Garden Porn

It's here, right on schedule. Burpee's catalog. This year, the cover shows a pile of lucsious, ripe tomatoes, a new hybrid called Burpee's Red Lightning. They do this on purpose -- send the catalog out in the depts of winter when we're all longing for a little taste of Spring.

And, like Pavlov's bitch, I respond the same way every year. I want everything I see. I want the new purple and red coleus called Fantasy for my front garden. I want parsely and sage and rosemary and thyme and basil and sweet woodruff and wormwood and nasturtiums and marigolds and morning glories and ornamental millet and the black and white mixed scabiosia and the yellow violas and . . . . I do this every winter. And, every April, I curse myself and wonder what on earth made me think I could get all those plants in all by myself, an old lady like me with a full-time job. And, I promise myself that, next year, I'll be more reasonable, frugal, self-controlled. And, I mean it. I do. Until the moment when my secretary brings me the mail and I see the Red Lightning tomatoes, perfect, amazing, shot through a Vaseline-covered lens and simply, well, simply pornographic.

Of course, deep in my garden porn-induced lust, I also forget about all the perinnials I already have -- the rubideckia, the peonies, the iris, the lillies, the woad, the daffodils, and the lilacs. I can't spare a minute's thought for the seeds I harvested myself this fall, the deep black hollyhocks and the rose hips and the pineapple sage. But honestly, that's the planting I love best of all -- plants from plants that I grew last year.

One of, IMHO, the most terrible things the U.S. did to Iraq was to make it against the law for farmers to collect and use their own seed. Agribusiness has been after this for a long time all over the world. And, it's wrong. It's just wrong. Ask any gardener, anyone who spends time with their hands in the dirt and makes a daily ritual of walking around and checking in with each of their plants. I hope the farmers in Iraq just ignore the rule. I hope the Iraqi government undoes it. It's pornographic in the true sense of the word -- an attempt to substitute what's fake for what's real. Bremmer had his dirty little hand in this. And he didn't use a condom.

Now, I wonder if I can put some of the new eupatorium in between the purple millet . . .