Not knowing where your food comes from is a primary form of alienation.

But there is one place where a person can make choices that will lead in a small way toward greater sanity in dealing with the natural order. That place is the private garden.

I cannot walk into our garden without constantly being reminded of the friends who have shared their plants.

When I need to be precise about a plant, I use its Latin name, even if my nongardening friends sometimes look at me a little funny for using big words in a dead language - or in the kind of horticultural Esperanto that botanical names make up.

Plants are the original chemists. Their sophistication makes DuPont and Monsanto look like little kids with chemistry sets.

Whether the are splashed with gold or white, striped with chartreuse or cream, or margined in light tones, they are nature's weaklings, and nature is still a matter of survival of the fittest. The survival of variegated plants depends on human intervention.

Not knowing where your food comes from is a primary form of alienation.