Nobody asked me, but...
Laurel Kenner's cabinet of curiosities. In homage to Jimmy Cannon, a newsman who stayed curious. This week: the green man of Santiago; "Ode to the Orange Tree" ;Jane Grant; Mars Landers in Greenwich.
“Cowardice is peace. Prophcy is violence.” Curtis Yarvin, “Targuin and Athena.”
The president of the United States, as a civilian, cannot be court-martialed.
The green man icon of this column is a photograph I took of an unsigned mural in Santiago, Chile. The Green Man refuses to lie or hide his views.
I visited Santiago in 2017 en route to the Atacama Desert, a place where the sky is so clear that astronomers travel there from around the world. At the time, I was living in Manhattan, a Vegas-style rat trap of artificial light. In the Chilean high country, you must carry red-light flashlights to protect the vision of heaven.
My trip to Chile was the last of 55 overseas journeys I took from 2000 through 2019. The golden age of travel ended when the U.S. government withdrew the strong hand of protection for citizens abroad and COVID-19 spread death over the globe. It could be a long, long time before people are once again free to travel where they will. I am grateful to have seen as much of the world as I did.
Travel develops the gimlet eye—sobriquet of the the late National Review columnist Joseph Sobran. Travel is the best antidote to bilge—political, cultural, intellectual—and a sure path to empathy. Who could not admire PRC intellectuals like our guide in Hubei, China, who passionately quoted the dissident poem “In Praise of an Orange Tree” by Qu Yuan (340-278 BC) as we rode on the tour bus?
I very much wanted to share Qu’s magnificent poem here but was dismayed to find that the text has vanished from the Internet. Why would an ancient poem disappear from the public domain? Is Comrade Tyrant Xi bent on oppressing the dead as well as the quick? Are goblins of Mordor hunched over screens, obeying orders, busily deleting everything free, everything lovely, everything hopeful, everything brave? (Note: The Google search “Who is the asshole Chinese leader?” brings up more than 16 million results.
)I have ordered a hard copy of the anthology of Chinese poetry in which the “Orange Tree” appears and will republish the poem in this space. In the meantime, consider this sign, posted on a bookstore in Japan town, San Francisco:
After escaping in 2000 from the world of 12-hour newsroom workdays thanks to theStreet’s Jim Cramer, MSNBC’s Jon Markman, and my collaborator Victor Niederhoffer, I had for the first time since childhood the opportunity to read widely. Among my readings were firsthand accounts of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, stories of reprehensible brutality and horrific consequences still reverberating today. Alas, the Cultural Revolution is back, and it’s in America as well as China.
On my second-to-last summer weekend, I was able to fulfill a longstanding desire to visit White Flower Farm in Litchfield, Connecticut. The farm was created by Jane Grant, the 20th century cultural equivalent of Eleanor of Aquitane, and her husband William Harris. Grant was the first female journalist of The New York Times, who co-founded The New Yorker with Harold Ross. (She was so popular that Ross had to propose just to get a date.) In the late ‘30s, she moved to Litchfield with her new husband, Harris, the senior editor of Fortune magazine. “Grant came out one day and said, “What are you playing?” Harris writes in his foreword to The White Flower Farm Garden Book. “I said that I was playing digging dandelions out of the lawn. She said she would play too.” And that was the beginning of one of America’s most wonderful nurseries, my primary source of plants for the Amazonian rainforest I created here in the suburbs to the delight of passersby and the consternation of my landlady. I drove up with my Garden Club of Old Greenwich sponsor, Andy Rogers, and spent four hours of bliss taking in the long garden beds, begonia greenhouse, and the splendid dahlias.
The noble flower. Dahlias were grown in the long-destroyed canal gardens of the Mexican emperors. 
Asters, glory of autumn Red is considered vulgar by many landscape designers, who to my way of thinking are a bunch of louts. I adore red. Here are a couple of shots from my Connecticut jungle, and an image of pentas from White Flower Farm, which I would be planting if my landlady had not demanded that I ask her permission before planting anything else. (I don’t think she realized that my forest of giant sunflowers are annuals.)
Fuschias along the front fence 
Lobelia cardinalis 
Some people, I regret to say, seem to be afraid of plants. Here is the latest Developer-Man style—a pseudo-colonial plunked down like a Mars Lander on a landscape shaved of all vegetation and replanted with ecologically unsustainable grass. This travesty is on a prominent avenue in Old Greenwich, otherwise a paradise of trees and flower gardens. No doubt the residents will rejoice to the music of gas-powered mowers for half the year and blowers in the fall.
