Tikun Olam-תקון עולם: Make the World a Better Place

(photo: Heronswood.com)

For the gardeners among us, you may never buy another seed packet from Burpee’s after you read this travesty of a story. Six years ago, Burpee’s bought Dan Hinkley’s Heronswood Nursery. If you’ve never read, heard about or seen Heronswood I feel sorry for you. It was an oasis of the beautiful, rare and exotic plants from around the world which Dan dug up on his trips around the world. Hinkley is one of the great botanical adventurers of our time. He sought out regions of the world whose climate mirrored the Pacific Northwest and hiked into the backcountry to harvest specimens which he grew back home and sold to the public. In this way, he introduced American gardeners to some of the most extraordinary plants they’d ever see. A visit to Heronswood’s site was a feast for the eyes–filled with sumptuous colors and luxuriant forms.

I always loved Hinkley’s catalogues which he published yearly. They were filled with his charming, idiosyncratic prose. They purposely didn’t have any pictures (at least until Burpee got hold of it), just plant names (Latin only) and descriptions. Dan made you work hard. He didn’t give it to you on a silver platter. If you visited Heronswood, which I was privileged to do once before he sold it to Burpee, you wouldn’t find a single plant name in English–only Latin. If you weren’t botanically trained it made for some difficult shopping. But you had to respect the purity of his vision and I did.

George Ball, chief Burpee vandal (photo: Harley Soltes / Seattle Times)

Then Dan sold his baby to Burpee’s with the promise that nothing would change. He’d continue to gallivant around the world looking for the most wonderful plants and his partner, Robert Jones would manage the business end. But it didn’t work out for Burpee’s. A nursery which Dan and Robert had managed successfully for years before they sold it to Burpee’s somehow didn’t churn enough cash for the corporate maw. Security guards came early on May 31st and took possession of Heronswood from Dan and Robert. The wonderful Heronswood that we knew and loved is no more (this from the Seattle Times):

For the founders of Heronswood as well as the thousands of gardeners who visited the lush nursery over the years, the news was devastating.

“This has been like dealing with a death in the family,” said Daniel J. Hinkley, who began Heronswood with his partner Robert Jones nearly 20 years ago. “We’re sad because we believed in Heronswood and believed it was more than just a nursery. We were trying to contribute to the horticultural community and the community as a whole.”

…”This is a disaster,” Richard Hartlage, a prominent landscape architect said. “Everyone is just shocked.”

George Ball is a cultural vandal just as surely as those who tore down the old Pennsylvania Station in New York City in 1966 and consigned the stone facade of the McKim Mead and White landmark to the New Jersey Meadowlands (where a preservationist found them years later neck deep in swamp). One could compare this to the burning of the ancient library at Alexandria, the largest then existing library in the world. OK, maybe I’m exaggerating. But don’t believe me, let Dan tell it:

“One thing I want to tell the people at Burpees is that the garden is filled with some extraordinarily rare things, and I hope that whoever acquires it values it.”

Do you think George Ball is listening or gives a shit??

Burpee’s is slime as a company. Their Neanderthal president, George Ball, wrote a heinous Op-Ed column/advertisement (link to my blog post which links, in turn to the column) in the New York Times a few months ago in which he attacked the Native Plant movement as ‘plant elitists.’ If you love plants, gardens and natives as many of us do, reading that column makes your blood boil. And if this post doesn’t turn you off Burpee’s for good, then reading that column will surely do the job.

Ball’s comment in the Seattle PI are unintentionally damning:

“But we’re not closing it, we’re just moving it,” he said.

Right, just moving it to Pennsylvania; or else moving it online. What about the physical Heronswood we all know and love from its Whidbey Island paradise?

Oh and in case you didn’t know, Mr. Ball seems to be under the mistaken impression that gardeners only live on the east coast:

When we purchased this six years ago,” he said, “we were anxious to make it a profitable company that would be fulfilling our ambition to serve a national audience of gardeners, which is predominantly on the East Coast. For six years we worked away at it. But finally we decided the best thing would be that we relocate.”

Makes lots of sense to me. You buy one of the world’s most prominent nurseries located on the WEST COAST when you all along believe the “national audience” for gardening is on the east coast. Is he a lunkhead or just a Vandal or both?

And in this interview from the North Kitsap Herald, Ball appears geographically-challenged reminding me of the subject of a Stephen Colbert interview:

“This will be the best of both worlds,” Ball said. “We’re not moving away from the Pacific Northwest, we’re moving to Pennsylvania.”

Huh??

And how about clueless:

Ball said he and Burpee worked hard to provide a good severance package for the employees and wishes nothing but the best for them. He also said they didn’t seem too upset by the news….

“I’m still angry,” [Heronswood employee Connie] Lammers said. “I was in shock when I first heard about it. Working there was more than business or a job. The employees were like extended family.”

There’s more:

“The plants we’ve collected from around the world will be tested under conditions more similar to those of our customers,” he said.

You see, there are no Burpee customers on the west coast; or if there are Ball sure doesn’t give a damn about ‘em. To which I say let’s give ‘em hell and make sure they have no customers not just on the west coast but in other places which don’t care for nursery vandalism (see last paragraph).

Though Dan has a five year non-compete clause with Burpee’s, I hope he’ll begin planning now for a new nursery venture. Dan, don’t let Burpee’s have the last word in this matter. Don’t let Burpee’s commit an act of nursery vandalism by dismantling the treasure that was Heronswood. We need you to act as a counter to the Burpee’s of the gardening world.

Another aspect of Burpee’s corporate philosophy which I detest is that they’re not content to just sell plants. They want to own the plants and their DNA.

I propose that gardeners and native plant lovers organize a national boycott of Burpee’s. What’s more, we should pressure our favorite nursery retailers to join the boycott by refusing to stock Burpee’s products. I know they’re the biggest seed sellers in the world, but who needs ‘em. There aren’t other seeds for sale from other companies? Companies which don’t ride roughshod over the botanical heritage of the Pacific Northwest.

The NY Times today published a distressing ode to invasive plants in Border War, a column penned by George Ball, “president of the seed and plant company W. Atlee Burpee & Company” as the Times author credit notes. I was under the impression that Martha Stewart owns Burpee, but I haven’t been able to confirm that online. But for those of you in the Pacific NW I know for a fact and must sadly say that one of our finest nurseries, Dan Hinckley’s Heronswood, is also owned by horticultural pirate. I can’t help but wonder how Hinckley, one of the word’s great nurserymen and an intrepid plant explorer, makes of this column.

Pacific NW native, trillium ovatum, does battle with invasives (photo: NWPlants.com)

What I particularly object to is that an executive of one of the world’s largest agricultural seed companies was given prime NYT real estate to argue that his products (the non-native, hybridized and denatured seeds used by agriculture, both big–massive industrial farms–and small–suburban homeowners) are cool for the environment. The Times should be ashamed. Where is the column by a director or board member of the thousands of organizations in this country which support native plants?

Before I get farther on in this discussion, I should stop to explain that “exotic” plants (also called invasive, noxious or pest) are plants which arrive from other places and take root in our local landscape. Many times (though not always) such plants have aggressive growth habits and overwhelm more delicate native species. Speaking of which, native plants are those which have grown in your region for centuries during which they’ve adjusted themselves to climate, terrain, pests, and diseases. These plants have found a balance with nature which many exotics have not yet done. For this reason, many horticulturists prize native plants.

Back to shilling for big bucks…here’s how Ball dishonestly sets up the premise of his argument:

THE horticultural world is having its own debate over immigration, with some environmentalists warning about the dangers of so-called exotic plants from other countries and continents “invading” American gardens. These botanical xenophobes say that a pristine natural state exists in our yards and that to disturb it is both sinful and calamitous. In their view, exotic plants will swallow your garden, your neighbors’ gardens and your neighbors’ neighbors’ gardens until the ecosystem collapses under their rampant suffocating growth.

If anything suffocates us, though, it will be the environmentalists’ narrowmindedness. Like all utopian visions, their dream beckons us into a perfect and rational natural world where nothing ever changes — a world that never existed and never will.

Himalayan blackberry thicket–imagine tearing that out with your own hands, Mr. Ball (photo: Invasive Species Initiative)

“Botanical xenophobes”–very catchy. Must’ve been written for him by some sharp publicist. But champions of native plants are not “xenophobes.” They do not hate all exotics, but only those which destroy native habitat. Here in the Pacific NW we are overrun by English laurel, Himalayan blackberries, and English ivy among others. These plants aren’t mere annoyances. They actually overwhelm a landscape and force all native species to the margins. That’s one sure recipe for the potential eventual extinction of some of our finest plants. Ball promotes another lie when he says environmentalists dream of a “perfect and rational world where nothing ever changes.” One thing anyone who studies Nature comes to learn is what Edmund Spencer noted in his Faerie Queene, mutatis mutandis, everything changes within it and does so constantly.

In this passage Ball seems to be deliberately playing an neocon idelogical card in calling native plant exponents “radical fundamentalists,” another preposterous statement. But I find it instructive that Ball seems to be aligning his argument with political conservativsm. If you think about what’s between the lines of this article, Burpee and other seed conglomerates are under attack around the world from small farmers who believe its seed choices are destroying the diversity of seed stock developed over thousands of years of natural selection. As Sustainable Table notes:

A few huge companies now produce much of the seed used by farmers; in 1999, the 10 largest seed companies controlled about 31% of the global seed market. These companies typically sell only the widely-used industrial varieties of plant seeds. This makes it increasingly difficult for farmers to buy non-industrial seed varieties and thus contributes to the disappearance of traditional plant varieties.

And this Purdue University Center for New Crops and Plant Products site puts the argument even more strongly:

The loss of biodiversity threatens global food security, especially for the poor, who rely on biodiversity for 85 to 90% of their livelihood needs.

[An alarming] trend I’d like to mention is privatization of plant breeding and seed sales. The first half of 1998 witnessed a dramatic consolidation of power over plant genetic resources worldwide, a trend that began over three decades ago. The global seed trade is now dominated by “life industry” corporations whose vast economic power has effectively marginalized the role of public sector plant breeding and research. Of course, the consolidation trend is not just in seeds but in all sectors of the life industry.

* 20 years ago there were thousands of seed companies, most of which were small and family owned. Today, the top 10 global seed companies control 30% of the $23 billion commercial seed trade.

Not to mention that native plant lovers are turning away from Burpee’s unimaginative plant selections and returing in droves to the plant choices that have worked best in local landscapes over millenia–native varieties.

Burpee can’t like any of this. It hits them where they live– in the pocket book. Hence, Ball’s mini temper tantrum in the Times’ Op-Ed section.

Here’s more specious argument:

The anti-exotics argue that gardens should be populated exclusively by native plants, as if the exotics were trying to enter the flower bed illegally.

What is it with this immigration trope?? Anyway, I’m not aware of “anti-exotics” who argue gardens should be populated exclusively by natives. Seems to me, the author is trying to set up a strawman who’ll fall over at the mere breath of his counter-argument. Horticulturalists, as far as I can tell, argue that we should return to natives and feature them prominently. But I know of few who argue against exotics, period. That seems extreme to me, which is why I doubt there is such a person except in Ball’s fervid imagination. I’ve had a garden here in Seattle since 1998. When I first planned it I told the landscape designer I worked with that I wanted to have as many native plants as I could while still featuring those exotics which I liked. I believe in a mix of the two with the native plants deserving pride of place for their long-lasting existence among us in this place.

[Denying exotics a place in our gardens] would compare with the denial of human immigration on grounds that certain ethnic groups breed in numbers “too prolific” for the existing elite to tolerate. Imagine, then, a horticultural ruling class. No “invasives” need apply: let the lily find another valley. Such prohibitions of exotic plant species demonstrate only an elitist snobbery that is as dangerous to a free society as it is to a free botany.

What horse crap! This is why the immigration trope is so idiotic yet so desirable for Ball. Using it, he can bring up to specter of racism calling native plant lovers racist and elitist for choosing natives over exotics. Ball’s argument is pathetic. Exotics actually DO crowd out natives and bring some species to the edge of extinction (at least in their local habitats, if not universally). Again, I’m aware of no horticulturalist (and Ball doesn’t provide any examples either) who’s advocated a “prohibition” against exotics. That would seem preposterous and impossible to enforce. Natives are not an elite, they are just common sense. In gardening, you generally go with what works in your environment. Natives work because they’ve been tried and tested over centuries, if not millenia.

Another fallacy of Ball’s argument:

No one, and certainly no gardener, grows truly destructive invasive plants in his garden.

Not true. There are many exotics grown in gardens by unsuspecting folk who do not realize the danger if those same plants are let loose in native habitats like forests which might lie right across the street. Not to mention that one of the hallmarks of exotics is that they hitchhike everywhere and easily establish toeholds in places like gardens even when the owner doesn’t want them there.

Aside from requiring a bit of weeding, exotics are safe as milk, unless one considers gardening a chore rather than a passionate hobby.

Reading this made me realize I need to invite Ball to join my neighbors in Friends of Madrona Woods who’ve spent seven years tearing out ivy, holly and Himalayan blackberry from the hillsides of this lovely urban park (and we’re nowhere near done yet). We have work parties every month. If Ball thinks exotics are charming little creatures who deserve our tender mercies and consideration, I don’t think he’d feel the same way after tearing out ivy vines for a few hours on our hillsides.

Friends of Madrona Woods is a Seattle environmental group devoted to restoring a local city park to a native habitat. We plan the first Seattle “daylighting” of an urban stream from source to Lake this summer. To learn more about how the native vs. exotic debate plays out in our little patch of woods visit our site.