too long for the tomato plants
to fill their cages or for the orange daylilies to reach high in
bloom around the mailboxes.  Well, the dreams that gardeners dream on
nights of howling winds come true in good time, and, in any event,
orange daylilies always bloom.

Such is the ritual of the annual awakening in the world of the
gardener in the United States.  More than that, however, as the
National Gardening Association (NGA) has found, it is an
acknowledgment by members of 80 percent of the nation's 93.3 million
households that gardening is without rival as an outdoor leisure
activity.  Americans by far prefer to bring a peony to exquisite
bloom or a golden summer squash to sweetness of flesh than to play
golf, catch fish, or go camping and wish on falling stars.

"In 1990 retail sales of lawn and garden materials amounted to more
than 20 billion dollars," Bruce Butterfield, research director of the
NGA, says.  "Six years ago the figure was 14.2 billion dollars. These
sales are increasing 10 percent a year." It can even be said that
Americans spend more each year on gardens than on pizzas.

This reaffirmation of gardening as a bridge to better living has
surged markedly in the past several years.  The reasons are not
clear, but economic uncertainties may play some role.  Vern
Grubinger, an agricultural extension agent in Brattleboro, Vermont,
who receives hundreds of requests each spring and summer for help
with problems in the garden, thinks many people are now growing their
own vegetables as a hedge against financial hardships.  "A gardener
can save a couple of hundred dollars in food costs that way,"
Grubinger says.

For whatever other reasons, gardening has grown in the nation because
it has reached out to tap into the vast pool of baby boomers, the
generally well-educated and health-conscious men and women who were
born in the two decades following World War II.  They are of that age
now where the garden offers reassurance and continuity.  Many are in
their 40s--years enough to appreciate deeply the genius of life and
growth in the soil.

Born in 1947, Ed Perlman is of that generation, but he is not new to
the soil.  He has earned all the merit badges for good gardening, and
now, being particularly skillful at growing plants in containers, he
prepares such exotica as blooming pelargonium topiaries for use as
Christmas decorations at his home in Washington, D.C.

For his talents Perlman has had to pay a price of time, and that, he
declares, is the way it must be.  "The worth of a garden and a person
as a gardener cannot be judged in a season or even two seasons," he
said.  "It takes years."

He's right.  Gardening does remain an unalterable commitment to time
and patience.  For the six clematis vines, alone, in my garden I have
pursued perfection for five years, to make them hold over the fence
as clouds of soft color.  The artemisia along the edges of my lily
pond have started to mound as they should, but it has taken three
years of careful midwifery--three years of dirty fingernails,
bending, stooping, and aching knees.  As for the geranium Wargrave
Pink, it has taken to its place in the garden with no greater speed.

So I have learned that for all the wondrous birthings in the wormy
cradles of the soil there are failures and disappointments.  The
impatiens bloom, certainly, and bloom until they die when summer
dies, sick to death by then of their own megawatt colors.  But it
takes more than just a while for a garden to develop form and
character, to touch the souls of those who walk there.

Sam John Passarella has plenty of time.  As a prison inmate in
Tennessee, convicted of charges involving assault and kidnapping, he
has served 11 years of a term extending into the next century, but he
gardens now and says he doesn't give much thought to his "red date,"
or scheduled release, in 2013.

"I don't even care that much about getting out as long as I can
continue to work with flowers, especially roses," he said.  In his
mid-40s, Passarella still has the face of an acolyte, but he weighs
more than 400 pounds, and when he moves, it is like the docking of a
ship.

We walked in single file through narrow aisles of a greenhouse at the
Middle Tennessee Reception Center in Nashville, a holding facility
for prisoners awaiting transfer to other institutions.  Passarella
recited the names of the plants as we passed through, and when he
came to a bench where there were rose cuttings taking root in
containers, he said almost in awe, "Look at that; we're bringing life
into the world."

His title is head gardener at the center, and he said he is learning
something new every day--about composting ("It's amazing") and
deadheading and pH factors and more.  And he told me he stands ready
to swear by all the saints that the plants have made a changed man of
him.

The concept of calming the beast in a person through gardening is not
new in this country and is even older in England (the fair-minded
will concede the preeminence of England in all matters of the
garden).  It has long been known that being around plants can be of
significant benefit to the physically and mentally disabled and to
older persons and inner-city youngsters turned surly.

"Once you start looking at gardens and gardening as they affect
people, you find a powerful tool," said Charles A.  Lewis of the
Morton Arboretum in Lisle, Illinois, an authority on the
relationships between plants and people.  "In the process of
gardening one becomes very personally involved.  You become aware of
larger forces in the world than man-made ones."

At Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Blacksburg,
Diane Relf of the Department of Horticulture said that stress levels
rise and fall in relation to the proximity of plants.  "In a public
area where there are no flowers, there often will be more litter than
where, say, some marigolds have been planted," she told me.  Citing a
study of patients in a Pennsylvania hospital, she said that those in
rooms with views of outside greenery recovered from surgery more
quickly than those who had windows facing walls.  They were also more
civil to the nurses.

For all that, only in recent years has horticultural therapy gained
standing among the therapeutic sciences.  One university, Kansas
State, even offers a four-year degree in the discipline.

In the detention facility at Nashville, selected inmates attend
classes and work in the greenhouses for a period of six months.  The
supervisor is Jeff Philpott, a young vocational horticulturist, and
every weekday he stands before them for 90 minutes to explain the
workings of plant life.

"I've had people in here with third-grade reading levels, and I've
had college graduates," Philpott said, "and all of them are amazed
when they find out how essential plants are to the existence of us
all."

There are now more than 700 members of the American Horticultural
Therapy Association.  Among them is Nancy Easterling of the North
Carolina Botanical Garden in Chapel Hill.  In those pleasant and
piney surroundings is the Learning Garden, where bumblebees hang
upside down in the air to get to the bashful flowers of a giant
Solomon's seal (Polygonatum commutatum).  The garden is Easterling's
creation, and sometimes children come here from the psychiatric ward
of a local hospital to learn about plants and soil and to help heal
their illnesses.

"What the Learning Garden can do," said Easterling, "is add a little
bit of structure to what these children see all around them.  When
they enter here, they feel like it is their place, their world."
Youngsters go there to feel and smell, and sometimes to try to pet
the worms.  There is usually one among them who discovers that a
blade of lemongrass held between the thumbs makes a good whistle.

In Philadelphia Martha Straus of Friends Hospital works in the
greenhouse with men and women with emotional problems, as well as
with alcoholics and drug addicts ("What a place to grow pot," said
one).  Friends Hospital, opened in the early 1800s, pioneered
horticultural therapy; it was the first in the nation to have a
greenhouse for use by patients.

The treatment rooms where Straus works are heavy with floral smells,
and that itself is part of the therapy.  "Smell is one of the senses
that have the most impact on you," she said.  "It keys memories such
as those of associating with flowers as a child, being with your
mother or grandmother in the garden when they planted pansies,
feeling the pansies brush against your hand, and remembering they
were like velvet." Such memories serve well to help rid the patients
of their demons.

Gardeners in America are going to their memories more than ever now,
and that is being reflected in the rising interest in heritage plants
and seeds.  "Take tomatoes," said Kent Whealy.  "Gardeners want them
to be as flavorful and as tender as they can be, and they want
tomatoes that produce over the whole season instead of coming ripe
all at once.  Many of the older varieties are vining tomatoes that
continue to set fruit at each node and continue to grow all season
long."

Whealy's business is saving the seeds of the vegetables grown in this
country before hybridization was started by large commercial
growers--before ethylene-gassed market tomatoes put a grimace on the
face of America.

Those were times when old gardeners in rural places grew Dad's Mug
tomatoes and Albino Bull Nose peppers.  They grew spiny Cow Horn okra
that itched.  Some seeds were passed on, but many were lost when the
growers died.  In addition, the seed companies dropped many plant
varieties from their catalogs as hybrids took their place.  Of the
great number of varieties of vegetables available in this country at
the turn of the century, more than 80 percent have been abandoned.
Many plantsmen are seriously concerned about the loss of this unique
and valuable gene pool.* (*See "The World's Food Supply at Risk," in
the April 1991 issue.)

In 1975 Whealy and his wife, Diane, founded the Seed Savers Exchange
as a means of preserving what old-time vegetables remain.  Now there
are seeds for 2,500 different varieties of tomatoes in the bank of
the exchange, along with those of 600 varieties of potatoes, 700
peas, 2,400 beans, 500 peppers, 400 types of lettuce, and much more.
Seed Savers is located on the 140-acre farm where the Whealys live,
near Decorah, Iowa, a pleasurable town not far from where the
Mississippi runs.  About 1,200 varieties of vegetables are grown
there for seeds each year, thus ensuring a continuing supply.

Many of the seeds were brought to this country by immigrants from
Europe.  Diane Whealy's grandfather came from Bavaria, and not long
before he died, he passed along three varieties of seeds--a pink
beefsteak tomato, a fast-growing prolific pole bean, and a purple
morning glory with a red star in its throat--to the Whealys.  It was
then they decided to devote their time to preventing such gardening
heirlooms from being lost forever.  And they have done that so well
that in 1990 Kent Whealy was named a winner of a $275,000 MacArthur
Foundation "genius" award.

There is now a network of some 5,000 gardeners around the country who
join in the activities of the exchange.  In summer, when roadsides
are drifted with Queen Anne's lace, hundreds travel to the Whealy
farm to hear talks on gardening and to swap seeds.  They sit on
folding lawn chairs by their trucks and cars.  John Amery was there
with two buckets full of soybeans.

"I got these from a minister in Indiana," he told me.  "As you can
see, they are mutated.  The minister claims that was an act of God.

Parts of the garden sit so low that rainwater would collect if not
for the tunnels dug by moles and voles.  At the edge of it all is the
Pennsylvania Turnpike, where trucks and cars whoosh by.  It has been
that way since 1951 when the road opened, and by now, I suspect, Mrs.
Reed has come to accept the traffic as no more troubling than the
insistent spread of fleabane with its flowers of crystalline white.

In Philadelphia, gardens now flourish in many parts of the inner
city.  Flowers and vegetables grow on what were empty lots strewed
with the flotsam of crime and despairing lives.  It is all part of
Philadelphia Green, a program of community outreach sponsored by the
Pennsylvania Horticultural Society.

"Understand, greening is not the be-all and end-all of a neighborhood
turning itself around," said J.  Blaine Bonham, Jr., executive
director of the project.  "But it has proved vital in rekindling
people's spirits and a belief in their neighborhoods, including North
Philadelphia, one of the most devastated urban areas in the country."

Bonham and his staff of 35 work with neighborhood residents who want
to start a community garden.  In addition to guidance and technical
assistance, they supply the plants, gardening tools, fencing, and
soil for raised beds.  There is a waiting list of between 400 and 500
requests to establish a garden.

The New York Botanical Garden sponsors a similar program in New York
City called Bronx Green-Up.  The program reaches deep into the
borough, with 150 lots in cultivation, including one near 182nd
Street and Prospect Avenue called the Garden of Happiness.

There was a man at the garden who said that his name was Robert Smith
and that he was raised in North Carolina.  He was growing collard
greens.  There was Maria Oreiz from Puerto Rico, and her crop of
vegetables included cilantro, an herb favored in Hispanic dishes.
Also gardening there was a man who looked older than his years; he
was short and wiry, and he blew ashes from his cigarette before
cutting a huge eggplant in his plot and holding it over his head like
a tennis champion with the Wimbledon cup.

"Before, there were weeds here, as tall as you, and the drug dealers
would hide in them when the police came," Austin Jacobo, a leader in
the community, told me.  "There were junk cars here too, and old
refrigerators.  But now look.  It's like beauty in the morning.  You
know beauty in the morning?  It's something good.  That's what the
garden means to us.  Something good."

Terry Keller is a woman with a certain patrician presence, yet she
seems at ease on a street in the Bronx where two sneakers with laces
tied together dangle forlornly from an overhead utility wire.  She is
in charge of Bronx Green-Up, and sometimes it seems to her that she
has to fight for every step of progress.  Pointing to a section of
broken sidewalk near a garden, she said, "I have a commitment from
the city to fix this, but I had to shame them into doing it.  I had
to say to them, 'There are wonderful sidewalks where rich people
live, so how can you allow this?'"

She knows, however, that the program is a big success.  The gardens
are becoming social centers where the prevailing atmosphere is one of
pride and tolerance and hope.  "It's good not only for the people who
participate but also for those who just walk past the garden and look
in," Keller said.  "But right now I'd give my right arm to have
someone give us $10,000 so we can buy the soil we need for one year."

The program is in danger because of deep cuts in municipal funding of
the Botanical Garden.  For more than a century that great museum of
plants and trees across the street from Fordham University has
provided inestimable benefits to horticulture in America.  It is a
refuge sought out each year by 500,000 visitors.  There are people
living in the Bronx who have been escaping to the Botanical Garden
for relief and renewal all their lives.  Sometimes they come to spend
a few hours in the warm, glassed-in old Victorian conservatory, and
sitting there, close to where orchids bloom beside waterfalls, they
dream of having gone to Florida for the winter.

There are gardens to be found elsewhere in New York City, even in the
high reaches of Manhattan's towers.  Keith Corlett designs terrace
and roof gardens, but sometimes the views are such that it is best to
close the garden off and let the pleasure flow from within.  He does
that with vines such as wisteria, set to grow vertically and
overhead, and with evergreens.  All are planted in heavy containers.
In high-rise gardening, consideration must be given to the
substantial weight of moist soil and to temperature differences 20 or
30 floors up, and--it is no small matter--the freight elevator had
better be working.

They and others are giving the garden in America a new identity.
They're bending the rules, and the results are something to see.
There is most of all a new kinship between the plantings and the
site.  Plants native to a place and many varieties of ornamental
grasses promoted by van Sweden and Oehme are given heavy play.  Even
the lowly hydrangea wears a new respectability.

Edith Eddleman caught national attention with her design for a
perennial border emphasizing native species at the North Carolina
State University Arboretum at Raleigh.  She began her work in 1983,
gradually bringing life to the mammoth bed (300 feet long and 18 feet
wide) that was as striking and innovative as anything on the American
scene.  When she finished, it was a border with one thing or another
in bloom for ten months of the year.

Today she does not set out with any preconceived effect in mind.  "In
designing a garden," she said, "I start with one plant, then I
connect other plants to it, and other plants to those.  It's an
organic thing.  I like to think of myself as a plant chemist."

It is not so much color that Eddleman strives for with her designs,
although she certainly achieves that, but rather how a plant stands,
how it is shaped and textured.  She may start with a yucca, spiky and
sharp as a sword, and end with the soft yellow button-like bloom of
Moonbeam coreopsis, but there are no jarring transitions in the
middle, only friendly foils.

Farther south Ryan Gainey is much in demand as a garden designer.  He
is a romantic, and to him design involves not only the garden but the
house and other surroundings as well.  Indeed, I was along when
Gainey visited a wealthy client in an Atlanta suburb to advise her on
what colors to use for painting her house.  He did not want the
structure to clash with the garden.

"It's all very important, and it has to be all woven together," he
said.  "I mean the combination of plants, trees, grass, light, air,
space, garden decoration.  And the patterns, the stones, realizing
where the sun's going to come in the wintertime.  It is all very much
a tableau vivant.  It changes with the season, and it changes with
the way the wind might do something, or the way the sun might catch
something.  It is a combination of that which is living and that
which is still life.  It is gardening, and it is the most complex
form of artistic expression there is."

Such services as Gainey provides are not for the poor, not even for
the average gardeners of today, who do not aspire to peacocks on the
lawn or formal groupings of box (the reference is to boxwood, but in
elitist garden circles it is considered loutish to use all the word).
They are concerned more with the garden as a personal thing and as a
statement of environmental concern.

Americans dump 69 million pounds of pesticides on their gardens and
in their homes each year.  As much as a tenth of the urban water
supply has been tainted by the chemicals.

But the trend now is to organic gardening and biodegradable
materials.  New-wave gardening demands old manure.  Photodegradable
plastic mulches are being developed that change color with the
seasons.  They are dark in spring to absorb heat, then lighten to
reflect intense summer sun.  Scientists are testing an alternative to
chemical sprays and powders:  genetically engineered pesticides in
which bacteria that are dead but toxic to insects are sprayed on
plants.

Ann Lovejoy, a leading writer on gardening subjects, told me she
never uses chemicals in her garden in Washington State.  "If
something is so sick that you need chemicals, throw it away," she
said.  "What sense does it make to poison something to grow something
else?"

To all that, the rose grower is likely to say yes, but what of the
aphid?  What of the black spot and the mildew and all the other
curses laid down on the most beloved of flowers?  How are they to be
controlled, short of chemical warfare?

There is an answer, and more and more gardeners are seizing on it.
They are planting old-fashioned, disease-resistant roses, including
those that grow as shrubs and those that take to a trellis or a wall
like Spiderman.  The incomparable scents of those roses are being
rediscovered, and for the gardener now of an age to remember, it is a
return to a time when it seemed that Old Blush bloomed in every yard.

There is a place in Brenham, Texas, called the Antique Rose Emporium,
and the man who runs it, Mike Shoup, is a rose rustler.  He goes
around the Texas countryside taking cuttings from antique roses he
finds in cemeteries and in fields where houses and other buildings
once stood.  He finds them in most any place touched by the history
of early settlement in the Southwest.