Re: agricultural sabotage?

**A*@aol.com**

It takes a while for exotic plants with unpleasant attributes to become 
widespread.  It is when they are widely scattered that excessive vigor and 
vitality can become a problem.

However, if you have not seen the minimally maintained publicly owned lands 
around Boston, MA then I recommend a trip some time.  Celastrus orbiculatus 
and Ailanthus altissima, and Rosa multiflora, and Polygonum cuspidatum 
outnumber the people.  I am currently amassing opinions and recommendations 
from university and governmental sources to convince a very intelligent and 
well mannered woman, whose Cambridge, MA residence would sell for 4.5-5.0 
million dollars were she to offer it for sale, that she does not have a 
quaint relic of the 19th century in her front yard.  She has a plant that is 
deemed a noxious weed in quite a few of the United States.  She wants to 
encourage R. multiflora.  It cost her $150-$175 last year to keep the plant 
from making half of her front yard inaccessible and partially blocking the 
public sidewalk.  It is exactly such individuals that make the case for 
garden writers of the mass media to pass along only the most unquestionably 
accurate and reliable information to the public.  I also wish that the 
eastern Massachusetts mass media would make it easier to communicate with 
their free lance specialty writers who, in my opinion make mistakes that 
should be corrected.  It was easy to get a correction into the Tuesday 
Science Section of the Boston Globe, but the garden stuff is oriented toward 
publicity for retail outlets and incomplete and inaccurate.  Unfortunately, 
the ordinary homeowner in Massachusetts is denied access to the Cooperative 
Extension Service except in Plymouth County.  Horticultural knowledge is now 
scarce except among the best paid professionals in Massachusetts.  That can 
be shown by driving around any community and looking traffic signs with 
"brown volcanoes" and deliberately piling 4 cubic yds. of shredded bark 
around public trees while large groups of woody plants have 6mil thick 
plastic sheeting placed on the ground around the entire mass. 

It is a little embarrassing that so much bad management of the cultivated 
landscape is practiced within a few miles of the campus of Harvard University 
where botany and the most fundamental levels of plant physiology were being 
studied before the land grant colleges (Morrill Act) existed.  It also took 
decades for our medical establishment to agree with Dr. White about diet and 
exercise while some groups in rural areas had been advocating that to their 
members since late nineteenth century.  Well, I guess I should be glad it 
only takes an average of half a century to modify conventional wisdom instead 
of ten times that.  

I personally, think that the problems that the local Catholic Archdiocese has 
now will make the United States more conscious of the need to renew some of 
the hierarchy of all organizations at regular intervals.  The rapid 
communications that have become available in my lifetime will serve to let us 
all know when conventional thinking is overcoming demonstrable science.  In 
re childhood sexual abuse: see February 2002 edition of Scientific American.

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