Paradise Found: America Returns to the Garden

We all have an idea of a garden. It is the place where we wish we were, where we are at our best: generous, fertile, humble and at peace. For some the vision may be exquisitely formal, a garden of thought and geometry, traced with tulips and a perfectly taut hedge. For others it is wild and artless, with shaggy trees and hiding places and children splashing in clover. Even if we have never been there, we know what it looks like.

Maybe it is the change of season, or something in the social climate, but suddenly it seems as though all around the country people are going to any length to find their garden: to read about it, visit it and, if at all possible, create it. Mailboxes bulge with gardening catalogs, groceries grow on windowsills, cranes hoist trees onto city rooftops. From coast to coast, nursery owners say their business has doubled. Even baby boomers who did not have the remotest interest in the subject two years ago now rattle off the Latin names of their plants and comb suburban garden stores for just the right style of Japanese weed whipper.

Wrestling the wilderness is an old American sport, turning forests into arbors, fields into farms. Yet this desire to plant something is reaching into places and lives that defy fertility. Throughout the most savage reaches of New York's inner city, community gardeners are transforming burned-out lots into verdant sanctuaries. Across the dry plains of the Midwest, botanists are finding plenty of volunteers to help them reclaim the prairies and replant the wildflowers that belong there. In a formidable climate where there are hailstorms in June and frost in August, juvenile offenders at a Wyoming detention center have some of the finest gardens around.

Amid so much activity, the stereotypes no longer fit. Through the 1970s, the archetypal gardener was over 50 and had time and money to spare: a smug matron with impeccable calceolarias, an eccentric rosarian, a spinster growing herbs. But now, says the National Gardening Association, 78% of America's households garden, and all the recent surveys suggest that the most fervent converts are between 30 and 49 and still evenly divided between men and women. Those who once bought geraniums and parched them in college dorm rooms have discovered that they can even garden competitively.

The baby boomers get much of the attention, because they accounted for half of the record $17.5 billion that was spent last year on things horticultural. Once they have poured all the money they can into their homes, cash-flush yuppies have found that a garden can soak up limitless discretionary income. After seeds and dirt, there are goatskin gloves and Garden Weasels, wide- throated anvil pruners from Rolcut of England, not to mention $15,000 for a Sargent weeping hemlock tree. The yuppies quickly master the rituals and floral lore, swap compost recipes at dinner parties. Mulching has become elevator talk.

The touching eagerness of converts leaves some veterans bemused. Gardening, they will tell you, is a vocation, not a gift, and requires work and experience to master and love. "I see these specimen trees coming down the highway from the nursery wrapped like Egyptian mummies," says Long Island Painter Robert Dash, "and I think, 'God, the gardening world has got out of hand.' "