Jill Churchill: Mulch Ado About Nothing

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 asked.

Everybody looked at Shelley.

“We had better be," she said firmly.

Miss Martha Winstead, a woman of the same cut, nodded to Shelley approvingly.

“Very well, I'll just let my assistant know we're ready for the next item," Eastman said, going to the door and calling down the hall to someone named Bryan.

Bryan turned out to be a large, faintly stupid-looking teenager with very serious muscles and extraordinary balance. He carried a large box as lightly and carefully as Jane would have handled an egg carton. He set it down on the desk. It was a box with a cover that went almost to the bottom of the lower box. Sort of like a giant candy box. Bryan and Dr. Eastman each eased up one side of it.

On the platform of the lower box was a miniature garden. Something spiky in the middle and a frothy mass of what Jane thought was artemisia around the edge. But what was between these was confusing.

Small compact plants with jagged dark green foliage and coral pink flowers.

“What are the pink ones?" Shelley asked.

Dr. Eastman leaned forward and said in a thrilling voice, "Marigolds."

“Marigolds aren't pink. They're all colors ofgold, cream, and orange," Ursula said, getting up to take a good look. The rest of the group followed her example.

“These are marigolds," Dr. Eastman said firmly. "I'm sorry I can't share them with you because I've applied for the patent, but they're not available to the public yet.”

Jane wasn't all that knowledgeable about plants, but she knew marigolds well. They were one of the few annuals that could survive her neglect and were cheap enough to buy a lot of. "Could we touch them?" she asked.

“Certainly," Eastman replied.

Jane pinched a leaf and smelled her fingers. It was the distinct odor of marigolds. The foliage was exactly right — dark, glossy green with jagged edges. It was the color that was astonishing. The flowers were certainly shaped exactly like marigolds, but looked as if they must have been dyed and stuck on with wires. She touched a flower and it was lush and alive. Could they have been injected along the stem or soil with that color?

She remembered the Queen Anne's lace along the hedgerows of her grandmother's farm. She and her sister Marty would pick them and Grandmother would let them put the stems in colored water and sometimes little bottles of ink, and the creamy white flowers changed to that color.

Could you do that to a cream-colored marigold?

Or was it truly a coral pink marigold? Surely Dr. Eastman, who was so knowledgeable about plant patents, wouldn't play the sort of trick Jane was thinking of. Turning around, she glanced at Geneva Jackson, who had remained in her chair at the back of the room. Geneva was smiling.

“How did you do that?" Miss Martha Winstead asked in awed tones.

“Through long and tedious cross-breeding," Dr. Eastman said. "Tomorrow I'll bring a copy of my data that you can glance over to get an idea of how it is arranged and the detailing that's necessary as well as what the patent applications look like."

“This is truly sensational, and that's not a word I use lightly," Martha said. "When will they be available to the public?"

“Not for another two years or maybe three. Since they have to be asexually produced, I'll have to hire out the growing to all the plant growers I can find. Fortunately, we have the advantage of cloning now. It's far more expensive, but much faster. Marigolds aren't prone to rooting from slips.”

Nobody in the room could tear their eyes away from the astonishing plants.

“I'll be the first to buy them," Ursula said. "They're amazing and will look so good in with my herbs.”

Eastman nodded to Bryan, the helper, who carefully set the top of the box back in place and carried it away.

Six

As Shelley and Jane headed out from the community center to have lunch at their favorite Mexican restaurant, they gushed about the extraordinary pink marigold.

“Just think how much work went into creating such a thing," Shelley said. "I would never have the patience to do all that. Didn't someone have a long-running contest for a pure white marigold?"

“I remember that, too. I don't think they ever got anything whiter than a light cream color."

“Nor would I even have thought of trying to get a pink one if I were in that business."

“You know, that's the thing about this morning that surprised me most," Jane said. "That it is a business. A very serious one. I always thought that new plants were much easier to come up with than it appears. There must be big money involved or nobody'd wait years."

“I wouldn't be surprised. When the pink marigold hits the nurseries, it'll sell in millions. I wonder how we could ask about the money part.”

Jane looked down her cast, which was already getting grubby around the toes. "Did you notice that Geneva Jackson didn't come up to look at the plants?"

“I didn't. But she has more important things on her mind."

“But she was smiling as we gawked."

“Was she really?" Shelley said, taking a corner so fast that it made the wheels of her van squeal.

“Didn't you have the feeling that Dr. Eastman knew her pretty well?" Jane asked in a shaky voice. The worst thing about the broken foot was having to be Shelley's passenger.

“Which one of them?"

“Both Julie and Geneva, it sounded like."

“Come to think of it, it did seem that way," Shelley said, beating out another van for the last parking place in front of the restaurant and waving cheerily at the other driver.

“You can't park here," Jane said. "It's a handicapped parking spot and I forgot to bring along the sticker they gave me to hang on the rearview mirror."

“You're obviously handicapped, if only for a little while."

“I think Geneva might be one of his 'secret' growers. If so, it would explain why she didn't come look at the plants. She's probably seen hundreds of them.”

Jane struggled out of the van, coming down a little too hard on her injured foot. But it was worth it to be free of Shelley's driving.

They got their favorite booth near the front window and made much of studying the menu, even though both of them had it pretty well memorized from their many previous visits.

The waitress saw Jane's crutches and exclaimed, "What in the world did you do to yourself?" "I tripped on a curb.”

The waitress looked blank for a minute and finally said, "Oh.”

Jane got the taco salad with the chili mixed in, and Shelley let herself go with a chicken chimichanga. When the waitress had gone, Shelley asked, "Do you think the attack on Julie Jackson had anything to do with her job?"

“I've been wondering the same thing," Jane said. "I'm not clear on exactly how she fits into this business, though. Geneva said they had a professional relationship as well as being sisters. Is Julie, like Dr. Eastman, a plant breeder?”

Shelley shrugged. "Eastman suggested that she was some sort of patent cop. Checking out suspicious claims. Only he said 'questionable,' I think. She didn't appear to have anything especially interesting growing in her yard."