A Garden of Marvels Page 25

  Clark and his colleagues are taking the process a step further. In 2009, the university established its Plant Innovation Program, which brings a group from Dave’s lab together with food scientists, psychologists, and marketing experts to change the front end of the breeding process.

  “Instead of breeders saying we’re going to make this big, bold, yellow flower because we think consumers are going to buy it, we’re trying to figure out what consumers prefer. In the case of tomatoes, we’re finding out what flavors they want.”

  The process has already resulted in a new tomato. The Innovation group retrieved heirloom types and had volunteers sample, rate them, and explain their ratings. Then they figured out the biochemical components of those tastes (that is, their fragrance compounds), identified the genes that code for those chemicals, developed a transgenic model, and then bred it conventionally. One such tomato, called Tasti-Lee, was introduced in 2011. Other tomatoes, some of which will be designed to meet different regional preferences, are on the way. New flowers are coming, too, but flower preferences are more complex because color influences expectations for scent. An orange petunia, for example, with wintergreen notes would be weird, but a rose-scented pink petunia—or a Black Velvet that emanates the smokiness of scotch—might be appealing.

  As we leave the greenhouse, Dave offers to show me his coleus breeding operation. I’m not especially interested. For one thing, I have a plane to catch. For another, coleus are cultivated for their leaves, not their flowers, which are inconspicuous, and I’m here to finish my research on flowers. Finally, I do not like coleus. I remember coleus as small plants in melancholy combinations of maroon and dark green. Nonetheless, Dave seems very enthusiastic and since I appreciate a good enthusasim (having indulged in a number of them myself), I agree.

  Dave’s coleus grow outdoors in breeding lots nearby. As we walk there, I ask him how he came to horticulture, whether he’d always had an interest in plants.

  He laughs and says, “I’m originally from east Tennessee. My parents were the generation getting out of the coal mines. My dad worked in a chemical factory and my mom was a seamstress, but we had a farm on the side. My dad used to drop me off on the side of the road to sell beans. I didn’t ever mind working in the garden, but it was always work. The whole idea was to get off the farm.”

  Dave and his older sister were the first in their family to go to college. At the University of Tennessee, he started out majoring in engineering—that was what his sister had done and she’d gone on to a successful career at Hewlett-Packard—but he hated it. One day, he decided college just wasn’t for him, signed up at a local navy recruiting office, and went back to his room to pack up. When his friends came in and found out what he was doing, they made him promise to try another major before dropping out. He picked up the course catalog, flipped through it, saw horticulture, and without knowing anything about it decided it would be his new major. After his first two courses, he knew he’d found his calling.

  When we arrive at the half-acre of coleus, I’m stunned. The bold Florida sunshine lights up hundreds of waist-high mounds of the most kaleidoscopically colorful plants I’ve ever seen. These are nothing like the funereal ground-huggers I knew. These have leaves with hot pink centers and purple borders, leaves with a center oval of raspberry ringed first by vanilla and then lime green, chartreuse leaves deeply serrated, velvety purple leaves with grass-green frills, rust-colored leaves with orange hems, heart-shaped leaves of purest magenta, pale-green leaves with bloodred spatters, red leaves in a big butterfly shape with brilliant pink veins, and leaves that look like a medley of fruit sorbets. Looking at the coleus rows is like looking at one of those brilliant Matisse interior paintings where blue-and-white checkered tablecloth meets green-and-yellow flowered chair meets striped red-and-white wallpaper. Times one hundred.

  I gape and exclaim. Dave beams, and starts pointing out his favorites. It’s clear his heart is in coleus.

  “You know,” he says sheepishly, “I worked the first eight or ten years of my career at the university building this molecular biology program. Then one day I had a student come along who didn’t want to do molecular biology; she wanted to do conventional breeding. So we started investigating crops, looking for the ones that had the most genetic variability, and came up with coleus. That was almost a decade ago, and every year our coleus program, which is just simple old-fashioned breeding, gets bigger and bigger.”

  Dave has revolutionized coleus in color, pattern, and size. I wasn’t wrong that the coleus of my memory were small and gloomy. Until Dave got involved in the crop, they were. Coleus have traditionally been propagated by seed. In order to produce seeds, the plants had to make flowers. In order to make flowers, they had to draw down energy stored in their leaves. As soon as they began their reproductive phase, they stopped growing, and their lower leaves dropped off. By the late summer, they were leggy and unattractive.

  Dave began breeding coleus with the goal of creating plants that either never flower or if they do, flower sparsely and late in the season. He wanted plants that would channel their energy away from making reproductive organs and seeds and into making deeply pigmented leaves. Any wild coleus individuals that make that trade-off are goners, but coleus that do so in his garden are winners. What Dave has found through years of selection is that the red-blue anthocyanin pigments that protect leaves from ultraviolet rays can produce a rainbow of colors, especially if plants are not sidetracked into making babies. Plus, plants that never hit puberty continue to flourish and grow into the fall, sometimes reaching six feet high. Of course, all of Dave’s plants must be reproduced vegetatively by rooting cuttings, which makes them six times more expensive than traditional varieties. Nonetheless, major growers—Ball, Proven Winners, and Syngenta—now license and sell Dave’s varieties, and gardeners happily pay for long-lived, brilliant, and flowerless coleus.

  PART V

  Onward, Upward, and Afterward

  twenty-seven

  Trouble in Paradise

  When I left Charles and Susan Farmer’s citrus nursery, Charles promised to keep me up to date on my cocktail tree’s progress. We spoke occasionally over the next months, and from time to time he sent me cell phone photos so I could see the branches growing longer and sturdier. After a year, however, USDA still hadn’t implemented the regulations that would allow him to ship my tree.* I began to feel guilty. The Farmers are in the citrus and blueberry, not the plant-sitting, business. Then Charles mentioned that someone else, a Floridian, had called to ask about buying a cocktail tree, and I added worry to guilt. This tree was not going to slip out of my grasp.

  I couldn’t take it out of Florida, at least not without risking arrest, but I could move it within the state. My mother, eighty-four years old, widowed, and living in Fort Myers, became my Plan B. If she would take custody of my tree, at least I could enjoy it on my periodic visits. Perhaps there would be a time when I would be able to take it north.

  I wasn’t at all sure, though, that she would be amenable to my plan; gardening was of no more interest to her than it had ever been. If I had suggested she take care of an ordinary orange tree, I suspect she would have declined. But with this cleverly engineered tree, I thought I might have a chance.

  As a high school student in the 1940s, my mother had been the only girl to take “shop.” She is as manually gifted as I am not. As a young married woman with two toddlers, she was one of the original phone hackers: When AT&T was a monopoly and charged an additional fee for each “extension” in a house, my mother figured out how to splice into the wiring. She delighted in foiling Ma Bell, and we had a telephone in every room, including the little storage closet under the basement stairs. Together, my parents started a furniture-making company in our basement when I was about five. Where all the neighboring families had a rec room with a TV, a wet bar, and maybe a Ping-Pong or pool table, we had a woodworking shop with a table saw, stacks of lumber, and bags of cement. Their product was a line of poured
-concrete coffee tables with insets of slate rectangles. (I suppose the tables had a Bauhaus sort of aesthetic.) They also made knock-down beds and knock-down sofas out of plywood, long before IKEA did. Their hands-on approach extended beyond furniture. My mother sewed many of my clothes when I was a child. Together they laid tile, and built an elaborate fence around the patio, a screened-in porch, and a wall of louvered cabinets. No professional painter, plumber, or electrician passed through our doors.

  My mother assumed everyone was as dexterous as she, and organized an ice-carving birthday party for me when I was twelve. She set up sawhorse tables in the basement and every guest got a twenty-five-pound block of ice. We had our choice from a selection of tools from the furniture shop, mainly screwdrivers, but also awls, hammers, and paint scrapers. (Amazingly enough, no one was injured.) She also taught me how to use a sewing machine, and gave me lined notebook paper so I could practice stitching up and down straight lines. When I managed to do this, she signed me up for sewing classes at a local fabric store. The chief result was an off-white, corduroy culotte-dress that hung in my closet unfinished for years. I had enjoyed choosing the fabric and cutting out the pattern, and managed to sew the long seams. But the fine details—the interfacing, the facings, buttonholes, and hem—were too frustrating, and I returned, as my father said, to writing “pomes.”

  My parents were pragmatic, problem-solving people. I suspect they considered gardening an effete activity, sort of like poetry for the outdoors. Still, the yard couldn’t go untended. My mother turned the side yard, which was shaded by the house, into what she called a rock garden. The job was half done before she started: The builder had dumped excavated material and some construction rubble there and then covered it up with fill dirt. The soil was just deep enough to support pachysandra and hostas. The sloping backyard she let grow into a scrubby thicket dominated by an untamed pussy willow tree whose lovely, soft, gray “kittens” appeared in early spring. Ahead of her time again, she maintained that she was creating a haven for birds, although I believe the thicket was really cover for her aversion to taking care of plants.

  When I was thirteen, my parents fell in love with sailing, and bought a fourteen-foot Sunfish. My mother abandoned the petunias, the thicket, and the hostas, and every weekend our family drove to the Chesapeake Bay in a red VW Beetle, towing the Sunfish behind us. All four of us crowded onto this craft not much more substantial than a windsurfer. My younger sister Joanie and I vied for the narrow spot in front of the mast where we wouldn’t get whacked in the chest by the boom.

  Joanie and I were not enthralled with our parents’ hobby, especially as we grew older. To us, sailing meant bobbing about in the crisscrossing motorboats’ wakes on hot and windless days while the sail flapped and snapped. “Stinkpots,” my father would scoff at passing Boston Whalers, but I admired those bare-chested teenage boys and the girls in bikinis with their hair streaming out behind them as they passed us. A cabin cruiser looked good to me, too. Inside, I figured there was air-conditioning, and wondered if the ride would be smooth enough so I could read. My melanin-deficient complexion condemned me, in those days before effective sunscreens, to a long-sleeved shirt and a hat; otherwise I’d be blistered by bedtime. After June, even the relief of swimming was out because the jellyfish appeared. Our baking boredom was interrupted only by occasional bouts of shivering terror when a sudden thunderstorm blasted through, bringing stinging rain and bristling with lightning that I was sure would strike the metal mast and fry us like soft-shell crabs.

  Some time in our mid-teens, when my parents graduated to a nineteen-foot Mariner, a weekender with a cabin and a primitive toilet, they agreed we could stay home, and we became happy sailing orphans. Our parents became ever more committed sailors: over the next twenty-five years, they traded up again and again for an ever larger boat. As soon as my father was able to retire, he and my mother put their house up for sale, sold the furniture, put a few boxes in my attic, and headed south on the Intracoastal Waterway in a thirty-eight-foot Endeavour. They traveled slowly and contentedly around Florida and through the Caribbean, adding to their birding life-list and dropping in on local bridge clubs. Not until their mid-seventies did my mother’s arthritis finally end their peregrinations, and they moved to a condo—with no yard—in Fort Myers.

  All of which is to say, I didn’t know if my mother’s curiosity about a cleverly constructed cocktail tree would trump her lack of interest in plant care. To my relief, it did. She agreed to play host, but with two conditions. She would bear no responsibility for the outcome of her caretaking, and I would have to tell her exactly what to do for the tree, right down to when to water.

  That last requirement should have scotched the deal, given that I live a thousand miles away, but we—me, my mother, and the tree—were in luck. I’d already given a lot of thought to the challenges of proper watering. I’d been taking care of more than fifty indoor plants for nearly a decade, and still lost plants to dehydration. (Would that I were so mindful that my plants might run the risk of overwatering.) I know I should make a circuit of my menagerie first thing each day, lifting the pots or testing the soil with my finger for dryness. But watering is a chore, and I’m a procrastinator of the highest order, so I always figure I can make the circuit a little later. I mean, what difference could another hour make? Somehow, days go by before I finally notice that the leaves on the coffee are limp and my prayer plant is prostrate, not with piety but deprivation.

  I had already determined that this would not happen to my cocktail tree, and had made preparations. I knew I couldn’t reform myself, so I decided to enlist technology. In my roamings around gardening sites on the Internet, I had come across an ad for an electronic moisture meter, a do-it-yourself kit called Botanicalls, available for purchase online. Assemble the meter, plug it in, stick it into the soil of a potted plant, and as the soil dries, so its inventors claimed, the device would text or tweet you to let you know. I fell for it, cable, cord, and router, and ordered the kit.

  When I opened the Botanicalls’ box, I found a bright green circuit board in the shape of a saucy, ovoid leaf; two slender metal probes for detecting moisture; and a plastic bag with several dozen colorful transistors, resistors, capacitors, and LEDs. I had no hope of putting the thing together myself, but I am not without resources. Those resources are my cousin, Danny, who has a doctorate in computer science, and his clever thirteen-year-old daughter, Rosie. Danny and Rosie agreed to solder the components to complete the circuit board. A week later, they brought by the assembled device. I slipped the probes, now attached to the assembled circuit board, into the soil of a parched peace lily, and plugged the cord into a wall socket and the cable into a wireless router. A minute later, the plant sent a message to my cell phone. It arrived on my Twitter account.

  “URGENT! Water me!” it read.

  I poured in a cup of water.

  “Thank you for watering me!” it responded. Over the next weeks, the peace lily sent me regular updates on the moisture content of the soil:

  “Current moisture: 84%.”

  “Current moisture: 72%.”

  “Current moisture: 24%. Need water.”

  I added a cup of water, but this time received “You didn’t water me enough!”

  The Botanicalls turned out to be a terrific nag; the only way to make it stop was to water. I loved it. Danny taught me how to reprogram the device’s script. The possibilities were limitless.

  On my next trip to Florida, I drove up to Auburndale to meet Charles and pick up my tree. I was pleased to see that it now looked as full and vibrantly healthy as all the other Hamlins in the greenhouse. Each scaffold limb of my tree had a white plastic tag with its species name, and I could see that the shape of the leaves varied from branch to branch. The foliage of the variegated Eureka lemon had lovely cream-colored edges, like a ribbon around a hemline. Charles hefted the tree into my car and gave me last bits of advice and good wishes, and I drove her two hours south to Fort Myers.r />
  I say “her” because I had decided my tree needed a name. I christened her “Dorothy” for Dorothy Parker, a woman who, like my mother, appreciated a stiff drink and might have gotten a kick out of a cocktail tree. (As Parker wrote: “I like to have a martini. / Two at the very most. / After three I’m under the table, / After four I’m under the host.”) Mrs. Parker had been a scrappy soul, and survived three suicide attempts, a fact I thought boded well for my tree.

  With the help of a neighbor, I settled Dorothy onto my mother’s screened porch, plugged in the Botanicalls, set up a Twitter account for my mother, and signed her up to receive Dorothy’s tweets.

  On Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, Dorothy tweeted “Everything is copacetic.” Thursday, she warned, “Feeling a little thirsty. Make sure we have tonic and limes.” On Friday, the message was “It’s almost five o’clock. Do we have ice?” On Saturday, I left for home, but my mother called later to tell me Dorothy had advised her to get out the glasses and the crackers and dip. On Monday, Dorothy tweeted: “Absolutely parched. I’ll have a double.” My mother complied, and poured in two quarts of water (straight up) until, per my instructions, water ran out of the holes in the bottom of the pot.