by Izora Firelands, Horticulture Editor

Oh yes, I too despair of and for America, So much wrong, so many wrongs.

Sure, an end will come as it does to all things. For now, we're still here, chugging away, aren't we, this—some say—latter-day Rome in its period of great, slow decline, beset by enemies both without and within.

No mere Rome this. On any chart of human beauty, right across all—got that? ALL—categories, our works stand, more enduring than bronze indeed (or titanium) in all the arts, greater and lesser, all the sciences, greater and lesser, all nurturings, and yes all destroyings too:

Hic facet Americus (America made this).

Well-wrought stuff from well-wrought minds and very clever fingers.

What has saved and set us apart, from Rome and all the rest (new world indeed), is our old, indissoluble bonding with the land, our generous and startling portion of the earth's generous and startling geography. Unlike Rome, say, or Greece, where landing was at best a diversion—even if now and then necessary, here (as only also in China) wilderness ruled, rules, and will until whatever end awaits us continue to rule.

Oh we built our great cities, those splendid, walled-off total-immersion tanks of purest culture, endless inwardness, and virtuosic omphaloskepsis, with the usual marvelous results. Giant and glorious American flowers of noble and noteworthy abstraction bloomed in those carefully tended hothouses: old breeds made new, new breeds from old. Once we got going, the really good stuff just kept coming and coming and coming.

Meanwhile, always, out on the prairie primeval sports sprang, generation after generation, from old, old seeds, directly out of ground-down bedrock neath starry skies above and always attentive tree-friends nearby.

There, there were the deepest roots of America, and as long as they remain intact neither greed nor duplicity nor the most shamelessly expedient government will long grow and prosper because such falseness is, beginning to end, sterile and, finally, wholly impotent and self-destructive.

Seek America not in the outward and visible, however wonderful, beguiling, seducing. Look rather to the copses, bowers, hollows, plains, valleys, prairies, mountains, deserts, creeks and rivers, ditches and washes, gulleys and canyons.

There, far from the blare of media, far from the glare of fame, far from the awful spreading cancer of hubris and self-serving religion and ravenous power, there grow still and still the American wildflowers which, on their slim stems support all the rest of empire at its worst and at its very best.