Mulch ado about nothing

successes.”
    He glanced around, fairly satisfied that most of his audience appeared to be catching on. “Naturally, you have to keep detailed records of each cross, the result, and a full description of each plant involved. This mass of data must be submitted with the plant patent application. If you just sent in a description of a plant and a cutting or picture or little potted example, without significant records, you’d certainly be rejected and told to do it right.“
    “Doesn’t this take a terrifically long time?“ Jane asked.
    “It often does,“ Eastman said. “The initial work is tedious and you have to wait for a seed to grow, mature, and go to seed before you know what you’ve got. But professional breeders have many projects going on at the same time, so it’s not as if you sit around reading the newspaper for a year or two, waiting for the seedling to grow to maturity.
    “The next stage is to find growers that are called triallers, because they do the trials. Breeders have... well, let us say, somewhat secret and well-trusted relationships with many triallers. I work in the north of Illinois. I have very private contracts with plantsmen who have isolated areas for growing in the high plains, the deep South, the northwest rain forest area, West Texas, Maine, the Appalachians, and desert environments. I send cuttings or bulblets or whatever parts of the plant I’m testing that qualify as asexual reproduction to the environments I think will be suitable. And oftentimes to areas I don’t think are suitable as well, simply because a breeder can be surprised by a unexpected trait of the plant that he wasn’t cross-breeding for.”
    Someone must have looked confused by this. Eastman looked at somebody behind Jane and said, “Suppose your hybridized impatiens turned out to be surprisingly hardy. Southern testers wouldn’t know this, but someone north of here might realize that this particular impatiens could take at least a light frost without falling over because the cell structure collapses at thirty-two degrees.”
    He went on to other examples, and after another half hour when he sensed that the audience was getting information overload, he said, “That’s all my lecturing for today. I have a little booklet I put together explaining what I’ve talked about this session that I’ll hand out for you to read over and absorb. We’ll do questions about the material and go on to the next stage at tomorrow’s lesson.“
    “What about the garden tours?“ Miss Martha Winstead asked.
    “That’s what we’ll plan out during the rest of this session. And then we’ll have a little ‘show and tell’ as well. I’d like to leave Mrs. Jeffry and Mrs. Nowack for last since they seem to be in the earliest stages of gardening and will be able to benefit from seeing the other gardens first. And we’ll do Miss Winstead and Mr. Jones on the same day as they also live next door to each other. I have a house here in the neighborhood I use when I’m visiting my children and grandchildren and giving lectures in Chicago. But I’m not as familiar with this area as the rest of you, so I leave it up to the group to plan the schedule.”
    Everybody exchanged addresses and it turned out that nobody lived terribly far away. It would be simple to do two gardens a day in the second half of class. Simple in theory, of course, until other factors came into it. Miss Winstead wanted to go first because she had something blooming that wouldn’t last beyond Tuesday or Wednesday. Ursula Appledorn lived near a house that had a huge garage sale nearly every Thursday, and parking at her home that day would be impossible.
    Dr. Eastman waited with barely controlled impatience while a great deal of time was wasted discussing routes, and days, and car-pool participants, the students occasionally wandering far off the subject entirely to speculate about weather, road conditions, and garden-tool storage as well as to make some random comments on hairdressers, some controversial decisions the city council was considering, and What Our Youth Are Coming To.
    Shelley, in an agony over the others’ lack of control and organizational abilities, took over. “Here, I’ve listened to everyone and drawn up a schedule. Pass it around and copy it down.”
    She rather violently ripped a page out of her spiral notebook and thrust it at Ursula, who had caused the most meanderings.
    “Are we all sorted out now?“ Dr. Eastman