Garden centers and many garden catalogs carry tubers of named dahlia varieties.
The garden catalogs are fat this time of year with spendy gimcracks that promise to revolutionize the tired old routine of putting seeds in the earth and waiting for them to grow.
The correspondence began in May 1958, when Lawrence wrote to White suggesting a few little-known seed and plant lists for White's review of garden catalogs, the first of which had just been published in The New Yorker.
The holiday bills fester, the garden catalogs have not yet arrived with their immodest promises of spring, and escaping to warmer climes is harder now that the economy has stopped working.
But even though I am tempted to take to my couch, armed with luscious garden catalogs to dream of next year, I am admonished by the words of the late, great English gardener Rosemary Verey: "A garden in winter is the absolute test of the true gardener".
Of course, for me the dream is represented by a six-inch stack of glossy garden catalogs and the promise of tomatoes in August; for Ms. Stewart it's that plus a multimillion-dollar book contract and an "Apprentice -type reApprentice -type
Some garden catalogs and their Internet equivalents include recipes, but they do not mention the sense of power that comes from feeding yourself and your community, the gut-level triumph of bringing to the table a wooden bowl heaped with barely dressed leaf lettuces snipped just minutes ago.
Do not let yourself be seduced by those fancy plastic bins advertised in the garden catalogs.
