When I was in high school nothing seemed more important than to see what next year’s car models would look like. Every fall a friend and I would go to the library to look at car magazines to see whether any of them had pictures of next year’s new Chevys, Buicks, or Dodges. From there we’d walk or take a bus to the auto showrooms to try to get a look at the models to come. They were there in the windows, but they were always draped with a soft shroud. We couldn’t see them, but being teenage guys, we were good at imaging what was beneath the lines and curves.

Now that I drive a Toyota and can’t tell a Chevy from a Mazda, my interest in new models has shifted from cars to tomatoes. Burpee’s and Park Seed are my must see catalogs for hot new tomatoes. This year Burpee’s newest are ‘Golden Mama’ and ‘Porterhouse Beefsteak.’ ‘Golden Mama,’ they say is “the first yellow paste tomato bred.” That’s revolutionary because it means that marinara lovers finally can top their pasta with a yellow sauce. Think of it: pasta primavera with yellow sauce. ‘Porterhouse Beefsteak,’ Burpee says is “the greatest extra-large beefsteak we’ve ever bred.” It’s the Hummer of tomatoes. Some of these giants top out at four pounds, they claim. Now ordinary beefsteaks will bulk up to three pounds, and a seven-pound plus tomato could contend for a world record. But even at four pounds, ‘Porterhouse’ is still a force to be reckoned with.

Park Seed is featuring an heirloom tomato they call ‘Tomato Pineapple.’ It’s a two-pound yellow-skinned beefsteak type with red stripes here and there. Park markets ‘Pineapple’ like a fine wine: “It has a strong Tomato aroma and fruity aftertaste.” Park Seed also has a quirky new model that they’ve named ‘Tumbling Tom Yellow.’ ‘Tom’ is a yellow cherry tomato that Park is marketing as an “edible ornamental.” It has an unusual white bloom and is bred to vine so it can be used in hanging baskets and window boxes. ‘Tumbling Tom’ “dangles about 2 feet over the sides of containers, for all the world as pretty as any spreading Petunia!”

I can’t grow tomatoes -- too much shade where I live. But I was hoping to see and follow some of the new models in the tomato patch at the botanical garden. The keepers of the garden planted ten varieties -- none with the pizzazz of the new models featured in the garden catalogs. For the Garden’s tomato patch, the keepers picked ‘Health Kick,’ ‘New Girl,’ ‘Pink Girl,’ ‘Golden Girl,’ ‘Better Boy,’ ‘Lemon Boy,’ ‘Beefy Boy,’ ‘Big Beef,’ ‘Celebrity,’ and ‘Orange Blossom.’

With two exceptions, these are the Toyotas of the tomato world – safe, predictable, and reliable. The Boys and the Girls are proven best-sellers. ‘Celebrity’ has been around for decades. ‘New Girl’ is a sequel of ‘Early Girl.’ ‘Big Beef’
is a tried and true small beefsteak described by some as “a poster child for easy to grow plants.”

‘Health Kick’ and ‘Orange Blossom’ are the interesting ones. Both are examples of the new, up-and-coming “healthy tomatoes.” ‘Health Kick,’ a red plum-tomato that did poorly in this same plot last season, has half again as much of the antioxidant lycopene than other tomatoes. ‘Orange Blossom,’ an early-maturing slicing tomato, is high in high beta carotene, a source of vitamin A.

When I had a vegetable garden I liked orderliness. I planted like plants in evenly spaced rows. I even used a string anchored to tent stakes to keep my rows straight. One year I did try scattering a pack of green bean seeds into a six-by-six foot bed because I could protect a patch easier than I could a row from the rabbits. Turned out to be my best yielding crop ever. This morning I saw another idea for interplanting – bright, deeply colored red rows of leaf-lettuce were acting as honor guards to a row of young peppers. Good use of space and not bad on aesthetics either.

Some flowers are just comical. If I were taking a youngster though the botanical garden with me, we both might laugh when we saw them in the glass temperate house this morning. Alone, I just smile. Ochna serrulata is the plant. It’s native to the Capetown area of South Africa. The nearby sign says its common name is “Bird’s Eye Bush.” My encyclopedia of plants Flora calls it either ‘Carnival Bush’ or more aptly the ‘Mickey Mouse Plant.’ Less comical, Flora says that in some parts of the subtropics Mickey Mouse is considered a “serious environmental weed.”

A first: one of the carefully cared for Asian mayapples (Podophyllum) planted a season ago I think, is blooming. It’s called ‘Spotty Dotty’ because of its mottled, pockmarked leaves. Its burgundy-colored, two-inch long flowers are clustered modestly in twos and threes below umbrella-like leaves. When I return next week, the flowers will surely be gone so I’ll never know whether they’ll ever reveal more than I saw this morning.


We stopped a while to see the sun and shadows share the space on this hillside in the Japanese Garden.