Word: seed
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...conservatism without the impetus of Puritan vitality, with the righteous middle class living in suburbs "the bedrooms of Boston" --outside the municipal limits where they have neither votes nor interest in reform, and with the working class content in its slums. Boston lacks the seed of initiative to overcome its inertia. In other cities a Joseph Pulitzer or a Mark Eldridge has crusaded through the newspapers and found something dynamic in the community to complement its editorials. In Boston, how ever, the press takes its lead from the community, and Boston must rest in its circle torpor...
...this show was almost too good. Rose, a gentleman farmer as well as a newspaper columnist on the side, moaned last week: "I'd appreciate it if Mr. Burpee would take me off his list. Every year around" this time, he sends me a fancy seed catalogue. It's illustrated with pictures of pumpkins big as Cinderella's coach . . . lima beans so big that if Glenn Davis saw one he'd scoop it up and run for a touchdown. Each year I'm seduced...
...sales emphasis was on flowers. As usual, Philadelphia's W. Atlee Burpee Co., biggest mail-order seed house in the world (1946 gross: $5 million), made the biggest noise. It sent out three million catalogues to push the latest products of its California farm. Items: a yellow-pink snapdragon billed as the "first alldouble snapdragon ever grown from seed" and the "most sensational new flower for 1947"; a pink "alldouble" petunia called the "Mrs. Dwight D. Eisenhower" ($2 a packet...
Long Stems, Big Prices. Detroit's Ferry-Morse Seed Co., which claims to be the "world's largest producer and distributor" of vegetable and flower seeds, introduced a sweet pea called the Cuthbertson, notable for long stems and resistance to summer heat. Manhattan's Max Schling Seedsmen, Inc., the Tiffany of seed houses (it once got as much as $10 for a packet of delphinium seeds), offered a "Tyrian pink and yellow" dahlia at $15 for a single tuber...
Vegetable seed sales were slipping. At the peak of Victory-gardening enthusiasm in 1944, when the U.S. had an estimated 22 million gardeners, vegetables accounted for nearly 75% of all seed sales; now they were leveling off to a peacetime norm of slightly more than 50%. But vegetable growers, too, had plenty of novelties to choose from. Almost all seedsmen were featuring a new brownish-tinged lettuce called Bronze Beauty. Other attractions: a midget watermelon (Schling), a hybrid eggplant (Burpee), a yellow sweet pepper (Manhattan's Peter Henderson), a "giant tree tomato" (Vaughan's of Chicago...