THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, November 12, 1994 TAG: 9411120228
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B01 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Column
SOURCE: Guy Friddell
LENGTH: Medium: 63 lines
My eyes blinked open to the TV screen on which a personable young woman was holding up a red terra cotta flowerpot and saying, ``Now rub it with yogurt.''
That caught my attention.
I have never tasted yogurt, mainly because I'm uncertain where it comes from.
I fear it may derive from milk curdled in the stomach of a yak, but I don't want to know for sure. Don't tell me.
Watching the young woman, Martha Stewart, on the ``Today'' show, I wondered what properties attuned yogurt to clay pots.
She, as if answering, said her father always had insisted that unused pots be spotless, and it was her chore to wash them.
But now, she said, for a gardener to be de rigueur, flowerpots had best be covered with moss or lichens or what not.
Anything, such as a mossy flowerpot, that can be left unattended has my vote.
Moss, moreover, happens to be my favorite lawn.
And I recall, with pleasure, moss-lined wire baskets, filled with growing flowers, that hung from porches of my childhood.
Every so often I drop by a friend's house just to look at the moss that carpets the winding brick walk, so green and deep you can scarcely make out the bricks.
My neighbor said she was going to have the walk cleaned.
``No! No!'' I cried. ``Don't let anybody touch that mossy walk.''
But, she said, she worried lest someone slip on the film of moss.
Just put up two signs, I told her: BEWARE THE MOSS! and WALK WITH CARE!
Our yard out front, full of maples, pines, wild cherries, crape myrtle, and two gingko trees, tall sentinels on either side of a brick walk, is shaded too deeply to support a stand of grass.
But pioneering moss crept over the years about six feet on either side of the brick walk.
Its texture is such that a neighbor, pausing to view it last spring, said, ``This is a velour lawn.''
During the weird weather hereabouts, the June drought followed by the August deluge, the moss took on a brownish tinge here and there, but it is hanging on, trying to come back, and I am betting on its tenacity.
A gifted landscapist, chancing to pass by, offered to ``make something'' of the yard, as he put it.
``It makes no difference to me what you make of it so long as you don't touch the moss,'' I said.
As yet, things are as they have always been.
Here, as I recall, are the instructions:
Using a detergent, clean and rinse the pot, grease it with yogurt, rub it with a bit of moss, apply a growth stimulant, and soon the pot will bristle with the natural look in favor today.
One thing, as I remember, she left out about the yogurt.
She didn't say what flavor.
Chocolate, I imagine. by CNB