Liberty Hyde Bailey Blog

Bailey on the Growing of Vegetable Plants

2012-02-12T19:36:00.000-05:00

More sage advice from L.H. Bailey on vegetable gardening!

A Vegetable garden is admittedly a part of any home place that has a good rear area. A purchased vegetable is never the same as one taken from a man's own soil and representing his own effort and solicitude.

It is essential to any satisfaction in vegetable-growing that the be rich and thoroughly subdued and fined. The plantation should also be so arranged that the tilling can be done with wheel tools, and, where the space will allow it, with horse tools. The old-time garden bed (Fig. 291) consumes time and labor, wastes moisture, and is more trouble and expense than it is worth.

The rows of vegetables should be as long and continuous as possible, to allow of tillage with wheel tools. If it is not desired sow a full row of any one vegetable, the line may be made up of several species, one following the other, care being taken to place together such kinds as have similar requirements; one row, for example, might contain all the parsnips, carrots, and salsify. One or two long rows containing a dozen kinds of vegetables are usually preferable to a dozen short rows, each with one kind of vegetable.

...It is by no means necessary that the vegetable-garden contain only kitchen-garden products. Flowers may be dropped in here and there wherever a vacant corner occurs or a plant dies. Such informal and mixed gardens usually have a personal character that adds greatly to their interest, and, therefore, to their value.

... It was the writer's pleasure to look over the fence of a Bavarian peasant's garden and to see, on a space about 40 feet by 100 feet in area, a delightful medley of onions, pole beans, peonies, celery, balsams, gooseberries, coleus, cabbages, sunflowers, beets, poppies, cucumbers, morning-glories, kohl-rabi, verbenas, bush beans, pinks, stocks, currants, wormwood, parsley, carrots, kale, perennial phlox, nasturtiums, feverfew, lettuce, lilies!- L.H. Bailey, Manual of Gardening

Bailey's View on Growing Annuals

2012-02-01T09:16:00.000-05:00

Liberty Hyde Bailey wrote that, "The best gardener is one who does the most gardening by the winter fire.” And here we are folks. Nursery catalogs are filling mailboxes and the big box stores are moving out the half-off Christmas decorations for the Burpee display. Here is some timeless advice from America's Father of Modern Horticulture regarding annuals as we get ready for another growing season.

ANNUAL plants are those that you must sow every year. From seed to seed is only a year or less. Annual plants probably comprise half the flowering plants of the world. They quickly take advantage of the moving seasons,— grow, blossom and die before they are caught by the blight of winter or of the parching dry season. They are shifty plants, now growing here, then absconding to other places. This very uncertainty and capriciousness makes them worth the while. The staid perennials I want for the main and permanent effects in my garden, but I could no more do without annuals than I could without the spices and the condiments at the table. They are flowers of a season: I like flowers of a season.

Of the kinds of annuals there is almost no end. This does not mean that all are equally good. For myself, I like to make the bold effects with a few of the old profuse and reliable kinds. I like whole masses and clouds of them. Then the other kinds I like to grow in smaller areas at one side, in a half experimental way. There is no need of trying to grow equal quantities of all the kinds that you select. There is no emphasis and no modulation in such a scheme. There should be major and minor keys.

The minor keys may be of almost any kind of plant. Since these plants are semi-experimental, it does not matter if some of them fail outright. Why not begin the list at "A" and buy as many as you can afford and can accommodate this year, then continue the list next year? In five or ten years you will have grown the alphabet and will have learned as much horticulture and botany as most persons learn in a college course. And some of these plants will become your permanent friends.

For the main and bold effects I want something that I can depend on. There I do not want to experiment. Never fill a conspicuous place with a kind of plant that you have never grown.

The kinds I like best are the ones easiest to grow. My personal equation, I suppose, determines this. Zinnia, petunia, marigold, four o'clock, sunflower, phlox, scabiosa, sweet sultan, bachelor's button, verbena, calendula, calliopsis, morning-glory, nasturtium, sweet pea,—these are some of the kinds that are surest and least attacked by bugs and fungi. I do not know where the investment of five cents will bring as great reward as in a packet of seeds of any of these plants.

Before one sets out to grow these or any other plants, he must make for himself an ideal. Will he grow for a garden effect, or for specimen plants or specimen blooms? If for specimens, then each plant must have plenty of room and receive particular individual care. If for garden effect, then see to it that the entire space is solidly covered, and that you have a continuous maze of color. Usually the specimen plants would best be grown in a side garden, as vegetables are, where they can be tilled, trained and severally cared for.

There is really a third ideal, and I hope that some of you may try it,—to grow all the varieties of one species. You really do not know what the China aster or the balsam is until you have seen all the kinds of it. Suppose that you ask your seedsman to send you one packet of every variety of cockscomb that he has. Next year you may want to try stocks or annual poppies, or something else. All this will be a study in evolution.

There is still a fourth ideal,— the growing for gathering or "picking." If you want many flowers for house decoration and to give away, then grow them at one side in regular rows as you would potatoes or sweet corn. Cultivate them by horse or wheelhoe. Harvest them in the same spirit that you would harvest string beans or tomatoes: that is what they are for. You do not have to consider the "looks" of your garden. The old stalks will remain, as the stumps of cabbages do. You will not be afraid to pick them. When you have harvested an armful your garden is not despoiled. - L.H. Bailey, Country Life in America, Volume 4, 1903 (see the full article here: ANNUALS )

Was L.H. Bailey a Racist?

2012-01-30T11:17:00.001-05:00

In a recent January post on Thornapple CSA's blog, Paul B. Thompson, the W.K. Kellogg Professor of Agricultural, Food and Community Ethics at Michigan State University, made the striking claim that Liberty Hyde Bailey was a racist: "But although Bailey is clearly a food ethics icon, he’s also problematic. He was a racist, for one thing, and his writings include occasional sentences and paragraphs that are shocking to modern readers." Despite not giving any specific support to his charge, let us take Professor Thompson's charge seriously. Unfortunately, comments to Professor Thompson's blog post are currently closed so I'll respond here.

To clear the playing field, let's list two important ideas that everyone should know about race:

Race has no genetic basis.
Race isn't biological, but racism is still real.

With this in mind, here is what Bailey had to say in his background book, What is Democracy? published in 1918 after the wake of the Great War; "Racial independence and separateness is a doubtful apprenticeship to democracy. It tends to solidify the racial clan, making it a class enterprise in the world. Racial jealousies and hatreds have always stood in the way of democracy, and the modern process has been to break down these barriers...One reason why democracy has thriven in North America is because the population is not a race but a brotherhood."

It is evident, that Bailey could not discard the idea and workings of racism. This doesn't make him a racist, however. In great contrast to a racist ideology, Bailey found the ideas of race antithetical to democracy. If he can be accused of anything is perhaps overt optimism that North America consisted as a brotherhood, while we still struggle with the inequalities of racism today.

In his follow-up writing, Universal Service, the Hope for Humanity, Bailey viewed World War I as a "great collapse" in society where people of every race found it necessary to be prepared, "to destroy the citizen of any other race or people in order to protect itself." He further asserted, "If we make no fundamental change of direction in these moving forces at the conclusion of the present Lapse, then we must conclude that society does not have within its body the power of self-correction." Again, Bailey articulates the destructive properties in our belief in race.

In all fairness, perhaps Professor Thompson quick accusation was directed at other aspects of Bailey, namely his science. But as for the man himself and his personal beliefs, we find a very articulate person, hoping for a better future, with a larger belief in humanity. That alone should give one enough restraint in connecting Liberty Hyde Bailey with the ugly stain of racism.

L.H. Bailey-A Look Backward On The Grape

2012-01-20T11:19:00.002-05:00

On a shelf in my library are some fifty books printed in North America which are devoted to the grape, but there is no other fruit that has anywhere near this number of volumes. When, many years ago, I began to collect horticultural books from antiquarian shops in all parts of the country, with no lists to guide me, I was struck by the profusion of writings on "the vine" and began to make inquiry as to the reasons for it. I found that therein lay a most interesting and devious history, and one that has much significance to the development of agricultural practice. We think of history as belonging to politics and governments, to kings and thrones and wars, but hardly to such common practices as the plowing of land and the growing of grapes; yet, one does not plow, neither does he plant, until he makes up his mind to do so, and he makes up his mind because there are antecedent reasons.

These grape books are generally old — of the middle of last century and earlier — and they impress one greatly with the description of European practice. Many of them are books recording the attempt to transfer Old World methods into this new continent, and to grow the vine for the purpose of making wine; for wine has been the destiny of the grape from the time of Noah until the present epoch.-L.H. Bailey

(Read more at A Look Backward on the Grape )

Through the Lens of L.H. Bailey: Plants, Places, & People

2012-01-06T14:09:00.002-05:00

In the archives of the Liberty Hyde Bailey Museum over one-hundred glass plate negatives taken by America's Father of Modern Horticulture, Liberty Hyde Bailey were uncovered. This summer, for the first time in over a century, these images will be able to be viewed by the public. At the Liberty Hyde Bailey Museum's premier exhibit, "Through the Lens of L.H. Bailey: Plants, Places & People," connect to America's eminent horticulturalist-philosopher through these rare images taken at the turn of the 20th century.

JUNE 22ND: MEMBER PREVIEW

OPENING JUNE 23RD - SEPTEMBER 15TH

General Admission: $5; Student/Senior Admission: $3; Kids 5 and under: Free; Members: Free

- Group Tours Available -

For more information email lhbm@south-haven.com or call (269) 637-3251

A Christmas Husbandly Fare

2011-12-19T10:43:00.001-05:00

It was more than three centuries ago that native Thomas Tusser, musician, chorister, and farmer, gave to the world his incomparable "Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry." He covered the farm year and the farm work as completely asVergil had covered it more than fifteen centuries before; and he left us sketches of the countryside of his day, and the ways of the good plain folk, and quaint bits of philosophy and counsel. He celebrated the Christmas festival with much conviction, and in the homely way of the home folks, deriving his satisfactions from the things that the land produces. His sketches are wholesome reading in these days of foods transported from the ends of the earth, and compounded by impersonal devices and condensed into packages that go into every house alike.

...May we not once in the year remember the earth in the food that we eat? May we not in some way, even though we live in town, so organize our Christmas festival that the thought of the goodness of the land and its bounty shall be a conscious part of our celebration? May we not for once reduce to the very minimum the supply of manufactured and sophisticated things, and come somewhere near, at least in spirit, to a "Christmas husbandly fare?" - L.H. Bailey, The Holy Earth

The Wild Apple of your Eye

2011-12-18T16:24:00.005-05:00

Looking for a good ritual this New Years for your apple tree? Check out

The Wild Apple of your Eye!

The Difficulty with Much of our Teaching

2011-12-12T08:47:00.001-05:00

The difficulty with much of our teaching is that the pupil does not carry it with him into life; and he does not carry it with him because it is likely to be taught in an abstract way and without any particular articulation or vibration with the situations that he has to meet or with the knowledge that he is likely to gain by experience. I do not care much about the mere "practical" teaching, meaning by that the direct outcome of teaching in dollars and cents; but I care very much to have our teaching really mean something to the pupil, and to this end all teaching should be applicable.

... I think we shall some day consider it to be important that our people know the actual products of the earth, not only that they may utilize these products effectively but that they also may have the resource that comes from good nature-knowledge. - L.H. Bailey, 1913, "York State Rural Problems"

How the Trees Look in Winter

2011-12-06T21:31:00.001-05:00

Only the growing and open season is thought to be attractive in the country. The winter is bare and cheerless. The trees are naked.

The flowers are under the snow. The birds have flown. The only bright and cheery spot is the winter fireside. But even there the farmer has so much time that he does not know what to do with it. Only those who have little time, appreciate its value.

But the winter is not lifeless and charmless. It is only dormant. The external world fails to interest us because we not been trained to see and know it; and also because the rigorous weather and the snow prevent us from going afield....If the farmer's winter is to be more enjoyable, the farmer must have more points of contact with the winter world. One of the best and most direct of these points of sympathy is an interest in the winter aspects of trees. Let us consider the subject a moment.

Consciously or unconsciously, we think of trees much as we think o f persons. They suggest thoughts and feelings which are also attributes of people. A tree is weeping, gay, restful, spirited, quiet, sombre. That is, trees have expression. The expression resides in the observer, however, not in the tree. Therefore, the more the person is trained to observe and to reflect, the more sensitive his mind to the things about him, and the more meaning the trees have. No one loves natures who does not love trees. - L.H. Bailey, 1899

L.H. Bailey on Pruning

2011-11-22T17:07:00.001-05:00

Of all the operations connected with horticulture, pruning, shaping, and training bring the person into closest contact and sympathy with the plant. One directs and cares for theplant tenderly and thoughtfully, working out his ideas as he would in the training and guiding of a child. There are some persons, to be sure, who cannot feel this sympathetic contact with a plant: they are the ones who, if they prune at all, use an axe or machete or a corn-knife. If a person cannot love a plant after he has pruned it, then he has either done a poor job or is devoid of emotion. It is a pleasure to till the soil and to smell the fresh crumbly earth, but the earth does not grow; it is still a clod. The plant responds to every affectionate touch. - L.H. Bailey, The Pruning Manual

Interactive L.H. Bailey Timeline

2011-11-15T20:08:00.001-05:00

It's new! It's underway! Watch it grow and learn about America's Father of Modern Horticulture!

Storing and Saving Seeds

2011-10-09T18:18:00.000-04:00

To keep seeds is to prevent germination and at the same time to preserve the life of the seed.

Seeds should be thoroughly ripe and dry before they are stored. Those of pulpy fruits are removed and cleaned. If the seed-vessels are dry and hard, seeds may be left in them till sowing time, but usually they are removed.

Hard seeds, as of trees and nuts, may be buried. Most seeds, however, are stored dry in paper bags or boxes in a cool dry room. The receptacles should be tight to keep out weevils; if there are any signs of bug work, a little bisulfide of carbon may be poured in the receptacle, and the vapor of it will destroy animal life. This material is inflammable, and it should be kept away from flames.

If seeds at storing time are moist and the weather is damp, they may be lightly kiln-dried before put away for winter. Rarely are dry seeds injured by freezing. Seedsmen sometimes keep large and more or less fleshy seeds, as musas, in fine dry sawdust, chaff or other material that will insure equable conditions and prevent too great desiccation. -L.H. Bailey, The Nursery Manual, 1920

Tired of genetically modified food? Every day, Americans are moving more toward eating natural, locally grown food that is free of pesticides and preservatives--and there is no better way to ensure this than to grow it yourself. Anyone can start a garden, whether in a backyard or on a city rooftop; but what they need to truly succeed is The Heirloom Life Gardener: The Baker Creek Way of Growing Your Own Food Easily and Naturally, a comprehensive guide to cultivating heirloom vegetables. In this invaluable resource, Jere and Emilee Gettle, cofounders of the Baker Creek Heirloom Seed Company, offer a wealth of knowledge to every kind of gardener--experienced pros and novices alike.

Pumpkins and Squashes-What's the Difference?

2011-10-01T19:46:00.000-04:00

Image via Wikipedia G. W. C. B., Baltimore, Maryland, writes: "In some sections of country pumpkins, or at least such as are recognized as such in other sections are called squashes and then again in other sections this order of recognition is exactly reversed. Will you please define the difference between pumpkins and squashes, so we novices can make the distinction also."

We submitted your inquiry to Prof. L. H. Bailey of Cornell University, who kindly replies as follows:

It is impossible to give any distinctions between pumpkins and squashes because the vernacular names are used very indiscriminately. Ordinarily, what people in Europe call pumpkins are what we call squashes. Perhaps I can best answer by saying that there are three types of pumpkin-like plants which we grow. One type is characterized by a soft, round stem to the fruit, and to this type belong the true squashes, like the Hubbard, Boston Marrow, Turban, Mammoth Chili, and the like. This species is Cucurbita maxima. Another type is characterized by a very hard and deep-five-cornered stem, and this includes the true field pumpkins which are used so much for stock and for pies. To this type also belong the summer bush squashes like the Crookneck, and scallop varieties. This type is Cucurbita Pepo. This third type is characterized by a rather firm, cylindrical stem which has a large expansion where it joins the fruit and it includes the Cushaw, Canada Crookneck and Japan Crookneck types. This type is Cucurbita moschata. -L. H. Bailey (From "Gardening, Vol. IV, 1896)

The Garden Guru: Give crotons a place in the sun

2011-09-25T11:55:00.001-04:00

The Garden Guru: Give crotons a place in the sun

Almost 80 years ago, in his revered Standard Cyclopedia of Horticulture, Liberty Hyde Bailey referred to crotons as coming in an "almost endless variety." They were popular conservatory plants way back then, but now we grow them on patios and balconies, in soil in our landscape beds, and indoors in pots, just as our great-grandmas did. We're surrounded by crotons, and the list of varieties has grown exponentially. They're everywhere.

Read more: http://www.star-telegram.com/2011/09/08/3348049/the-garden-guru-give-crotons-a.html#tvg#ixzz1YyqmDrpj

Ten Things to Learn From An Apple

2011-09-23T21:45:00.001-04:00

Image via Wikipedia

I like to go into the cellar at night with a lantern and pick apples from this box and that — plump and big and round — and eat them where I stand. They are crisp and cool, and the flesh snaps when I bite it and the juice is as fresh as the water from a spring. There are many kinds of them, each kind known by its own name, and some are red and some are green, some are round and some are long some are good and some are poor.

1. How much of the apple is occupied by the core?

2. How many parts or compartments are there in the core ?

3. How many seeds are there in each part ?

4. Which way do the seeds point ?

5. Are the seeds attached or joined to any part of the core? Explain.

6. What do you see in the blossom end of the apple?

7. What do you see in the opposite end?

8. Is there any connection between the blossom end and the core?

9. Find a wormy apple and see if you can make out where the worm left the apple. Perhaps you can make a drawing. To do this, cut the apple in two. Press the cut surface on a piece of paper. When the apple is removed you can trace out the marks.

10. When you hold an apple in your hand, see which way it looks to be bigger—lengthwise or crosswise. Then cut it in two lengthwise, measure it each way, and see which diameter is the greater.
-L.H. Bailey, An Apple Twig and An Apple, 1904

THE HARVEST OF THE APPLE-TREE

2011-09-11T11:32:00.001-04:00

Image via Wikipedia Finally the apple is ripe, a fair goodly object joyous in the sun, inviting to every sense. Hanging amidst its foliage, bending the twig with its weight, it is at once a pattern in good shape, perfect in configuration, in sheen beyond imitation, in fragrance the very affluence of all choice clean growth, its surface spread with a bloom often so delicate that the unsympathetic see it not; and yet the rains do not spoil it.

The apple must be picked. Do not let it fall. Probably it is over-ripe when it falls; the hold is loosened; its time is up. Wormy apples may fall before they are ripe; the worm injury, if it begins early, causes them to ripen prematurely. A premature apple is not a good apple, albeit the small boy relishes it but only because he may get his apple earlier; in the apple season, when ripe fruits are abundant, the boy does not choose the wormy one.

Pick the apple from the tree. It will do you good. It is ever so much better than to pick it from a box on the market or out of a quart-can in the ice-chest. You will feel some sense of responsibility when you pick it, some reaction of relationship to its origin. We know that we understand folks better when we see them at home. L.H. Bailey- The Apple Tree, 1922

The Importance of Cooperative Extension Work

2011-09-05T20:54:00.000-04:00

Regarding Cooperative Extension Work: "Any enterprise closely associated with homes and that hopefully employs the leisure of multitudes of people is worthy of investigations and researches conducted at public expense. It is a sad attitude of legislators and others that predicates the need of such investigations on the probable money earnings of the enterprises, as if there were no other measure of human life." -Liberty Hyde Bailey, The Garden Lover, 1928

The Size of An Acre

2011-08-25T10:56:00.000-04:00

I am convinced that the size of an acre of land varies directly with the size of the man who manages it. The larger the man, the larger the acre...I once asked an old gardener how much land he had, and he said with pride that he owned once acre; and he added, "It is a wonderful acre: it reaches to the center of the earth in one direction, and it takes in the stars in the other." This man's farm included not only the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow but it contained the entire rainbow. - Liberty Hyde Bailey, 1911

The Cornell Countryman Comments on the History of L.H. Bailey

2011-08-22T17:12:00.002-04:00

48th Annual Blueberry Festival, with Sundaes to Boot!

2011-08-09T12:45:00.002-04:00

It's that time again! The 48th Annual Blueberry Festival in South Haven kicks off this week. You can visit the Liberty Hyde Bailey booth on Friday the 12th down at South Haven's waterfront from 10-3 to toss some blueberries (by hand) and even test your knowledge on blueberry trivia. To top it off, come to the museum from 2-4 pm Sunday the 14th for blueberry sundaes. Clever, aren't we? Be there or be blue!

The Farmer is Proverbially the Man Who has Stood on His Own Feet

2011-08-06T12:40:00.002-04:00

“The farmer is proverbially the man who has stood on his own feet. Other persons have stood on other men’s feet. The purpose of every good country-life institution is to develop persons who are able to walk alone.” Liberty Hyde Bailey, The State and the Farmer (1909)

Liberty Hyde Bailey Podcast for July 31st

2011-07-31T14:19:00.000-04:00

Exploring a 19th Century Home: Part 2

2011-07-22T14:26:00.000-04:00

Podcast for the Week of July 17th-FREE SUMMER PROGRAMS THIS WEEK!

2011-07-17T13:36:00.000-04:00

To Share the Earth Should Be the Right of Every Soul

2011-07-16T15:00:00.000-04:00

We have yet scarcely visioned the proper partition of the earth, that the greatest number of the people may partake of it. When finally we have mastered ourselves, we shall look back on the people in the deep gray cities who never had the opportunity or the right to stand on a bit of wild land somewhat as we now look back in pity and in sorrow on those who suffered in the Inquisition or those who were in bondage. To share in the earth should be the right of every soul, and we shall some day make it easy rather than difficult for this to be brought about. - L.H. Bailey, The Open Country

Handbook of Nature Study: Nature Study and Writing

2011-07-16T13:36:00.001-04:00

Handbook of Nature Study: Nature Study and Writing: 'We stifle the desire to write if we first lay down rules and formulas as to how to write. Let the child have a personal experience; then allow it to write. "

The Nature Study Idea, Liberty Hyde Bailey

Brunch at the Bailey's Preview Discovering the Bailey Farm-July 15th, 10-11am

2011-07-09T16:12:00.002-04:00

Commentary Series: Hunter: Two Anniversaries

2011-06-27T16:35:00.000-04:00

Commentary Series: Hunter: Two Anniversaries
From Vermont Public Radio: I've been putting in new strawberry beds every few years since I started gardening in 1948. You would think I would know how to do it by now. But no, I had to get out my handy little, "The Practical Garden Book", by Hunn and Bailey, Macmillan 1900. I have the 1901 edition. That is 110 years ago.

Geraniums

2011-06-20T17:15:00.000-04:00

If a window or a garden can have but one plant, that plant is likely to be a Geranium. -L.H. Bailey, Cyclopedia of American Horticulture, 1901

The Fruit Tree

2011-06-20T11:41:00.003-04:00

By the woodshed or the pump, or against the barn or the garden fence, the apple tree or pear tree connects the residence with the world of life and space that stretches out to woods and farms. We transfer our affections to it, as a half-way place between ourselves and our surroundings. It is the warder of the fields and monitor of the home. It is an outpost of the birds. It feels the first ray of morning sunshine. It proclaims every wind. It drips copiously in the rain. Its leaves play on the grass when the year goes down into the long night or winter. And in the spring its brightening twigs and swelling buds reveal the first pulse in the reviving earth. Every day of the year is in its fabric, and every essence of wind and sun and snapping frost is in its blossom and its fruit.

I often wonder what must have been the loss of the child that had no fruit-tree to shelter it. There are no memories like the days under an old apple tree. Every bird of the field comes to it sooner or later. Perhaps a humming-bird once built on the top of a limb, and the marks of the old nest are still there. Strange insects are in its knots and wrinkles. The shades are very deep and cool under it. The sweet smells of spring are sweetest there. And the mystery of the fruit that comes out of a blossom is beyond all reckoning, the magic growing week by week until the green young balls show themselves gladly among the leaves. And who has not watched for the first red that comes on the side that hangs to the sun, and waited for the first fruit that was soft enough to yield to the thumb!

And an orchard is only a family of fruit-trees. Orchards are also very real, but I hope that we do not lose the feeling of the tree. Our affections cling to trees, one by one; an d then the orchard becomes almost a sacred spot. A fruit tree in full load is one of the marvellous objects in nature. We cannot understand how the work is done, -how such abundance is produced and how such color and substance and flavor and faultless form are derived of the crude elements of soil and sunshine and air. It gives of itself out of all proportion to the care and affection that we bestow on it. It is a very sermon in liberality. It is a great thing when the making of orchards spreads rapidly, for it means not only commercial thrift but a growing appreciation of the tender and refreshing products of the earth. - L.H. Bailey, The Fruit-Garden, from the Background Book, The Garden Lover

Liberty Hyde Bailey T-Shirt

2011-05-31T17:02:00.015-04:00

Last Saturday saw the groundbreaking of the Liberty Hyde Bailey Interpretive Garden Path, at North Shore Elementary in South Haven, Michigan, Bailey's hometown. You can check out their blog at http://lhbitrail.blogspot.com/. And, if you would like to be the first on your block to have a snazzy L.H. Bailey t-shirt call Becky Linstrom at (269) 637-0506 ext 3525! Check out the dedication news at the Herald Palladium, "Where dandelions are dandy: Garden path honors South Haven horticulturalist."

The Feeling for Plants

2011-05-22T22:25:00.001-04:00

Image via Wikipedia

One does not make a good library till one has a feeling for books, nor a good collection of pictures without a feeling for pictorial art. Neither does one make a good garden of any kind without a feeling for plants.
This does not mean that the feeling must be born with the person. It would be a hopeless world if we could not acquire new sentiments and enthusiasms. One can cultivate a feeling for plants by carefully observing them, growing them, reading about them, and particularly by choosing the company of persons who know and love them. As soon as one begins to distinguish the different kinds closely, one acquires the feeling of acquaintanceship; every kind then has its own qualities, and every kind is admirable in itself. Plants have personality. - L.H. Bailey, The Feeling for Plants, Homegrounds

Good Air

2011-05-18T17:16:00.001-04:00

Image by Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com via Flickr

It is most strange that persons who spend the day in the open air are likely to bottle themselves up at night. I suppose that the fear of fresh air is in part expressive of our general philosophy of life, whereby we unconsciously carry the idea that man is in warfare with nature. We shut our doors to nature. Our windows are small and cramped, as if we only grudgingly let in the out-of-doors. Before we knew the nature of contagious disease, it was very natural that we should consider the atmosphere to be responsible for all kinds of insidious enemies. Disease was supposed to be due to some effluence or miasma, and we shut our doors to it. Now that we are able to distinguish the effects of air from mosquitoes, flies, and germs, we should begin to discriminate in our habits. The best civilization will come when we put ourselves in sympathetic attitude toward nature, rather than when we antagonize it; and we shall learn what things are noxious and take means to avoid them. The spread of tuberculosis in northern regions in former time was due not so much to the fact that winters were cold as to the battening up of doors and windows. Sometime we shall learn how to warm our houses and at the same time supply them with clean air. - L.H. Bailey, The Training of Farmer s, 1909

The Best Planting

2011-05-15T10:57:00.005-04:00

...the best planting, like the best painting and the best music, is possible only with the best and tenderest feeling and the closest living with nature. One's place grows to be a reflection of himself, changing as he changes, and expressing his life and sympathies to the last. -L.H. Bailey

The Camera In Gardening

2011-04-25T11:47:00.003-04:00

L.H. Bailey, Apple-Jonathan, ca. 1901

The best preparation for gardening is to go afield and see the things that grow there. Take photographs in order to focus your attention on specific objects, to concentrate your observation, to train your artistic sense. An ardent admirer of nature once told me that he never knew nature until he purchased a camera. If you have a camera, stop taking pictures of your friends and the making of mere souvenirs, and try the photographing of plants and animals and small landscapes. Notice that the ground glass of your camera concentrates and limits your landscape. The border-pieces frame it. Always see how your picture looks on the ground glass before you make your exposure. Move your camera until you have an artistic composition—one that will have a pictorial or picturesque character. Avoid snap-shots for such work as this. Take your time. At the end of a year, tell me if you are not a nature-lover. If to-day you care for only pinks and roses and other prim flowers, next year you will admire also the weedy tangles, the spray of wild convolvulus on the old fence, the winter stalks of the sunflower, the dripping water-trough by the roadside, the abandoned bird's-nest, and the pose of the grasshopper. L.H. Bailey, 1900

The Dandelion

2011-04-15T17:17:00.001-04:00

The first warmth of spring brought the dandelions out of the banks and knolls. They were the first proofs that winter was really going, and we began to listen for the blackbirds and swallows. We loved the bright flowers, for they were so many reflections of the warming sun. They soon became more familiar, and invaded the yards. Then they overran the lawns, and we began to despise them. We hated them because we had made up our minds not to have them, not because they were unlovable. In spite of every effort, we could not get rid of them. Then if we must have them, we decided to love them. Where once were weeds are now golden coins scattered in the sun, and bees revelling in color; and we are happy! - L. H. Bailey.

Suggestions For Study
I. Ask your teacher to let you go out of doors for ten minutes to look at dandelions. In your note books write answers to the following questions:
1. At what time of day are you looking for the dandelions? Is the sun shining, or is the sky overcast? Make up your mind to notice whether dandelions behave the same at all hours of the day and in all kinds of weather.
2. How many dandelions can you count as you stand on the school-ground? The little yellow heads can be seen a long distance.
3. Where do they prefer to grow, — on the hillsides, along the roadsides, in the marshes, or in your garden?

II. Gather a basket full of blossoming dandelions, roots and all, take them to school, and ask the teacher to let you have a dandelion lesson. Here are some suggestions that will help you:

1. Each pupil should have a plant, root and all. Describe the plant. Is it tall or short? How many leaves are there? How many blossoms?
2. Hold the plant up so that you can see it well. How many distinct colors do you find? How many tints and shades of these colors?
3. Look carefully at the blossom. How many parts has it? How much can you find out about the way in which the yellow head is made up?
III. Mark a dandelion plant in your garden. Watch it every day. Keep a record of all that happens in its life.

Taken from, Cornell Nature-Study Leaflets

A Favortie of Bailey- New John Muir Movie to Debut

2011-04-14T17:12:00.003-04:00

Image by cliff1066™ via Flickr

John Muir in the New World

L.H. Bailey called John Muir, "the interpreter of mountains, forests, and glaciers." This Preservationist, naturalist, author, explorer, activist, scientist, farmer, John Muir (4/21/1838 – 12/24/1914) was all these things and more. Nearly a century after his death, this Scottish American is remembered and revered as the father of the environmental movement and the founder of the Sierra Club, the oldest and largest grassroots environmental organization in the United States. American Masters continues its 25^th anniversary season with John Muir in the New World, airing nationally Monday, April 18 at 9 p.m. (ET) on PBS in honor of Earth Day (4/22) and John Muir Day (4/21). Find out more at the link above.

Liberty Hyde Bailey Interpretive Garden Path: Poem

2011-04-06T08:17:00.001-04:00

He is from our town

He did good things for nature

He was many things

Who was this great scientist?

He was the great LIBERTY!

written by Marnie F., South Haven, Michigan

(A Tanka poem: 5,7,5,7,7)

Olga Bonfiglio: News: South Haven Promotes Agricultural Sustainability

2011-03-30T17:13:00.003-04:00

The South Haven area has a rich, 150-year-old agricultural history as the Southwest Michigan Fruit Belt, the largest non-citrus fruit producing region in North America. It includes the legacy of Liberty Hyde Bailey, America’s father of horticulture and founder of the Michigan Pomological Society (later named Michigan Horticultural Society). He was born in South Haven.

Wes Jackson Puts Bailey at the Top

2011-03-30T16:58:00.002-04:00

Wes Jackson, known for being the co-founder and current president of The Land Institute, named, "the grand old Cornell dean," Liberty Hyde Bailey in his personal agricultural Hall of Fame list. "[Bailey] kept looking back to nature as the standard or measure against which we should judge our agricultural practices. The Outlook to Nature appeared in 1905 and The Holy Earth in 1915."

Read the entire article at:

A Conversation With Wes Jackson, President of the Land Institute - The Atlantic

100 Years of Community Gardening

2011-02-25T17:54:00.000-05:00

The roots of Bailey's work go deep. Cornell Cooperative Extension celebrates one-hundred years, another milestone connected to America's Father of Modern Agriculture. "We commemorate Bailey’s work in celebration of Cornell Cooperative Extension’s 100 years of agricultural, nutritional, and environmentally sustainable support, and we continue to encourage self-sustaining gardening and farming." Check out how they are celebrating this centennial!

4-H Youth Development Celebrates CCE at 100 with Statewide Growing Project

The Greenhouse in the Snow

2011-02-02T13:38:00.001-05:00

Liberty Hyde Bailey, self-portrait

It is in the dead of winter that the greenhouse is at its best, for then is the contrast of life and death the greatest. Just beyond the living, tender leaf-separated only by the slender film of the pane- is the whiteness and silence of the midwinter. You stand under the arching roof and look away into the bare blue depths where only stars hand their fold, faint lights. The bald outlines of an overhanging tree are projected against the sky with the sharpness of the figures of cut glass. Branches creak and snap as they move stiffly in the wind. White drifts show against the panes. Icicles glisten from the gutters. Bits of ice are hurled from trees and cornice, and they crinkle and tinkle over the frozen snow. In the short sharp days the fences protrude from a waste of drift and riffle, and the dead fretwork of weed-stems suggest a long-lost summer. There, finger's breath away, the temperature is far below zero; here, is the warmth and snugness of a nook of summer.

This is the transcendent merit of a greenhouse, - the sense of mastery over the forces of nature. It is an oasis in one's life as well as in the winter. You have dominion.

But this dominion does not stop with the mere satisfaction of a consciousness of power. These tender things, with all their living processes in root and stem and leaf, are dependent wholly on you for their very existence. One minute of carelessness or neglect and all their loveliness collapses in the blackness of death. How often have we seen the farmer pay a visit to the stable at bedtime to see that the animal are snug and warm for the night, stroking each confiding face as it raised at his approach! And how often have we seen the same affectionate care of the gardener who stroked his plants and tenderly turned and shifted the pots, when the night wind hurled the frost against the panes! It is worth the while to have a place for the affection of things that are not human.


Cornell's historic Liberty Hyde Bailey Conservatory may face demolition.

Did my reader ever care for a greenhouse in a northern winter? Has he smelled the warm, moist earth when the windows are covered with frost? Has he watched the tiny sprout grow and unfold into leaf and flower? Has he thrust a fragment of the luxuriance of August into the very teeth of winter? Then he knows the joy of conquest that makes a man stronger and tenderer. - L.H. Bailey (From, Country Life in America, Volume 1, Number 5, March 1902)

Related Articles

Outlook to Winter

2010-12-12T17:31:00.000-05:00

    Most of us, I fear, look upon winter with some feeling of dread and apprehension. It is to be endured. This feeling is partly due to the immense change that comes with the approach of winter. The trees are bare. The leaves are drifting into the fence-rows. The birds have flown. The deserted country roads stretch away into leaden skies. The lines of the landscape become hard and sharp. Gusty winds scurry over the fields. It is the turn of the year.
To many persons, however, the dread of winter, or the lack of enjoyment in it, is a questions of weather. We speak of bad weather, as if weather ever could be bad. Weather is not a human institution, and is not to be measured by human standards. There is strength and mighty uplift in the roaring winds that go roistering over the winter hills. The cold and the storm are part of winter, as the warmth and the soft rain are a part of summer. Persons who find happiness in the out-of-doors only in what we call pleasant weather, do not really love nature.
     We speak of winter as bare, but this is only a contrast with summer. In summer all things are familiar and close; the depths are covered. The view is restricted. We see things near by. In the winter things are uncovered. Old objects have new forms. There are new curves in the roadway through the forest. There are steeper undulations in the footpath. Even when the snow lies deep on the earth the ground-line carries the eye into strange distances. You look far down into the heart of the woods. You feel the strength and resoluteness of the framework of the trees. You see the corners and angles of the rocks. You discover the trail that was lost in summer. You look clear through the weedy tangle. You find new knotholes in the tree trunks. You penetrate to the very depths. You analyze, and gain insight.
    Many times in warm countries I have been told that the climate has transcendent merit because there is no winter. But to me this lack is its disadvantage. There are things to see, things to do, things to think about in the winter as in the spring. There is interest in the winter wayside, in the hibernating insects, in the fretwork of the weeds against the snow, in the strong outlines of the trees, in the snow-shapes, in the cold deep sky. To many persons, these strong alterations of the seasons emphasize and punctuate the life. They are the mountains and the valleys. The winter makes the spring worth while.
    The lesson is that our interest in the out-of-doors should be a perennial current that overflows from the fountain that lies deep within us. This interest is colored and modified by every passion season, but fundamentally it is beyond time and space. Winter or no winter, it matters not: the fields lie beyond. - L.H. Bailey, December 1901

The Bailey Farmstead...the Most Important Fact in Agriculture

2010-12-05T12:17:00.000-05:00

Leafing through a copy of L.H. Bailey’s most autobiographical book, The Harvest, I came across a passage on the importance of the home, specifically the home as a farmstead. Bailey wrote that the farmstead, “…is the greatest and most important fact in agriculture…The good single-family farm in the real open country (not in the environs of cities and towns) is one of our greatest social assets…Any estimate of agriculture that misses this situation is defective and of little avail...” I have no doubt Bailey pictured his childhood home in South Haven with its colonnade arches and tracks of orchards. What are we to make of this bold statement, that Bailey saw the home as the “most important fact in agriculture?” I would have thought that the crops, livestock, commercial output and technical ingenuity would be the important facts in agriculture. Not so for Bailey. It is the home. Happily for us, through the interventions of past generations, the iconic image of the Bailey farmstead/home in South Haven still stands, its longevity supported by its historical significance attachment to Bailey.

Reflecting on his essay I realized the farmstead/home in South Haven preserves immediately at least two values for us. First, is its historical value. This 19^th century Greek Revival home is an important physical artifact of Michigan’s agricultural settlement that, as historian Kenneth E. Lewis unabashedly puts it, shaped the destiny of the lower south Michigan region. Secondly is the value that Bailey points out, the farmstead as the symbol of naturalness and rightness in the place of things. As Bailey puts it in the same essay, “[The home] outweighs the quantities of things, the turnovers and the activities of the produce market. The home is still part of the farm, rearing new generations in the very midst of the realities of life, without make-believe, stage-play, patronage, advertising, go-betweens, or superfluities. It is a twelve month institution, seemingly as native and unremovable as land and trees and ceaseless brooks.”

I never experienced a farmstead life. My childhood was nestled in the concrete of suburban Detroit bereft of any natural process besides the ritual of public school and Sunday mass. However, my monthly visits to the Bailey homestead awaken some dormant aspect that is connected with the land and its long history, where the dictates of modern life are only a small passing drama. The value of naturalness comes through. As a historian, I am happy to see that the Bailey home still stands. As an individual, however, I am more keenly aware of this deeper value that Bailey realized of this home, sown from the seeds of his youth. It is a good thing to know both.

November: June

2010-11-24T15:41:00.000-05:00

    The frost is here again. It has blasted the tomato vines and beans; the cucumber shoots are limp with blackened withered leaves; the stately rows of sugar corn rustle dryly in the wind; the last cosmos and dahlia are gone, and the proud bushes that bore the flaring blooms are broken and dead; the China asters and the marigold are in ruins.
   So has the garden gone; the hopes of June with the achievements of August and September are passed again into the burdened years. A tinge of sadness is in the crisp autumn air, the low sun is only mildly warm at noon, and twilight creeps on before the day's work is done. Here is the wreck of the year; all the energies that burst in April are spent, the leaves loose their hold in a million appointed places and fall aimlessly into unassorted heaps. One would think that defeat and death are everywhere. The deadness of the winter night is even yet marching on the landscape. It is accounted a sad and ineffective ending for the brilliantly promises of May.
   A squirrel is harvesting the fallen nuts, to store them against the needs of winter; he is alert and quick, and apparently has neither fear nor dread. The hens go in and out contentedly. Cattle are in peace on distant fields. Crows flap out and away at dawn and back again at night as they flew to feeding-grounds in summer. The pinks that spiced the air in May and June are making bright aspiring shoots from the bottoms of their grassy clumps: another May is coming. Young hollyhocks with great bold leaves are along the margins: another July is in their roots. Foxgloves, snapdragons, and campanulas are sprouting at the base in sheer anticipation. Fresh tufts have sprung where the Madonna lilies held their stately bloom when June was passing to July. Great buds are on the crowns of the Christmas rose, to give bloom again before St. Patrick's Day, and the rhubarb crowns are ready. The twigs of tress from which the dead leaves fell are heavy with great buds that have harvested the vigor of summer and that will burst in leaf and bloom when the swallows come again. Men are plowing in the fields, to make ready for a new earth. Fences are building, old accumulations of worn-out things are burning in their heaps, highways are receiving the final betterments, crops are in the harvest. Men and pinks and squirrels are instinct with ancient faith.
    It has been a brilliant year, when beast and tree and men have ridden one more journey around the sun and have come back with a harvest. The holy harvest is in the season's brood, the showers of fallen golden leaves, the preparation for another May, the year's accomplishment and the ripened soul. The energies of June are garnered in November. -L.H. Bailey, The Harvest

2010-09-20T14:43:00.000-04:00

APPLE-YEAR

My last winter apple I ate today.

Shapely and stout in their modelled skins

Securely packed in my cellar bins
Two dozen good kinds of apple-spheres lay.

And today I went to my orchard trees
And picked me the first-ripe yellow fruits
That hung far out on the swinging shoots

In summer suns and the wonder-day breeze.

And thereby it was that the two years met

Deep in the heart of the ripe July

When the wheat was shocked and streams were dry;

And weather of winter stayed with me yet.

For I planted these orchard trees myself
On hillside slopes that belong to me
Where visions are wide and winds are free

That all the round year might come to my shelf.

And there on my shelves the white winter through

Pippin and Newtown, Rambo and Spy,

Greening and Swaar and Spitzenburg lie
With memories tense of sun and the dew.

They bring the great fields and the fence-rows here,
The ground-bird's nest and the cow-bell's stroke
The tent-worm's web and the night-fire's smoke

And smell of the smartweed through all the year.

They bring me the days when the ground was turned,

When the trees were pruned and tilled and sprayed,

When the sprouts were cut and grafts were made,

When fields were cleaned and the brush-wood piles burned.

And then the full days of the ripe months call
For Jefferis, Dyer and Early Joe
Chenango, Mother, Sweet Bough and Snow

That hold the pith of high summer and fall.

All a-sprightly and tart the crisp flesh breaks
And the juices run cordial and fine
Where the odors and acids combine

And lie in the cells till essence awakes.

I taste of the wilds and the blowing rain
And I taste of the frost and the skies;

Condensed they lie in the apple guise

And then escape and restore me again.

So every day all the old years end

And so every day they begin;

So every day the winds come in
And so every day the twelve-months blend.

L.H. Bailey, Wind & Weather

Why Do We Need So Many Apples?

2010-09-13T21:06:00.001-04:00

About thirty years ago (1892) I compiled an inventory of all the varieties of apple-trees sold in North America, as listed in the ninety-five nurserymen's catalogues that came to my hand. The inventory contains 878 varieties. In the present year, however, perhaps not more than 100 varieties are handled by nurserymen in Eastern United States. Probably the dealer and grower would consider even this small number much too great. The highly developed standardized business of the present day, aiming at quantity-production, naturally reduces the variety of products, whether in manufacturing or horticulture, and aims at uniformity. Under the influence of this leadership, we are losing many of the old products, varieties of apples among the rest.

Why do we need so many kinds of apples? Because there are so many folks. A person has a right to gratify his legitimate tastes. If he wants twenty or forty kinds of apples for his personal use, running from Early Harvest to Roxbury Russet, he should be accorded the privilege. Some place should be provided where he may obtain trees or scions. There is merit in variety itself. It provides more points of contact with life, and leads away from uniformity and monotony.

The leading varieties of apples, that have become dominant over wide regions, have been great benefactors to man. The original tree should be carefully preserved till the last, by historical or other societies; and then a monument should be placed at the spot. Monuments have been erected to the Baldwin, Northern Spy, McIntosh and other apples. We should never lose our touch with the origins of men, events, notable achievements, outstanding products of nature.

I fear it is now a habit with many fruit-growers to minimize the interest in varieties, placing the emphasis on tillage, spraying and management of plantations. Yet, the only reason why we expend all the labor is that we may grow a given kind of apple; the variety is the final purpose. -L.H. Bailey, The Apple Tree

Being One with a Tree

2010-08-30T22:11:00.001-04:00

Man listens in the forest. He pauses in the forest. He finds himself. He loses himself in the town and even perhaps in the university. He may lose himself in business and in great affairs; but in the forest he is one with a tree, he stands by himself and yet has consolation, and he comes back to his own place in the scheme of things. - L.H. Bailey, The Holy Earth

Liberty Hyde Bailey Museum Exploring a 19th Century Home

2010-08-18T22:52:00.001-04:00

The Peach is Sunshine

2010-08-13T15:44:00.001-04:00

This peach is sunshine. It is night, the twilight, and the dawn. It is dew and rain. It is noon, and wind, and weather. It is heat and cold. It is the sequence of the seasons, winter and spring, summer and autumn, and winter again, all of which have gone into the tree that gave it birth...and in the years to come, when you and I shall not be here to see, it or its progeny will bear peaches still! — L.H. Bailey, Peach, from The Harvest

Improvsational Farmer Stand-Up More Than Just a Routine

2010-08-06T15:38:00.002-04:00

Local southwest Michigan farmers Julie Cowley and Will Hart love what they do; plant food, grow food, provide food for their immediate community all within a half hour drive from their farm in Casco township where 2010's growing season is sprouting cabbages, lettuces, spinach, melons, celery, zucchini, scallions, squash, tomatoes, broccoli, cauliflower, sunflowers, zinnias, radicchio, leeks, and even blue popcorn. Their story of launching their first farm, Improvisational Farmer, was shared at the last 2010 Brown Bag series in the Bailey woodshed. Will spoke in how he rediscovered the longer cycle of the land that goes beyond the one year mindset. Julie shared the challenges of operating a private farm. Those challenges are paying off with a public more aware of their food. Even Michigan Governor, Jennifer Granholm recently spoke to the value of locally grown food, “Local food is fresher, tastes better and comes from farmland near you,” Granholm said. “And because many fruits and vegetables can lose up to 50 percent of their nutrients in just five days’ time, buying locally grown food is a healthier choice.” Julie and Will also offer Fresh-Prep food kits, ready for the grill. The farm is part of the Lakeshore Harvest Country which is sponsoring an upcoming local food dinner on August 22nd (see Lakeshore link for more info). Farm hats off to Will and Julie. Keep growing and we'll keep eating and growing.

CONTACT INFO THE IMPROVISATIONAL FARMER: Email: Fresh@ImprovFarmer.com, 1-866-254-4633, 269-639-1970, Farm location: 991 62nd Street, Pullman, MI 49450 (about 4 miles east of US 31/196 off Pullman Road, 109th Avenue), Mailing address: 876 1/2 Blue Star Highway, South Haven, MI 49090

The Earth is Divine

2010-08-03T21:45:00.001-04:00

Verily, then, the earth is divine, because man did not make it. We are here, part in the creation. We cannot escape. We are under obligation to take part and to do our best, living with each other and with all the creatures. We may not know the full plan, but that does not alter the relation. When once we set ourselves to the pleasure of our dominion, reverently and hopefully, and assume all its responsibilities, we shall have a new hold on life. - L.H. Bailey, The Holy Earth

The Habit of Grumbling at the Weather

2010-07-21T15:12:00.002-04:00

The habit of grumbling at the weather is the most senseless and futile of all expenditures of human effort. Day by day we complain and fret at the weather, and when we are done with it we have — the weather. The same amount of energy put into wholesome work would have set civilization far in advance of its present state. Weather is not a human institution, and therefore it cannot be "bad." I have seen bad men, have read bad books, have made bad lectures, have lived two years about Boston,— but I have never seen bad weather! — L.H. Bailey, Outlook to Nature

BROWN BAG BIOLOGY: What Would Bailey Plant?

2010-07-19T15:41:00.003-04:00

BROWN BAG BIOLOGY/LUNCH & LECTURE

Wed., July 21th, 12:30-1:30 PM

Liberty Hyde Bailey Museum

903 S. Bailey * South Haven, MI * (269)637-3251

Come to sit under the museum's historic Walnut Tree with your lunch for the free program that started it all! Topic: "What Would Bailey Plant?"

In 1862, a young Liberty Hyde Bailey witnessed his mother's passing from diphtheria in the very room he was born in only five years previously. Sara Bailey, left behind at the Bailey homestead, a collection of cottage of pinks, Dianthus, that she gardened. The young, grief stricken Bailey, continually kept-up the garden, marking a rite of initiation into the world of Horticulture and Botany. He writes in his book, The Garden Pinks, "From earliest boyhood the pinks have been my companions. Mounds and rings of Grass pinks were in the front yard, left there by my mother...to this late day the memory of them lingers." This is his list of his mother's extensive pinks: Dianthus Deltoides, D. graniticus, D. Alpestris, D. Arenarius, D. Petraeus, D. Caesius, D. Plumarius, D. Caryophyllus, D. Gallicus, D. Atrorubens, D. Croaticus, D. Cruentus, D. Barbatus, D. Laciniatus, D. Heddewigii.

Find out more at this program at the Bailey Museum!

BLUEBERRY ICE-CREAM FESTIVAL at the BAILEY

2010-07-12T09:48:00.002-04:00

BLUEBERRY ICE-CREAM FESTIVAL Saturday, July 17th, 2PM-4PM

Liberty Hyde Bailey Museum, 903 S. Bailey Avenue, South Haven, Michigan
Bring the family and taste the season's best! Locally grown blueberries from the southwest Michigan Fruit Belt adorn locally made Sherman's ice-cream. Being ecological never tasted so good! $5 suggested donation.

BLUEBERRY FACTS

• Only 80 fat-free calories per cup, blueberries are a good source of dietary fiber and vitamin C.

•Blueberries rank high in antioxidants that help protect against cancer, heart disease and other age-related diseases.

• Researchers have found compounds in blueberries that help prevent urinary tract infection.

• A single bush can produce as many as 6,000 blueberries a year.

• There are only three fruits native to North America: blueberries, cranberries and Concord grapes.

• Botanists estimate that blueberries have been around for more than 13,000 years.

Museum Becomes a Certified Wildlife Habitat™

2010-07-02T13:40:00.001-04:00

Nature cannot be antagonistic to man, seeing that man is a product of nature. We should find vast joy in the fellowship, something like the joy of Pan. - L.H. Bailey, The Holy Earth

The Liberty Hyde Bailey Museum, a National Historic Site has it all for wildlife now: food, water, cover, place to raise their young and sustainable gardening. These are the criteria set out by the National Wildlife Federation. As they mention, "Whether you have an apartment balcony or a 20-acre farm, you can create a garden that attracts beautiful wildlife and helps restore habitat in commercial and residential areas. By providing food, water, cover and a place for wildlife to raise their young--and by incorporating sustainable gardening practices--you not only help wildlife, but you also qualify to become an official Certified Wildlife Habitat™." Check it out at their webiste, Garden for Wildlife.

The Need to Go to Nature

2010-06-25T08:23:00.000-04:00

So long as the sun shines and the fields are green we shall need to go to nature for our inspiration and our respite; and our need is the greater with every increasing complexity of our lives. L.H. Bailey, The Nature-Study Idea

The Fresh Air Interview: Filmmaker Josh Fox - 'Living In The Middle Of A 'Gasland' : NPR

2010-06-21T17:48:00.000-04:00

So bountiful hath been the earth and so securely have we drawn from it our substance, that we have taken it all for granted as if it were only a gift, and with little care or conscious thought of the consequences of our use of it; nor have we very much considered the essential relation that we bear to it as living parts in the vast creation. Liberty Hyde Bailey, The Holy Earth

    Josh Fox lives in the Upper Delaware River Basin, on the border straddling Pennsylvania and New York State. In May 2008, he received a letter from a natural gas mining company. The company wanted to lease 19.5 acres of land from Fox — and would pay him $100,000 to do so.
    "[They say] 'We might not even drill,' " he tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross. " 'We don't even know if there's gas here. It's going to be a fire hydrant in the middle of a field — very little impact to your land. You won't hardly know we're here.' "
    Instead of saying yes, Fox decided to travel around the country to see how the process of natural gas drilling affected other communities and homeowners. The result, his documentary Gasland, premieres on HBO on June 21. See more with the link above.

Seasonal Sundaes this Saturday

2010-06-13T10:25:00.003-04:00

It's all local and good!

Ice Cream & Fruit Festival at

the Liberty Hyde Bailey Museum,

903, Bailey Avenue, South Haven, MI 49090, A National Historic Site

Saturday, June 19th from 2:00 to 4:00 PM

South Haven's own Sherman's Ice Cream covered with locally grown Michigan strawberries! $5 donation.

Scripture, Culture, and Agriculture: An Agrarian Reading of the Bible

2010-06-13T08:30:00.001-04:00

Scripture, Culture, and Agriculture: An Agrarian Reading of the Bible

This book examines the theology and ethics of land use, especially the practices of modern industrialized agriculture, in light of critical biblical exegesis. Nine interrelated essays explore the biblical writers' pervasive concern for the care of arable land against the background of the geography, social structures, and religious thought of ancient Israel. This approach consistently brings out neglected aspects of texts, both poetry and prose, that are central to Jewish and Christian traditions. Rather than seeking solutions from the past, Davis creates a conversation between ancient texts and contemporary agrarian writers; thus she provides a fresh perspective from which to view the destructive practices and assumptions that now dominate the global food economy. The biblical exegesis is wide-ranging and sophisticated; the language is literate and accessible to a broad audience.

Two Ways of Knowing a Tree

2010-06-02T14:38:00.000-04:00

There are, then, two ways of knowing a tree. One is the way of human feeling and sympathy, through which a tree becomes a part of one's self, as the sunshine does. It is identified with every hallowed experience. The influence of its benignant branches throws a savor into the commonest nooks and comers of our lives. Another way to know the tree is the botanical or analytical way. This method sternly scrutinizes every detail. This is essential to truth, but not to feeling. It is so likely to restrict and dwarf the vision and the sympathies as to make the tree but a laboratory filled with curiously fashioned mechanisms. Some persons are slaves to facts. There are botanists, no doubt, who know all the kinds of trees, but who have never seen the greenness and verdure and sublimeness of the woods. Yet, despite the narrow vision which may come from the analytical study of plants, there is no inherent reason why the person who traces the veins in the leaf, counts the seeds in the pod, and unravels the structure in the wood, may not also see the tree of which all these charming details are but the various parts. L.H. Bailey, introduction to "Familiar Trees and their Leaves"

A Society of the Holy Earth

2010-05-22T21:55:00.001-04:00

"I propose a Society of the Holy Earth. Chapters and branches it may have, but its purpose is not to be organization and its practice is not to be the operation of parliamentary machinery. It will have nothing to ask of anybody, not even of Congress. It will not be based on profit-and-loss. It will have no schemes to float, and no propaganda. It will have few officers and many leaders. It will be controlled by a motive rather than by a constitution. The associations will be fellowships of the spirit. Its principle of union will be the love of the Earth, treasured in the hearts of men and women. To every person who longs to walk on the bare ground, who stops in a busy day for the song of a bird, who hears the wind, who looks upward to the clouds, who would protect the land from waste and devastation realizing that we are transients and that multitudes must come after us, who would love the materials and yet not be materialistic, who would give of himself, who would escape self-centered, commercial and physical valuations of life, who would exercise a keepership over the planet,—to all these souls everywhere the call will come." L.H. Bailey, Universal Service (Image credit from chalk4peace.blogspot.com/)

Encore Online - The Agricultural Act of Eating:

2010-05-12T21:37:00.002-04:00

“Eating is an agricultural act.”

Wendell Berry’s quote is a simple observation of the reality of eating. So much energy and advertising is expended trying to separate us from what we eat that we don’t stop to realize that over 90 percent of a supermarket is not even food. Remaining blissfully unaware of what we eat and where it comes from is crippling us, but it’s curable.

Not many years ago, most of our food was produced within a 100 miles of our homes...

Read the entire artilce at: Encore Online - The Agricultural Act of Eating:

City, Country & Civilization

2010-04-30T09:05:00.003-04:00

"We have developed city civilization far beyond country civilization, and yet both are really the two necessary parts of human activity. City and country are gradually coming together in sympathy, but this is due more to acquaitanceship than to any underlying co-operation between them as equal forces in society. Until such an organic relationship exists, civilization cannot be perfected or sustained, however high it may rise in its various parts." L.H. Bailey, NY Times, July 12th 1910

Nature Is One Vast Democracy

2010-04-26T10:54:00.000-04:00

"Every person who works in factory or field, who sails the sea or digs in mines, who finds his efforts with books or machines or with vast enterprises, who prophesies of things to come,—every one is touched by the same wind, encouraged by the same rain, grown by the same sun, uplifted by the same birds, guided by the same stars. Nature is one vast democracy." L.H. Bailey, Ground-levels in Democracy, 1916

Quotable Bailey

2010-04-18T08:37:00.000-04:00

"The man who worries morning and night about the dandelion in the lawn will find great relief in loving the dandelions"

Liberty Hyde Bailey, Manual of Gardening, 1910

The Simple Wisdom of the Fields

2010-04-15T10:45:00.001-04:00

The more perfect the machinery of our lives, the more artificial do they become. Teaching is ever more methodical and complex. The pupil is impressed with the vastness of knowledge and the importance of research. This is well; but at some point in the school-life there should be the opening of the understanding to the simple wisdom of the fields. One's happiness depends less on what he knows than on what he feels. L.H. Bailey, The Nature Study Idea

The Satisfaction of a Garden

2010-04-13T10:41:00.001-04:00

The satisfaction of a garden does not depend on the area, nor, happily, on the cost or rarity of the plants. It depends on the temper of the person. One must first seek to love plants and nature, and then to cultivate the happy peace of mind that is satisfied with little.

In the vast majority of cases a person will be happier if he has no rigid and arbitrary notions, for gardens are moodish, particularly with the novice. If plants grow and thrive, he should be happy; and if the plants that thrive chance not to be the ones that he planted, they are plants nevertheless, and nature is satisfied with them.

We are wont to covet the things that we cannot have; but we are happier when we love the things that grow because they must. A patch of lusty pigweeds, growing and crowding in luxuriant abandon, may be a better and more worthy object of affection than a bed of coleuses in which every spark of life and spirit and individuality has been sheared out and suppressed. The man who worries morning and night about the dandelions in the lawn will find great relief in loving the dandelions. Each blossom is worth more than a gold coin, as it shines in the exuberant sunlight of the growing spring, and attracts the insects to its bosom. Little children like the dandelions: why may not we? Love the things nearest at hand; and love intensely. If I were to write a motto over the gate of a garden, I should choose the remark that Socrates is said to have made as he saw the luxuries in the market, "How much there is in the world that I do not want !" L.H. Bailey, Manual of Gardening

Window Farming: A Do-It-Yourself Veggie Venture : NPR

2010-04-06T11:33:00.001-04:00

If you have a green thumb, a window and a serious Do-It-Yourself ethic, you too, can be a farmer ... even in your downtown apartment building. Spring is here, and for urban dwellers with no access to soil, hydroponic gardening is a way to grow fresh veggies indoors.

Window Farming: A Do-It-Yourself Veggie Venture : NPR

The Apple Tree

2010-03-30T10:09:00.002-04:00

And often in my wanderings I promise myself that when I reach home I shall see the apple-tree as I had never seen it before. Even its bark and its gnarly trunk will hold converse with me, and its first tiny leaves of the budding spring will herald me a welcome. Once again I shall be a youth with the apple-tree, but feeling more than the turbulent affection of transient youth can understand. Life does not seem regular and established when there is no apple-tree in the yard and about the buildings, no orchards blooming in the May and laden in the September, no baskets heaped with the crisp smooth fruits; without all these I am still a foreigner, sojourning in a strange land. - L.H. Bailey, The Apple Tree

Upcoming Programs & Events At The Liberty Hyde Bailey Museum

2010-03-26T11:09:00.004-04:00

APRIL PROGRAMS & EVENTS
    > NIGHT FOR MUSEUMS: Thursday, April 1st, 5:30-7:30 at Phoenix Cafe
    > MEMBERSHIP KICK-OFF OPEN HOUSE: Saturday, April 17th, 12 Noon- 3PM at the Liberty Hyde Bailey Museum; Even if you are not a member, come on down and see the changes and opportunities for you and the family at America's National Historic Site for the Father of Modern Horticulture!

MAY PROGRAMS & EVENTS
    > KOUSA DOGWOOD SALE PICK-UP: Saturday, May 8th, 9 AM- 1PM at Liberty Hyde Bailey Museum: Pre-order the official flowering tree of South Haven. Trees measure approximate 36 inches for $30. Pre-order your tree by Wednesday May 5th! Call Anne French at 269-639-2412 or Esther Hanson at 269-637-2478:

JUNE PROGRAMS & EVENTS
    > STRAWBERRY ICE-CREAM FESTIVAL: Sunday, June 19th, 2PM-4PM: Bring the family and taste the season's best! Locally grown strawberries adorn locally made ice-cream. Being ecological never tasted so good!

Open to the Voices of Nature

2010-03-21T15:02:00.001-04:00

"It is due to every child that his mind be opened to the voices of nature. The world is always quick with sounds, although our ears are closed to them. Every person hears the loud songs of birds, the sweep of heavy winds and the rush of rapid rivers or the sea; but the small voices with which we live are known not to one in ten thousand. To be able to distinguish the notes of the different birds is one of the choicest resources in life, and it should be one of the first results of a good education. It is but a step from this to the other small voices,—of the insects, the frogs and toads, the mice, the domestic animals, the flow of quiet waters, and the noises of the little winds. It is a great thing when one learns how to listen. At least once, every young person should sleep far out in the open, preferably in a wood or the margin of a wood, that he may know the spirit and the voices of the night and thereafter be free and unafraid." The Nature Study Idea, L.H. Bailey, 1909

Planting A Plant

2010-03-19T08:55:00.002-04:00

"Most persons are interested in plants, even though they do not know it. They enjoy the green verdure, the brilliant flower, the graceful form. They are interested in plants in general. I wish that every person were interested in some plant in particular. There is a pleasure in the companionship, merely because the plant is a living and a growing thing. It expresses power, vitality. It is a complete, self-sufficient organism. It makes its way in the world. It is alive.

The companionship with a plant, as with a bird or an insect, means more than the feeling for the plant itself. It means that the person has interest in something real and genuine. It takes him out-of-doors. It invites him to the field. It is suggestive. It inculcates a habit of meditation and reflection. It enables one to discover himself." -L.H. Bailey, Planting a Plant, 'Nature-Study Quarterly, No. 8 : Leaflet 21, January, 1901

Visit the Liberty Hyde Bailey Conservatory, NOW!

2010-03-02T11:01:00.005-05:00

For those that can't make the trip out to Ithica currently, click on the title link for a short video tour of the Liberty Hyde Bailey Conservatory with Cornell plant biologist Ed Cobb.
In 1935, Bailey donated his herbarium and its library to Cornell University: "Call it an Hortorium... A repository for things of the garden — a place for the scientific study of garden plants, their documentation, their classification, and their naming." This conservatory became the major U. S. center for the systematics of cultivated plants. Enjoy!

Restoring Liberty Hyde Bailey's Birthsite

2010-03-01T18:23:00.005-05:00

The Liberty Hyde Bailey Museum is currently being restored to bring alive this Greek Revival farm house. With the help of Picasa, take a close peek at the process.

Getting Unplugged and Back in the Child's Realm

2010-02-23T10:48:00.002-05:00

The Kaiser Family Foundation reports that American children's use of iPods and MP3 players and other electronic media has increased more than an hour in the last five years. Today a child will spend over 7 hours plugged-in. (Children's Media Use, By Platform - Kaiser Slides) Solution? Connect back to nature as Bailey confesses in this poem, where even the grand Dean of Cornell was snubbed by a child enthralled in their timeless world.

CHILD'S REALM

A little child sat on the sloping strand
Gazing at the flow and the free,
Thrusting its feet into the golden sand,
Playing with the waves and the sea.

I snatched a weed that was tossed on the flood
And unravelled its tangled skeins;
And I traced the course of the fertile blood
That lay deep in its meshed veins;

I told how the stars are garnered in space,
How the moon on its course is rolled;
How the earth is hung in its ceaseless place
As it whirls in its orbit old.
The little child paused with its busy hands
And gazed for a moment at me,
Then it dropped again to its golden sands
And played with the waves and the sea.

L.H. Bailey, Wind and Weather

Quotable Bailey

2010-02-17T17:01:00.002-05:00

"Sad would be the day were there no objects higher than man." L.H. Bailey

(This inscription by Bailey found in the frontpiece endpage of his 1927 Background Book, Harvest: Of the Year to the Tiller of the Soil, dated January 13th, 1928)

It's Slow Good!

2010-02-16T09:39:00.003-05:00

Slow Food is a non-profit, eco-gastronomic member-supported organization that was founded in 1989 to counteract fast food and fast life, the disappearance of local food traditions and people’s dwindling interest in the food they eat, where it comes from, how it tastes and how our food choices affect the rest of the world. To do that, Slow Food brings together pleasure and responsibility, and makes them inseparable. Check them out.

"Hamburg steak often contains sodium sulphite; bologna sausage and similar meats until recently usually contained a large percentage of added cereal. "Pancake flour" often contains little if any buckwheat; wheat flour is bleached with nitric oxide to improve its appearance. Fancy French peas are colored with sulphate of copper. Bottled ketchup usually contains benzoate of soda as a preservative. Japanese tea is colored with cyanide of potassium and iron. Prepared mustard usually contains a large quantity of added starch and is colored with tumeric. Ground coffee has recently been adulterated with roasted peas. So-called nonalcoholic bottled beverages often contain alcohol or a habit-forming drug and are usually colored with aniline. Candy is commonly colored with aniline dye and often coated with paraffine to prevent evaporation. Cheap candies contain such substances as glue and soapstone. The higher-priced kinds of molasses usually contain sulphites. Flavoring extracts seldom are made from pure products and usually are artificially colored. Jams are made of apple jelly with the addition of coloring matter and also of seeds to imitate berries from which they are supposed to be made; the cheap apple jelly is itself often imitated by a mixture of glucose, starch, aniline dye, and flavoring. Lard nearly always contains added tallow. Bakeries in large cities have used decomposed products, as decayed eggs. Cheap ice-cream is often made of gelatin, glue, and starch. Cottonseed-oil is sold for olive-oil. The poison saccharine is often used in place of sugar in prepared sweetened products.

The attentive reader of the public prints in the recent years can greatly extend this humiliating recital if he choose. It is our habit to attach all the blame to the adulterators, and it is difficult to excuse them; but we usually find that there are contributory causes and certainly there must be reasons. Has our daily fare been honest?" Liberty Hyde Bailey, The Holy Earth

Herald-Mail Article: Gardening, Bailey & Children

2010-02-10T20:15:00.003-05:00

Dorry Norris's article supplies a well crafted thumbnail sketch of Bailey, his connection to gardening and how we can reconnect.

Lifestyle: Growing gardeners, by Dorry Norris
These days, gardening programs for kids are growing in popularity. Everyone, from The Herb Society of America to the National Gardening Association to local garden clubs, is creating strategies aimed at introducing children to the joys of nature through gardening...None of this emphasis would come as a surprise to Liberty Hyde Bailey, but the money expended might shock him.

For Feb 12 - Charles Darwin Day (1809-1882)

2010-02-09T14:39:00.003-05:00

I have seen great surprise expressed in horticultural works at the wonderful skill of gardeners in having produced such splendid results from such poor materials; but the art has been simple, and, as far as the final result is concerned, has been followed almost unconsciously. It has consisted in always cultivating the best known variety, sowing its seeds, and, when a slightly better variety chanced to appear, selecting it, and so onwards. -Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species

The story goes that around 1870, a young Liberty Hyde Bailey found a used copy of Darwin's The Origin of Species in a South Haven library. Bailey's father, a Quaker from Vermont, took the book and informed Master Bailey that he needed to approve of its contents first. After a week, Bailey Sr. laid the book in young Liberty's hands explaining, "I don't understand a lick of it but he sounds like an honest man so go ahead and read it." Origin listed important scientists such as Asa Gray and Alfred Russel Wallace. Later in his career, Bailey would study under Gray at Harvard. Bailey would tour Wallce at Michigan Agricultural School (now MSU). The book continued to inform Bailey throughout his career.

If we are parts in the evolution, and if the universe, or even the earth, is not made merely as a footstool, or as a theatre for man, so do we lose our cosmic selfishness and we find our place in the plan of things. We are emancipated from ignorance and superstition and small philosophies. The present wide-spread growth of the feeling of brotherhood would have been impossible in a self-centred creation: the way has been prepared by the discussion of evolution, which is the major biological contribution to human welfare and progress. This is the philosophy of the oneness in nature and the unity in living things.

We have wrongly visualized the "struggle." We have given it an intensely human application. We need to go back to Darwin who gave significance to the phrase "struggle for existence." "I use this term," he said, "in a large and metaphorical sense, including dependence of one being on another, and including (which is more important) not only the life of the individual, but success in leaving progeny." The dependence of one being on another, success in leaving progeny,—how accurate and how far-seeing was Darwin!

The Holy Earth, Liberty Hyde Bailey

The Nasty Tradition of Disconnecting Ourselves from Nature

2010-01-31T17:04:00.002-05:00

Despite the rhetoric of green living, Americans live in the wake of an industrialization that has cut us off from our roots of experience. It is so much so that the idea that we can be a part of nature, honor it, conserve it but also participate and use it seems to be a great contradiction. Most recently farming has been interpreted as "profoundly unnatural," in the Edible History of Humanity by Tom Standage.

"[Farming] has led to widespread deforestation, environmental destruction, the displacement of 'natural' wildlife, and the transplant of plants and animals thousands of miles from the original habitats. It involves the genetic modification of plants and animals to create monstrous mutants that do not exist in nature and often cannot survive without human intervention...Agriculture would surely not be allowed if it were invented today."

Standage's book contains chapters of quick studies one of which is the domestication of corn. Standage makes a strong argument that that human intervention has radically changed this plant from its original roots, making it dependant on humans for its cultivation. The same can be said for the domestication of wheat. How Standage qualifies these alterations puts humans as the Dr. Frankenstein of nature. This may be more of a case with genetically altered foods. But by classifying farming or the process of changing plants to human needs as unnatural, characterizes humankind as a rouge species, alien to its own world.
Liberty Hyde Bailey knew too well even in the 1900s the devastation of human intervention with their environment. Bailey however also knew the other type of relating, where the exchange between man and earth was sacred, that people needed to be awakened to the idea that we are stewards to a holy creation. From our current perspective seen in Standage's book, it's like we're reading the map backwards. We don't have to hermetically seal off land from human contact. Nor can we relate to the land as just a resource to exploit. When we subdue the land, and if we want to understand the true meaning of the word from Genesis, we participate in the development of the created order. As the New Interpreters Bible explains, to subdue is the process of "bringing the world along to its fullest possible creational potential...which creaturely activity will prove crucial for the development of the world." Human consciousness and science need not be seen as the process of creating "monstrous mutants that do not exist in nature and often cannot survive without human intervention" as Standage describes. Since we too are nature, we develop and commune in the process of nature. Our consciousness brings yet another gift to the exchange. The domestication of corn, its dependence on humans and our dependence on it, is an yet another example of the sacred subduing of the land, bringing our consciousness to nature in order to bring it to its fullest possible creational potential. Bailey hoped that we would arrive at this greater understanding and responsibility. It is possible one we embrace one of the most pernicious and ill informed contraditions of our time.

Most Persons Do Not Know What a Superlative Watermelon is Like

2010-01-25T10:22:00.003-05:00

As millions of people do not have gardens, so are they unaware of the low quality of much of the commercial produce as compared with things well grown in due season. Most persons, depending on the market, do not know what a superlative watermelon is like. Even such apparently indestructible things as cucumbers have a crispness and delicacy when taken directly from the vine at proper maturity that are lost to the store-window supply. Every vegetable naturally loses something of itself in the process from field to consumer.
When to this is added the depreciation by storage, careless exposure and rough handling, one cannot expect to receive the full odor and the characteristic delicacies that belong to the product in nature. We must also remember the long distances over which much of the produce must be transported, and the necessity to pick the produce before it is really fit, to meet the popular desire to have vegetables out of season and when we ought not to want them. There is a time and place for everything, vegetables with the rest. Modern methods of marketing, storing and handling have facilitated transactions, and they have also done very much to safeguard the produce itself and to deliver it to the customer in good condition; but the vegetable well chosen and well grown and fresh from the garden is nevertheless the proper standard of excellence. It is a surpassing satisfaction when the householder may go to her own garden rather than to the store for her lettuce, onions, tomatoes, beets, peas, cabbage, melons, and other things good to see and to eat, and to have them in generous supply.

- L.H. Bailey, The Principles of Vegtetable Gardening

A Resource for Our Food Essentials

2010-01-18T12:57:00.011-05:00

I am afraid that our food habits very well represent how far we have moved away from the essentials...we want everything that is out of season, necessitating great attention to the arts of preserving and requiring still further fabrication; and by this desire we also lessen the meaning of the seasons when they come in their natural sequence, bringing their treasure of materials that are adapted to the time and to the place. L.H. Bailey, The Holy Earth

Just this weekend in a produce section of Michigan grocery store I spied the displayed landslide of tomatoes. Tomatoes in Michigan isn't a great mystery but tomatoes in January? Only via Mexico. A lot of ground to travel for a tomato. Cucumbers? Yup, Mexico. I don't even want to get into bananas. What did people eat when items were out of season? Worse, how does one unravel the carbon footprint of boxed and packaged items? Is it just as bad to purchase wine from Australia? No answers yet to that one but here is one resource that can unravel some of the food mysteries: GoodGuide.com. As their website explains, "There are three simple things everyone should know about their food but don't: Where did it come from? How was it made? What's in it?" You can learn not only the ingredients of a product but also its environmental impact. It also has an iPhone app for the more technological savvy. It's another way to get back to our "food essentials." Now about that Australian wine...

Quotable Bailey

2010-01-12T08:08:00.010-05:00

War is organized anarchy.

The popular notion that the electing of any man to office is democracy, if only he is an upright citizen, is one of our precious fallacies. It is no more to our credit to " pass around " the offices than to ask first one neighbor and then another to serve as the family physician.

The wealth of a democracy lies in its people, not in its government or its goods. The product of democracy is self-acting men and women. The well being and progress of society require that every citizen, of whatever age, may have the opportunity to discover himself or herself and to make use of himself largely in his own way.

Responsibility, not freedom, is the key word in democracy,—responsibility for one's self, for the good of the neighbor, for the welfare of the Demos. Until every citizen feels this responsibility as an inescapable personal obligation, there is no complete democracy.

All quotes taken from Bailey's fourth Background Book, What is Democracy? (1918)

What's Gardening Good For?

2010-01-06T14:07:00.013-05:00

By Scott J. Peters, Ph.D., Associate Editor, Journal of Higher Education Outreach and Engagement; Associate Professor, Department of Education, Cornell University.

Excerpted from Dr. Peter's 2005 Keynote Address: What's Gardening Good For?, New York State Master Gardener Conference, Ithaca, NY, June 1, 2005

Up against the big pressing problems of our time, problems like the loss of decent jobs, increasing disparities of wealth, a shrinking tax base and rising taxes, terrorism and war (just to name a few), gardening seems, well, trivial.

It’s not going to turn the economy around. It’s not going to provide us with thousands of good jobs. It’s not going to transform our political and economic systems. It’s not going to bring peace and security.

Given this, we might well ask: What’s gardening good for?

And here are a few more questions we might ask, given the tremendous squeeze on taxpayers these days, and on the resources that government has to spend on public services and programs:

Why should educational organizations like Cornell University and Cornell Cooperative Extension, organizations that are funded in large part with people’s hard-earned tax dollars, be involved in gardening? Can gardening be a medium for meaningful education—that is, for education that really matters? If so, what kind of education, and what is it good for?

There are, it turns out, some very good answers to these questions.

Rick Burstell was a diesel mechanic for twenty years until he caught the extension spirit and got a job in Green County coordinating the Master Gardener program. A student in one of my classes interviewed him about his work. In his interview, Rick said this:

We just had our big staff meeting the other day. It was all about our extension mission and all the things that Cornell Cooperative Extension is going to be involved in here in Greene County. It was so impressive to me; it was all positive stuff.

When I was involved with private industry, we always had a graph on the wall with the numbers, and that was what it was all about. The only thing that mattered was the numbers. If the numbers were going up, everything was fine. It didn’t matter if everybody in the place was suffering or not; it was all about the numbers.

Here, we want to improve this community. We want to make the people in this community more informed. We want to help them to make the right decisions in their life. We want to teach them to have a healthier attitude, to eat healthier, to be healthier towards their neighbors, and to embrace and protect the beautiful natural environment that they have around them.

In between the television and the movies, we get taken in by all these horrible images and horrible versions of reality. Most of our realities are made up of all these phony situations; made up by Hollywood. We have so much of that in our consciousness.

We need to have some other good information in there too, that people cooperate with each other and do good things, and where people are more are concerned about helping their community than they are about building their bank account. Relationships with each other in the community are more important than having a huge amount of money and buying a huge house and big cars.

When I first read what Rick said, I was immediately reminded of something Liberty Hyde Bailey, the founding leader of Cornell’s extension work in New York State, wrote almost a hundred years ago when the extension idea was new. Bailey wrote:

The ultimate welfare of the community does not depend on the balance-sheets of a few industries, but on the character of the people, the moral issues, the nature of home life, the community pride, the public spirit, the readiness of responses to calls for aid, the opportunities of education and recreation and entertainment and cooperative activity as well as of increased daily work and better wages.1

The spirit of extension is really nothing more—and nothing less—than the human spirit, dedicated and directed to the pursuit of the "ultimate welfare of the community." We see this spirit in Rick Burstell’s comments.

I have not forgotten what is perhaps the toughest question I posed...: that is, why should educational organizations like Cornell University and Cornell Cooperative Extension, organizations that are funded in large part with people’s hard-earned tax dollars, be involved in gardening? I want to let Liberty Hyde Bailey answer this question. In his delightful book, The Garden Lover, published in 1928, Bailey wrote:

Any enterprise closely associated with homes and that hopefully employs the leisure of multitudes of people is worthy of investigations and researches conducted at public expense. It is a sad attitude of legislators and others that predicates the need of such investigations on the probable money earnings of the enterprises, as if there were no other measure of human life. (pp.151-152)

Thank goodness there are, indeed, other measures of human life.

Quotable Bailey

2010-01-04T13:39:00.003-05:00

A garden is half-made when it is well planned. The best gardener is the one who does the most gardening by the winter fire. ~Liberty Hyde Bailey

Cornell Gardening Resource

2010-01-02T10:40:00.008-05:00

A new year and time to begin planning the garden. Dean Bailey's adopted home of Cornell University and its Horticulture Department offers a great online gardening resource. Check it out: http://www.gardening.cornell.edu/

Nature practices a wonderfully rigid economy. For nearly half the summer she even refused rain to the plants, but still they thrived; yet I staid home from a vacation one summer that I might keep my plants from dying. I have since learned that if the plants in my borders cannot take care of themselves for a few weeks, they are little comfort to me. - L.H. Bailey, Garden Making

Quotable Bailey

2009-12-31T14:27:00.010-05:00

Some things are true in spite of statistics and philosophy and tabulation. Some things we know because we know them.

Business has no divine right, any more than has rulership.

The land is never partisan.

The fences are coming down,—those crooked, crabbed fences, horse high, bull strong, hog tight, and man proof, —the fences within which one might hide and be relieved of outside obligation. When the fence would not keep the neighbor out, the devil's-lane was interposed, the no-man's-land of briers and crooked growths. Many were the histories of the old line fence.
...the destruction of human beings by human beings is of a piece with the destruction of animals and vegetation, of the disregard for the essential rights of neighbors in the use and proprietorship of the earth, and of the shameful wounding of the planet.

A man does not serve his fellow until he takes care of himself. One does not serve the neighborhood until one serves one's own family; nor does one serve a state before one serves a community; one is not a good internationalist until one is a good nationalist.

The public schools constitute an arm of governance as well as an agency of education. We are to look to the school systems, more than to any other official force or agency, to develop the feeling for service. To this end they must be of the spirit as well as of the subjectmatter; and here is their greatest likelihood of failure.

The habit of making demands rather than rendering service will shorten the reach of any class of people.

I propose a Society of the Holy Earth. Chapters and branches it may have, branches it may have, but its purpose is not to be organization and its practice is not to be the operation of parliamentary machinery . It will have nothing to ask of anybody, not even of Congress. It will not be based on profit-and-loss. It will have no schemes to float, and no propaganda. It will have few officers and many leaders. It will be controlled by a motive rather than by a constitution. The associations will be fellowships of the spirit.
All quotes from Bailey's third Background Book, Universal Service (1918)

Country School

2009-12-29T14:09:00.010-05:00

THERE certainly will come a day
As men become simple and wise
When schools will put their books away
Till they train the hands and the eyes;
Then the school from its heart will say
In love of the winds and the skies:

I teach
The earth and soil
To them that toil,
The hill and fen
To common men
That live just here;

The plants that grow,
The winds that blow,
The streams that run
In rain and sun
Throughout the year;

The shop and mart
The craft and art,
The men to-day
The part they play
In humble sphere;

And then I lead
Thro' wood and mead
By bench and rod
Out unto God
With love and cheer.
I teach!

From, Bailey's second Background Book, Wind and Weather

Preserving the Birth Home of L.H. Bailey

2009-12-23T08:57:00.022-05:00

As posted in our November 14th blog, Liberty Hyde Bailey's birth site home (a National Historic Place and museum) is being historically accessed inside and out in order to uncover, rediscover and finally recover this priceless artifact. For this installment we start with the home's most noticeable feature, the arched front porch.

THAT IS ONE FASCINATING PORCH!
A popular Liberty Hyde Bailey Museum anecdote that has been bandied about by docents and trustees explained the four asymmetrical arches that grace the home's front porch as a Masonic symbol, secretly announcing to any passing Mason of the homeowner's connection to the brotherhood. While making a good story ala National Treasure there wasn't any evidence (besides the story) to support this claim. Even with pressing a museum docent further about how he new about the Masonic symbolism, he cryptically shook out the well worn trope of keeping Masonic secrets, secret. This doesn't hold water even more so now that the Masons have public radio commercials to help boost their waining numbers. Not much cloak and dagger as wishful projection. Here is what historical preservationist, Erica Pearson-Eklov uncovered for us.
While there isn't anything on Masonic symbolism, the porch and arches unquetionably stand apart from the Greek Revival style home.

The most contrary feature of the Bailey home is its front porch, which does not abide by Greek Revival style porches or décor. The single story wood porch extends the entire length of the west-facing front elevation, with a half-hipped roof. The porch has four arches of varying sizes facing west and one arch on either side elevation. Each arch displays rounded wood moldings and keystone decorations. Completed by December 1861, the porch was an addition to the house. The inside of the porch has wood plank flooring, painted a green color, with a tongue and groove wood ceiling. The foundation of the porch is composed of cobblestone masonry, differing from that of the house’s foundation. Most notably, the design of the porch exists in stark contrast to style of the main house.

As Marshall McLennan, professor emeritus of Eastern Michigan University’s historic preservation program, notes: “That is one fascinating porch! ...while the house is Greek Revival, the porch is more attuned to the earlier Georgian style. The facade of the house is very plain, lacking classical door and window treatments. Conversely the graceful porch is completely out of character with that. I am of the opinion that the porch was added later to try to spiff up an ordinary house.”

While McLennan argues towards the porch’s Georgian notes, others could argue the porch illustrates more Italianate tendencies. The Italianate style favors arches and curved tops, and its post-Greek Revival occurrence can be considered in tandem with the history of the Bailey porch.

Living the Backgrounds of Our Life

2009-12-22T19:05:00.008-05:00

There are two parts to the common day — the performance of the day, and the background of the day. Many of us are so submerged in the work we do and in the pride of life that the real day slips by unnoted and unknown. But there are some who part the hours now and then and let the background show through. There are others who keep the sentiments alive as an undertone and who hang all the hours of work on a golden cord, connecting everything and losing none: theirs is the full life; their backgrounds are never forgotten; and the backgrounds are the realities.

The joy of flowers is of the backgrounds. It lies deeper even than the colors, the fair fragrances, and the graces of shape. It is the joy of things growing because they must, of the essence of winds woven into a thousand forms, of a prophetic earth, and of wonderful delicateness in part and substance. The appeal is the deeper because we cannot analyze it, nor measure it by money, nor contain it in anything that we make with our hands. It is too fragile for analysis.

L.H. Bailey's, "Blossoms" 1913

Rediscovering Bailey's Background Books

2009-12-19T14:50:00.001-05:00

Among the volumes of Liberty Hyde Bailey's work, the more personal and philosophical writings are found in the Background Books: The Philosophy of the Holy Earth. These seven books which he called his “budget of opinions,” were written, as Bailey explains, with only the authority of "a single and unattached citizen, looking on." Bailey explained that, "Out of an experience not inconsiderable grew the desire to attempt certain Background Books...the person who may have chanced to read one of the other books may understand that here is not a repetition of statements but a progression of ideas." Bailey holds true to this format where there is constant weaving of a tapestry which meditates on the sometimes forgotten panoramas of our life. Here they are for the offering, with links to the first four.

(1915)
Wind and Weather (1916)
Universal Service (1918)What is Democracy? (1918)
The Seven Stars (1923)
The Harvest: Of the Year to the Tiller of the Soil (1927)
The Garden Lover (1928)

The Holy Earth

Quoatable Bailey-Never Lose Faith In the Soil

2009-12-18T10:13:00.006-05:00

Above all, old and young, we must never lose faith in the soil. It is the source and condition of our existence. It never grows stale and it never wears out. The earth is always young.

-L.H. Bailey, Lessons of Today

Health Care and 20th Century Agriculture Reform?

2009-12-14T14:08:00.001-05:00

Question: What Does Health Care Reform and the condition of agriculture at the start of 20th century during Bailey's time have in common? A lot according to the New Yorker's Atul Gawande

"At the start of the twentieth century, another indispensable but unmanageably costly sector was strangling the country: agriculture. In 1900, more than forty per cent of a family’s income went to paying for food. At the same time, farming was hugely labor-intensive, tying up almost half the American workforce. We were, partly as a result, still a poor nation. Only by improving the productivity of farming could we raise our standard of living and emerge as an industrial power. We had to reduce food costs, so that families could spend money on other goods, and resources could flow to other economic sectors." See how he connects the two in: How the Senate bill would contain the cost of health care: newyorker.com

We Must Begin on the Earth

2009-12-14T13:33:00.009-05:00

Every great crisis imposes special obligations on the people; and certain classes or groups of the people may be met with separate phases of the obligation. So it is said that certain very definite responsibilities now rest on the farmer because of the upset of conditions produced by the great war...When the armies shall have killed each other off, when the supplies shall have been exhausted, when the military organizations shall have tired of their vanities, when vengeance has been spent, and when society becomes ashamed of itself, then we shall begin all over again at a slow and laborious process of reconstruction; and we must begin on the earth. - (after the start of World War I)

L.H. Bailey, The Present Responsibility of the Rural People, November, 1914

The Threads of Nature Study

2009-12-07T10:34:00.008-05:00

"But if the child chooses the material, the subject will lack continuity: what then?

Nature is not consecutive except in her periods. She puts things together in a mosaic. She has a brook and plants and toads and insects and the weather all together. Because we have put the plants in one book, the brooks in another, and the bugs in another, we have come to think that this divorce is the logical and necessary order.

If all the things mentioned above are taught, then the life of the brook will be the thread that ties them all together. It is well to introduce the pupil to a wide range of material, in order to increase his points of contact with the world."

I think there is a lot of wisdom in the above words written by Liberty H. Bailey in The Nature-Study Idea (1903) . He gives us two illustrations in order to understand the connective idea of nature study led by our children. The first is a mosaic where the pieces are fit together to make a beautiful image. The second is a thread, weaving our study together within some focus area.What a wonderful way to remind ourselves of the way our children will build a love for the natural world and its Creator. - Barbara McCoy

Read Barbara's wonderful Blog, " Handbook of Nature Study." It is filled with extensive Nature Study activities and links. Thanks Barb!

Carl G. Jung- We Need a Relationship With Nature

2009-12-03T11:16:00.017-05:00

Like Liberty Hyde Bailey, Swiss Psychiatrist, Carl Gustav Jung, lived in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. This quote taken from a new collection of his work, The Earth Has A Soul, Jung reflects on how the changes wrought in the twentieth century had unmoored man from his instincts. His reflection strongly compliments Bailey's beliefs on land ownership and the value of the farmer.

Every man should have his own plot of land so that the instincts can come to life again. To own land is important psychologically, and there is no substitute for it. We keep forgetting that we are primates and that we have to make allowances for these primitive layers in our psyche. The farmer is still closer to these layers. In tilling the earth he moves around within a very narrow radius, but he moves on his own land.The industrial worker is a pathetic, rootless, being, and his remuneration in money is not tangible but abstract. In earlier times, when the crafts flourished, he derived satisfaction from seeing the fruit of his labor. He found adequate self-expression in such work. But this is no longer the case. First of all, he is responsible for only a small part of the finished product. Secondly, the product is sold, it disappears, and he has no further stake in it. Because the psychological reward in inadequate, the worker rebels against his employer and against “capitalism” as a whole. We all need nourishment for our psyche. It is impossible to find such nourishment in urban tenements without a patch of green or blossoming tree. We need a relationship with nature. I am just a culture-coolie myself, but I derived a great deal of pleasure from growing my own potatoes. - Carl Jung: The Earth Has a Soul: The Nature Writings of C.G. Jung, p. 154-155

Blogging Bailey

2009-12-01T14:22:00.007-05:00

"I am sure that the first President of ASHS (American Society for Horticultural Science), Liberty Hyde Bailey, delivered his presentations and lectures without many visuals, and I know that he definitely was a print type of guy. I have seen a photo of Liberty Hyde Bailey sitting in his living room up in Ithaca, New York, talking and conversing with students about horticulture. Today, Liberty would be on Facebook, have a blog site, and be on YouTube showing how to prune or identify a certain plant. The art of pruning a shrub or the science behind the horticultural principles extolled by Liberty Hyde Bailey haven’t really changed, but it is how we deliver the information that has most assuredly changed. I am sure if he were alive today, he would embrace the electronic revolution. I think back on how as graduate students and young professors we used to make our presentations for the annual conference using the old blue and white slides with black tables of data on a clear background. Now we use PowerPoint and create presentations and posters that boggle one’s mind. Sometimes I believe we stand a chance of losing the 'take-home” message in the myriad of bells and whistles in a presentation."

- Excerpted from, Reflections, by ASHS President, William J. Lamont, Jr., August 2009, ASHS Newsletter.

There's a Liberty Hyde Bailey Museum?

2009-11-14T13:31:00.019-05:00

Well, yes. Since 1938 there has been a museum dedicated to America's Father of Modern Horticulture. It is also Bailey's birth site, a 1850s Greek Revival rural farm house in South Haven, Michigan that is on the national register for historic places. The region is known as Michigan's southwest fruit belt. Soil and location make this place the largest non-citrus producing regions in North America. It is in this auspicious setting that Bailey grew-up amongst pioneer pomologists on a 80-acre fruit farm.

Despite the museum's early origins (even Bailey found it odd to have a museum dedicated to him before his passing), it has remained unknown to most of the country and even the natives of the region but for some legitimate and legally shaky reasons.

The Liberty Hyde Bailey Museum, despite being dedicated in 1938 to the city of South Haven remained void of being a working museum. Instead, up until 1954, it served as a nurse's dormitory for the adjacent city hospital in violation of the home's deed that stipulated it be a memorial to Liberty Hyde Bailey, South Haven's most famous son. Apparently fame can only take one so far.

Flash forward in the 1980s, and the museum flourished as a typical house museum for its time, being celebrated as a place with antiques and "old stuff" a view that doesn't pass public muster today. The question becomes what is the purpose of a museum, specifically one with this caliper of historical importance? That is what the museum board and staff will be addressing in 2009-2010. Preservation is the key word as we assess the place inside and out. Stay posted to this blog as we share the process of uncovering and rediscovering history in our largest artifact, the Bailey farm house and grounds. Stay tuned. In the meantime, check-out this quick PowerPoint tour.

L.H. Bailey and Albert Einstein

2009-11-11T12:28:00.003-05:00

"Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better." -Albert Einstein

"It is blasphemous practice that speaks of the hostility of the earth, as if the earth were full of menaces and cataclysm. The old fear of nature, that peopled the earth and sky with imps and demons, and that gave a future state to Satan, yet possesses the minds of men, only that we may have ceased to personify and to demonize our fears, although we still persistently contrast what we call the evil and the good. Still do we attempt to propitiate and appease the adversaries. Still do we carry the ban of the early philosophy that assumed materials and "the flesh" to be evil, and that found a way of escape only in renunciation and asceticism.

Nature cannot be antagonistic to man, seeing that man is a product of nature. We should find vast joy in the fellowship, something like the joy of Pan. " -Liberty Hyde Bailey, The Holy Earth

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Through the Lens of L.H. Bailey: Plants, Places, & People

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The Difficulty with Much of our Teaching

How the Trees Look in Winter

L.H. Bailey on Pruning

Interactive L.H. Bailey Timeline

Storing and Saving Seeds

Pumpkins and Squashes-What's the Difference?

The Garden Guru: Give crotons a place in the sun

Ten Things to Learn From An Apple

THE HARVEST OF THE APPLE-TREE

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