Gardening and the internet

This is really only tangentially related to plants and gardening, but I've been thinking lately about the internet.
My thinking was started by a series are articles in Slate by a man who has decided to give up the internet for 4 months. The articles are full of references to the internet as an addiction, and a time waster. His latest is titled, If You Grow Up on the Internet, Are You Better Equipped To Use It Responsibly? About how young people feel about the internet.

Which got me thinking. I grew up with computers, but the internet didn't really come into my life until my late teens. And do I regret it? Not even a tiny little bit. I just wish I had had it sooner. I discovered (or, rather, rediscovered) gardening in my mid-teens. I didn't know a single gardener, with the exception of my uncle who lived 7 hours away and I saw maybe annually. I got stacks of books out of the library, and started learning to garden by trial and error. Mostly error.

Then, the internet came along -- at the library, at school, and I had access to information. To people. I traded plants and information with people on garden web. Most importantly, I discovered the incredible community of people that is The Rose Hybridizers Association, where I learned most of what I know about my deepest gardening passion, plant breeding. Let me emphasize that: In roughly another year I will have a PhD in Plant Breeding and Genetics. I have certainly learned a lot about the topic here in graduate school. The fundamentals, though, the real foundation of what breeding is and (perhaps most importantly) why I LOVE it, I learned from the amazing people on-line.

And there is so much more... I have a small collection of great garden reference books, but I have at my finger tips the ultimate reference of all, Google. I can, in moments, learn of an incredible new species of plant, get professional and amateur reviews of it, find a source to buy it from, find out how many chromosomes it has, and virtually anything else anyone knows about it.

I would certainly be a gardener without the internet (I don't think anything could keep me from being a gardener) but I wouldn't be nearly as good at it. Certainly I loose a little time watching cute kitten videos on you tube, but that is more than made up by the fact that I can learn in minutes what would have taken me hours to find in the library.

Long live the internet!

Are specialty nurseries dying?

I got my copy of Asiatica's spring catalog the other day, which opens with a chatty letter from the owner. This year, a fairly depressing one, starting with "For most merchants in the specialty nursery business, [2009] was a difficult year." and going on to say: "If it wasn't clear before, it is clear now that there is no sound economic basis for introducing and selling new and rare plants."

Arrowhead Alpines' catalog doesn't start out much more cheerfully: The headline on their first page is "Still Alive" and includes this: "All the better specialty nurseries are struggling and we hope that out customers and friends will continue to support our efforts to provide cool new plant material. For that matter support our competition as well. It is depressing how many great nurseries have gone in the last couple of years."

Even the perpetually upbeat Tony Avent of Plant Delights writes in his nursery's current newsletter:
"The economy continues to devastate the nursery industry, and the latest casualty is Green Valley Growers of Willis Texas. Green Valley Growers was the 59th largest nursery in the country with 300 acres and one million square feet of greenhouse production. There are many other large growers who are still hanging on while operating in Chapter 11 or Chapter 12 bankruptcy ... we wish them the best in trying to save their businesses."

I wonder -- and worry -- if these nursery struggles are just one more side effect of the hard economic times, or a sign of a longer term trend. I hope not. I can't imagine a world without catalogs packed with amazing plants I've never heard of and long to grow... I hope all my beloved suppliers make it through the hard times, and thrive for years to come. I'll even add a little bit to my orders, just to do my part.

But I think -- and hope -- that brighter times are ahead. Gardening is becoming trendy! I know right now it is just vegetable gardening -- but surely those people lured into the garden by vegetables will be drawn ever deeper into plant addiction, and soon finding themselves ordering rare Japanese Asarum. The rise of the internet, which is not only the ultimate gardening reference book, but also a source for plant-lust inducing blogs, and virtual gardening communities, will surely help fuel the rise and passion of gardeners across the country and the world. I think gardening is poised to follow the path of the "foodie" scene, and explode into mainstream America.

What do you think? Is gardening on the rise? Are specialty nurseries doomed?

Wednesday Links

A brief story about some University of Florida researchers and the potential to genetically engineer fragrance into flowers which I mostly pass on because I can't resist news stories about people I know (Dave Clark, one of the researchers in the article, is a collaborator with my advisor on the petunia project I'm doing) but also because it is an interesting note in the whole GMO debate. Though really, it would be easier to add fragrance to florist roses with traditional breeding. The genetic engineering approach would only really make sense with something like gerbera daisies with no scent whatsoever. And wouldn't a fragrant gerb be kinda weird?

Studio G does a post on living willow structures. Which I totally want to do. When I eventually graduate, and can move out of the blasted city, to somewhere with SPACE, I'm building one. Probably several.
Do check out this news story of a debate over genetic engineering somewhere in the UK (okay, I looked it up: Birmingham. Don't know where that is, but maybe you do.) It starts of all civilized with people saying they can respect and learn from each other, and ends with one farmer calling the others "miserable gits." Which just makes me giggle.

A good post on the evils of topping trees. I remember a professor explaining this to my class, and saying that topping does have one useful purpose: It can help you pick a good arborist! As in, if they offer to top your trees, don't hire them.

This report of a new repeat blooming cherry tree gets it all back to front. The variety was created via mutation breeding -- which is simply exposing the plant to some mutagen (chemicals, radiation) to create random changes in genes, most of which will be damaging, some of which might be useful. The strange thing about this story is that they act as if mutation breeding is some shiny new alternative to genetic engineering. Fact is, it is OLD news. Mutation breeding has been used in wheat breeding, to create rex begonias and in many other ornamental plants -- it is also a fundamental technique for doing basic research on genetics -- there are thousands and thousands of mutated lines of arabidopsis, corn, etc, in use in genetics labs around the world.

An interesting story in The Atlantic (by way of the essential Give Me Something to Read) about Wal-Mart's movement into local produce -- including a blind taste test comparing produce from Wal-Mart and Whole Food's, where Wal-Mart actually wins in several categories. A very interesting counter-point to the typical knee-jerk "Wal-Mart = bad" thinking.

Rice art and cultivar lust.

Have you see these amazing images created in Inakadate, Japan, by planting different colored leaf rice varieties in exacting patterns?

Photo from Pink tentacle (Do go check out the rest of the set. Really cool.)

But what gets me is the varieties they use to create the images, especially this almost white leaved rice:

Photo from this site (in Japanese)

How stunning is that? I want some! I've seen purple leaved rice for sale before, but never the white. Does anyone know of a source? I've been asking my Japanese friends, our friendly neighborhood rice researcher, browsing rice mutant databases... no luck yet. If anyone knows anything about it, PLEASE let me know! I NEED it. Desperately.

Wednesday Links:

Studio G's blog had a piece on an amazing looking topiary garden in South Carolina. Well worth checking out.

Tired of the cold and snow? Consider a trip to the lovely gardens of New Zealand. Oh, I wish I could...

Garden Rant's Susan Harris makes the point that snow is a design opportunity in the garden.

If you aren't a sort of academic plant geek, you might not appreciate this but: Allan Armitage is going to be dancing the hustle at a fund raiser! I want to see a dance-off between him and Michael Dirr!

The Inelegant Gardener explains the reason that some vegetables (his example is parsnips, but the same applies to a number of things) are sweeter after cold weather

Linda Chalker-Scott on The Garden Professors does a spot-on debunking of the "chemicals are evil" mindset.

Wednesday Links:

Starting off this week with celebrity gossip: Gardening is Nicole Kidman's stress-buster, according to the Times of India.

A nice piece on composting that doesn't follow the rules from the Christian Science Monitor -- a piece I can totally get behind, as I never make a proper compost pile -- I just throw stuff in a mound, and eventually, it breaks down. Patience is all you need

From MATT Kinase, aka The Scientist Gardener: A virus that melts caterpillars. Yes MELTS. It is really cool, but in a really gross way.

Here is the US news papers are busy publishing their best songs or movies or books of the decade ending, but in the UK (where they understand gardening) the Telegraph has a piece on the decade in gardening with a major emphases on the naturalistic design ideas of the amazing Piet Oudolf (see my pictures of the Oudolf designed Lurie garden in Chicago here). Reading stuff like this makes me so jealous of the Brits. This article honest to goodness discusses the "signature color combination of the late Nineties" as being Dahlia Bishop of Llandaff and Verbena bonariensis. Can you name the signature color combination of ANY decade in the US? Besides green lawn and too much dyed wood chip mulch?

Funny post on Cactus Blindness (the inability to tell different species of cacti apart) from Plants are the Strangest People

Great book review from Zanthan Gardens -- I confess to being a total essay addict, so to learn about a new (to me) book of gardening essays is always a treat.

By way of Garden Rant: Looking at nature makes us nicer

Extreme guerilla gardening -- planting 200 trees to protest a proposed shopping center! And the town isn't even going to remove them! Gotta love the Brits.

Looks like one thing to come out of Copehagen is a system to pay countries to preserve forest lands. The article includes the surprising (to me) statistic that rainforest destruction accounts for 20% of global CO2 emissions. Really? That's crazy.

Wednesday Links:

Gardening Gone Wild has posted a list of "Great Books for Gardeners" which I am very excited about. I need to stock up on good reading for the winter.

The British magazine Hort week has a brief article about the government trying to deal with an increasing lack of people with the skills to be successful horticulturalists. An issue here in the US too, but I don't think it is even on the government's radar screen in this country.

Gardening Gone Wild  (again! They're on a roll... and I had been considering removing them from my google reader list!) has a great post -- a "Letter to me as a new gardener" of the basic gardening advice she wishes she had known when she first started gardening.

Biotechnology -- a Solution to Hunger?  An excellent little article looking at the pros and cons of using genetic engrineering to try and help global hunger problems. So much of the coverage on GMOs is insanely polarized, with people either yelling: "It is EVIL!" or "It will SAVE THE WORLD!" that I was very happy to read this --  actually talking about some of the specific good genetic engineering could do, and some of the potential risks.

More on Biotechnology  in this piece from the Economist about Monsanto, everyone's favorite big ag company to hate. A good big picture view of where genetic engineering is and where it is going.

By way of the Fine Gardening website: A man arrested for while trying to prune his tree with a shotgun. Silly. Everyone knows semi-automatic machine guns work WAY better.

Global warming and transparency in science

A couple news stories this week that got me thinking.

First, this interview on NPR's Weekend Edition Saturday:

In the NPR piece, Scott Simon moderated a sort of debate between Freakonomics (and Super Freakonomics) author Steven Levitt and Peter Frumhoff of The Union of Concerned Scientists. Levitt advocates geoengineering to fight global warming in the short term while we get CO2 under control -- things like pumping sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere to reflect sunlight and cool the earth. I'm personally skeptical, though a little intrigued, but Frumhoff's arguments against it were... well, fairly shocking. He started arguing that it wouldn't work, but when Levitt pushed back, he basically confessed he thought it was dangerous mostly because it would make it harder to get people behind reducing carbon emissions. In other words: talking about this will make it harder to get people to do what I want them to, so it is better to just pretend it isn't an option at all, especially as world leaders are meeting to try and agree to significant emission reductions.

In response, Levitt asked: "And if the U.S. were to meet the standards that Barack Obama has proposed, what will happen to the temperature of the Earth over the next 50 years?"

There was a long, uncomfortable pause, and then finally Frumhoff admitted: "Well, we're going to see some warming."

In other words: Carbon reduction, on any scale being talked about, will not solve the problem in the short term, while geoengineering possibly could. But we mustn't talk about it.

Now, geoengineering certainly could have lots of other negative effects as well, it seems far from a perfect fix or even a practical one -- but shouldn't we at least be having a discussions about it? We hear so much about how horrible severe global warming could be, so shouldn't we at least consider all the options, no matter how wacky they may seem? Yet the attitude taken by Frumhoff is frankly antidemocratic: don't tell people all the options in case they decide on a different option than the one we, the experts, think is best. Don't discuss the pros and cons of emission reduction vs. geoengineering, just accept as decreed that carbon emission reductions are the one true way.

Even more disturbingly anti-Democratic is this story in Science about leaked private e-mails between top climate scientists. A lot of disturbing content, most strikingly this particular quote from CRU (Climate Research Unit) Director Phil Jones referring to requests from global warming critics for a file of raw global temperature data. He wrote: "I think I'll delete the file rather than send to anyone." Other e-mail exchanges regarded trying to keep controversial research findings out of the 2007 IPCC report, saying "Kevin and I will keep them out somehow - even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is."

Basically, the e-mails contain various versions of the same story: Rather than releasing data that they feared could be misinterpreted, they made an effort to control the message so only information that supported their conclusions were made public.

The factual omissions revealed by these e-mail exchanges are apparently not that damaging to the actual science -- the scientists seem to have good reasoning behind drawing the conclusions they have from their data, but the choice to simply promulgate their conclusions rather than the full course of reasoning that lead to those conclusions is very disturbing -- beyond disturbing. If I, in my research in grad school, tried to hide data which didn't support my conclusions I would be kicked out of school, and rightly so: Transparency is at the very heart of science. You always present the data that supports your conclusions, AND the reasons you might possibly be wrong.

I consider myself an environmentalist, and have never considered myself a doubter of global warming, but this story has frankly shaken me. What these scientists have done is put political dogma ahead of honesty and truth. How then are we to trust them? They think, I guess, that because global warming is so serious, it is too important to debate. I feel quite the opposite: For something that important we need all the facts and all the debate we can get.

Wednesday Links

Here's some links to things I found worth reading this past week:

Council orders grandmother dig beloved garden store unsightly wheelie bins I love that in the UK, someone having to rip out their garden is correctly viewed as a news-worthy tragedy.

Keep off don't touch Michele from the always great Gardenrant gives a spot-on analysis of bad landscaping -- my favorite quote: "...yards are not petting zoos for spruces, nor passive sponges for weed-and-feed, but places that actual humans should enjoy."

Confessions of a Sweatshop Inspector Totally off topic for this blog, but human rights and fair labor practices should matter to everyone. This is a fascinating piece on sweatshops, and has some really good information on how to figure out if a company is exploiting its workers.

Gardening books for Christmas A cool list of new books that would make great Christmas presents from The Daily Telegraph. Some cool looking books! I'm particularly intrigued by the title: Everything You Can Do in the Garden Without Actually Gardening

Breeding blight resistant chestnuts  A nice little story from the Baltimore Sun about efforts to restore the now virtually extinct American Chestnut via breeding with the blight resistant Chinese Chestnut. My grandfather has always been extremely interesting in this project, so I like keeping up on it.

Biodegradable = scam A thought provoking little post by the always worth reading MAT Kinase

Chocolate Flower Farm  I don't remember how I stumbled on this nursery, but: they specialize in flowers which are chocolate colored. Kinda strange. First time I've heard of a nursery specializing by color. But if you are into black/brown foliage and flowers (Ahem: Fern) you might want to check them out.

The power of gardens

I really think there is something pretty powerful about gardens and greenspaces that can have a big impact on how people live their lives and look at the world.

Another bit of evidence here: A neighborhood in that most down-and-out cities, Flint MI, transformed as people take vacant, weedy lots and start making gardens.

Wait, some earthworms are BAD?

European earthworms are destroying northern American forests.

Here's the story: Native American earthworms were pushed south by the last ice age, and haven't moved back up into the northern US and Canada. In other words (I never knew this) in the Northern US, there are no native earthworms. It is (or was) a worm-free zone. European worms escaped from those used as fishing bait and home worm composting are moving into these northern forests and changing the environment. Unlike native decomposers which slowly break down leaves, making a thick layer of partially decomposed organic matter called duff, these exotic earthworms gobble it all down in no time, leaving exposed soil which dries out faster, killing native plants, changing soil chemistry and so changing the populations of symbiotic fungi that native trees depend on, and even making the forests more suitable for invasive species like buckthorn and garlic mustard.
While it is too late for wild areas already infested, worms spread very slowly on their own, and humans discarding worms used for composting or fishing are the main way they expand their territory. Spread the word! I don't think enough people know about this.

Read more here and here and if you want to get more technical, here.
Photo from crocknroll on flickr.

Teaching the homeless gardening myths...

I just saw this story in the New York Times about a community center in the Bronx teaching the homeless gardening skills. Either the reporter didn't understand what was going on, or the "skills" being taught are fairly useless. First, they're dusting all their cuttings with Vitamin B1 shows up in this list of gardening myths to beware of. The reporter also quotes the teacher telling them how to root cuttings and telling them not to tear the bark... Um, okay. But you know, wounding is a key step in cutting propagation. Some studies have found actually crushing the stem with a hammer works wonders.
I love the idea of teaching people down on their luck how to garden -- gardening is the best therapy. But how about actually teaching them to garden not spreading myths?

Is gardening financially worth it? WHO CARES?

I saw this article today on Slate's The Big Money stating that "gardening won't end the recessions." The New York Times starter garden blog has also addressed the issue of the finances of gardening, as have many other articles, and I've seen wildly different numbers showing gardening to be a waste of money, or penny pincher's dream. For me, vegetable gardening makes sense financially. I (sort of) know what I'm doing, I have an established garden and so spend less than $20 on my vegetable garden each year while my grocery bill each week reduced by close to that during peak production. But that's not why I garden.

It seems all these articles about gardening are written assuming that because a financial crises prompted gardening, people must be gardening to save money.
But that assumption is wrong.
Plants are comforting. A garden is between you and nature, not you and speculating bankers. A harvest of vegetables is a solid, simple reality in the face of confusing mortgage backed securities and tangled health care debates. I heard from friends in the nursery business that people bought plants after 9/11 -- not to save money, but to feel better. And unlike other ways of making one feel better (alcohol, ice cream) gardening is guilt free: I'm not wasting money, nor harming my health.
Home grown vegetables are the perfect comfort food for a financial down turn.