Four-Color Flora

The gardens of Dedham. Mass., lay under eight inches of snow last week, and tillers of the soil in Lake Forest, 111., boarded their commuter trains in a below-zero blast off Lake Michigan. From South Carolina to Northern California, flowerbeds were bare, ruined choirs, strawberry patches frozen stiff as a Birds Eye package. But beside a million open fires and upturned thermostats roses bloomed, shrubs sprang into leaf, fruit trees and tomato vines burgeoned with succulence. It is Catalogue Time.

First Ever. The annual efflorescence of four-color printing is aimed at every kind of green thumbsman from penthouse to prairie. It reaches its peak this month, when the industry offers glowing premiums--rosebushes, flowering shrubs, a pruning knife--to those who mail in their seed orders before March 15. Each year also brings a crop of first-time-ever items. Among this year's new offerings:

> A new hybrid dogwood. "Eddie's White Wonder," sold by Ohio's Wayside Gardens, is a cross between the Northwest's magnificent Cornus Nuttalli and the East's hardier Cornus Florida.

> Four new perennials from New York's Jackson & Perkins, including a dwarf lavender-blue aster and a com pact, nonspreading Purple Heart.

> An almost white marigold called "Hopeful," from Philadelphia's Burpee Co., which has a standing offer of $10,000 to anyone who produces a seed that will grow a pure white one; the offer still stands.

>"Miss Susie," also from Burpee, the only verbena ever developed with two rows of petals.

The days are over when garden catalogues were synonyms for sucker bait. Thanks to such groups as All-America Selections, which tests the new varieties, the big companies now make a painstaking effort to describe their wares honestly, and to illustrate them in true-to-life colors, along with a modicum of imagination-whetting blarney.

When Is a Bad Seed? A few unscrupulous companies still advertise such dubious items as rosebushes at 250 apiece, or cut-rate, "guaranteed hardy" hedge plants that do not survive the U.S. mail. Other traps for the unwary in newspaper ads are fancy names such as "Tree of Heaven" for Ailanthus altissima, otherwise known as stinkweed, or the ever-popular "Christmas Rose," which is not a rose (it belongs to the buttercup family) and cannot be counted on to bloom at Christmas. As a result of whooped-up claims, thousands of home gardeners plant Elberta peach trees, one of the least rewarding varieties. Another pitfall is the failure of many catalogues to describe the variety of root stock on which a dwarf apple tree is grafted (it will not be a true dwarf if it is not rooted on imported English Mailing stock), or to mention how many times an evergreen has been transplanted (it develops a more vigorous root system by being lifted out of the earth and pruned).

Botanist Norman Taylor, editor of the excellent Taylor's Encyclopedia of Gardening, feels that plant advertising should specifically note which areas of the country are suitable for each species of plant or tree. Most reputable catalogues nowadays do in fact list preferred zones and soil conditions. But in general, Taylor points out, "people have been given the impression that spruce and hemlock and firs will thrive in the prairie regions west of the Mississippi. And you should be very careful about what rhododendrons you buy. The beautiful Rhododendron Maximum, for example, does well in New England and New York, but the hotter the climate, the less likely it is to survive."

In gardening, as in most other pursuits, the buyer gets pretty much what he pays for. Bargain hunting in seeds is especially risky because not even an expert can detect a bad seed. And, as the Apostle Paul reminded the Galatians: Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.

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