For his part, the curator of the £250,000 Scottish pavilion, Philip Long, strikes a patriotically un-Johnsonian note; at the very least, he declares, his choices share traditional native virtues: "They are all extremely bright and have a rigorous approach to work".
As a writer deeply in the American grain, he reminds us again and again, in his expansive sense of American possibility, that passion and hope are the best native virtues.
When composing a salad, wrote the English diarist John Evelyn in 1698, "every plant should come in to bear its part, without being overpower'd by some herb of a stronger taste, so as to endanger the native sapor and virtue of the rest; but fall into their places, like the notes in music".
Sub-cloning of the hbpA gene and its expression from the YSBLIC-3C vector resulted in a protein that is 21 residues longer than the native protein by virtue of a spacer that leads from the N-terminal methionine to the histidine tag, and also incorporates a C3 protease cleavage site.
When Americans rediscovered the virtues of native plants 20 years ago, they ripped out everything from rhododendrons and roses to Grandmother's lilacs.
Valentine Warner fared better, extolling the virtues of native shellfish – the majority of which are now exported to the French and Belgians, who have the palates and the patience to deal with the slippery little buggers.
Are these negative virtues?
The sulphur-crested cockatoo was 11th with 4,051 votes and the gang-gang cockatoo, which received the vote of a number of politicians by virtue of being native to Canberra, was 15th with 2,871 votes.
Cobbett, by contrast, is altogether less subtle as he lambasts the "nabobs, negro-drivers, generals, admirals, governors, commissaries, contractors, pensioners, sinecurists, commissioners, loan-jobbers, lottery-dealers, bankers, stock-jobbers", and all the other cronies of "the Thing" (that opaque mix of urban and mercantile corruption) for undermining the rural virtue of his native Hampshire.
The event, the fourth annual Smartscape Info/Expo, extolled the virtues of planting succulents and native California plants.
I am tempted to pull her to me, to explain she is American by birth, Native American by birth heritage and Indian by virtue of being raised by us.
