Anita Ferguson Todd


It may seem like an odd time to think about gardening, as the temperature drops and the leaves disappear from the trees. Not for Vanoka Morris-Smith of Berlin, Md. She lives and breathes gardening. It’s been her greatest love since she was a young girl.

 

Just about the only thing she enjoys more than an afternoon elbow-deep in soil is sharing her passion with children. One could say that transforming computer, cell phone and television-addicted youngsters into “little growers” is what makes Morris-Smith bloom.

 

The seed to inspire youngsters was planted in her mind eight years ago after glimpsing a young African-American girl on the cover of an old gardening magazine. That little girl with a fistful of basil and mismatched earrings showed such joy that Morris-Smith knew she had to reach out to children.

 

Her thinking isn’t novel — children (and adults) spend too much time indoors and they are losing touch with nature. Often called Nature Deficit Disorder, the phenomenon is detrimental to us all. No one is looking at the leaves, she says. People can’t tell the difference between an oak leaf and a ginkgo leaf.

 

She would do her part to change that.

 

Within a short time she was volunteering at a school in Philadelphia where she often visits a close relative. Morris-Smith’s gardening passion and desire to influence young minds proved to be a winning combination.

 

She and her little growers have won several gardening awards over the years. In 2007 transformed a run-down lot of leveled houses into an environmental learning center for a Philadelphia elementary school. It was one of three first-place winners for best school and children’s garden and the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society’s 33rd Annual City Gardens contest. That same year she was named an exceptional mentor by the same group. In 2007 she took herself back to school and master gardener so she would “know the answers when the children asked the questions.”

 

A postage orchard with Hale peaches in her Berlin yard is possibly her next project and she hopes to become involved with local children. She’s often seen in town wearing her “horticulture hat,” the one adorned with a big sunflower. The hat is a reminder of the giant sunflowers — as big as car tires — grown by some of her protégés.

 

Organic gardening using heirloom seeds and plants is her specialty. To qualify as heirloom, a plant must come from a seed family that has been grown in a garden for at least 50 years. Often, the seeds have been handed down from generation to generation over hundreds of years. It is this element that is perhaps most important to her.

 

Sure, organic gardening is good for the environment. The exercise has helped her lose weight and better manage rheumatoid arthritis. But for Morris-Smith, gardening is a link to the past, present and future all at once. This, she says, makes it good for the soul too.



Jason

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Dreaming of a small garden on the patch behind your house? Also, you want to start eating organic and make a small difference to this environment?

Here’s some help on putting together plants and their names to make things easy.

Now, if you go to a nursery and ask to buy a daylily, the grower will point out that there are many kinds of daylily. Do you want one that’s yellow, red, orange, or multicolored? If you say “yellow,” she may point out that she carries Stella d’Oro, Hyperion, or several others. It all comes down to the variety name, called the cultivar by horticultural professionals. Cultivar is a contraction of “cultivated variety” and is the name of the particular plant.

Naturally occurring wild plants are named by their genus and their species: The naturally occurring form of broccoli is Brassica oleracea, with Brassica being the genus and oleracea the species. There are many different kinds of wild brassicas. Each kind is given a species name (in other words, a specific name) to differentiate it from others in its genus.

Over the years, growers and horticulturists have selected especially delicious or prolific strains of Brassica oleracea that come true to seed—meaning that if their seed is planted, it will produce the same strain as its parent. These are called open-pollinated varieties. Among types of broccoli, De Cicco, Italian Green Sprouting, and Umpqua are such open-pollinated varieties, and you might find them listed in catalogs like this: Brassica oleracea ‘De Cicco’. “Heirloom varieties” are open-pollinated forms of crops that have been passed down through generations of home gardeners because of their high quality.

Horticulturists and plant breeders will often cross one open-pollinated variety with another to combine desired characteristics, producing hybrids, also known as crosses. These can be patented. If you plant hybrid seeds, you’ll get the hybrid that the breeders intend. But if you let the hybrid plants go to seed and then plant those seeds, the subsequent generation will revert to a fairly random genetic mixture of the parents’ characteristics, rather than more of the hybrids. Among broccoli, popular hybrids include Green Comet, Packman, and Premium Crop. Horticulturists use the symbol × (a cross) to denote a hybrid, so you might see a seed catalog with the following listing: Brassica × ‘Packman’. Usually, however, seed catalogs forego all the botanical details and simply list plants by their cultivar names.

An easy way to think of these distinctions is to visualize a slot machine where the little windows with lemons and cherries and liberty bells represent a set of genes. Pulling the handle is like planting the seed. Wild plants will almost always produce the same pictures in the windows every time you pull the handle. So will open-pollinated varieties. Hybrids will produce the desired lineup of pictures only on the first pull of the handle. A second pull (equivalent to planting seed produced by a hybrid plant) will scramble the pictures, and you won’t be able to say exactly what you’ll get.

Now that you are familiar with names of different plants, you can also use your fruits of labor to make some yummy organic recipes!



Tom