AGRICULTURE: Step Right Up, Folks

Broadway’s Billy Rose knew a good show when he saw one. But 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. . . .”

U.S. seedsmen were hawking their spring wares with a new peacetime vigor, hoping to keep sales near wartime levels. In the annual carnival of catalogues, the color work was gaudier than ever, the prose more aglow than before with full-bodied, giant varieties of superlatives.

For 1947, the 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).

No less eye-catching than these marvels were some of the new postwar gardening tools and gadgets which were finally being produced in quantity. The fanciest was a four-wheeled, gasoline-driven lawn mower with a unique rotary blade—it worked something like a floor-waxer. Price: $179.50. Runners-up were an electric hedge clipper ($44.50) and a flamethrower for killing weeds and soil bacteria ($23.50). Much postwar equipment was made of light-weight metals; there were a rubber-tired magnesium wheelbarrow (16 Ibs., $34.50), and an aluminum rake ($5). Neater still, there was a garden hose made of amber-colored, semi-transparent plastic ($13-35 for 50 feet). In the routine descriptive words of garden men, it was “guaranteed to last a lifetime.”