Toxin Handler

Why is it we dwell on garden mishaps and disasters? Most of us define our gardening year by plants we kill off and diseases we discover rather than by our accomplishments and happinesses. Whenever gardeners gather, the talk is of storms, record cold, disappearing honeybees and ravenous slugs. I’m still lamenting an escallonia hedge I lost to a February freeze before my daughter was born. She’s now 27.

Gardening shouldn’t be so much about regrets, so this year I kept a separate calendar of garden delights. I wrote down the small satisfactions that too often get lost in the “what ifs” and “if onlys” of our gardening lives.

Most of what I recorded would already be forgotten if not for these scribbled notes. Yet reading them over returns me to the quiet pleasures of mornings in the garden, of first bloom and the wonder of a hummingbird hovering at eye level. I share these with the hope their collective joy might prove sufficiently powerful to quell even the most persistent grumbling gardener . . .

JAN. 27: I run out in the pouring rain to clip a twig off my year-old witch hazel, Hamamelis ‘Jelena.’ The shrub is such a baby that her copper-colored blooms hardly show up in the gray, gray winter garden. Yet inside, tucked into a white vase, the curious little flowers are bright and cheerful, and their clean, astringent perfume fills the room.

FEB. 17: The thermometer hits an astounding 60 degrees, and I can actually feel the warm sun on my back as I clear away the muck of decayed hosta leaves. A few bees are buzzing about, enjoying the sunshine, too. When I hack back the bleached, papery blades of Japanese forest grass I find lavender and golden crocus in bloom beneath.

FEB. 18: I cut the first mixed bouquet of the season, composed of fat buds from ‘Ivory Prince’ hellebores, Iris reticulata, little yellow ‘Tête-à-tête’ narcissus and the flowers of Daphne odora. I snip off the daphne’s frost-blackened leaves, leaving the pink, sweetly fragrant flowers.

MARCH 18: I finish mulching, finally, in a cold, persistent rain and a month behind schedule. I come in chilled, wet and thrilled to be finished. All the fresh green growth of the perennials looks gorgeous set against the rich, dark mulch that coats the ground. I relish the thought of manure soaking into the soil to feed the plants.

APRIL 6: Good Friday is a glorious 75 degrees. The lilacs are in bud, and I cut branches to force. This is the first year I’ve ever successfully grown crown imperials (Fritillaria imperialis), the peacocks of the plant world. It must be the good drainage in the raised beds.

APRIL 7: It is only after I plant up the new container I scored at the local nursery that I realize I’ve bought an egg-shaped pot, no doubt influenced by the fact Easter is tomorrow.

APRIL 21: I love that green haze when the trees leaf out. It’s been such a cold spring, but even the tardiest trees, excepting the still bare chocolate mimosa and golden locust, are enveloped in a soft cloud of fresh new leaves.

APRIL 27: Even though it’s still in the low 40s at night, I’m able to cut an armload of supremely fragrant dark purple lilacs and fill the house with them.

MAY 5: I cook my first garden-inspired dinner of the season: lettuces for a salad, chives, parsley, mint and lemon balm to flavor a risotto.

MAY 21: The clematis ‘Crystal Fountain,’ which I mail-ordered and paid too much for from White Flower Farm, is blooming on the hog-wire screen, and it’s as blowsy and exotic-looking as its photo.

MAY 26: The miracle of a warm, sunny Memorial Day and I realize I’ve at last planted enough allium. I have more than 50 tall, purple Allium ‘Globemaster’ and A. ‘Purple Sensation’ blooming in one small border.

JUNE 1: Right now the garden is all buds and potential - the very best time of year with the long, light evenings and summer about to unfold.

JUNE 8: The soil is finally warm enough to plant pumpkins, sunflowers and basil, and I’ll set tomatoes out next week.

Valerie Easton is a Seattle freelance writer and author of “A Pattern Garden.” Her e-mail address is valeaston@comcast.net. Jacqueline Koch is a Seattle freelance photographer.

We’re back with another installment of “Art Gone Bad.”

A few weeks ago I wrote about a bench sculpture that inexplicably had become a magnet for acts of depravity in Belltown. It’s a fiberglass bench with steel plumbing pipes for legs. Some folks who live and work nearby have been trying to get rid of it for eight years, mostly because drug dealers and addicts gather there.

But the city wouldn’t budge because it’s more than just a bench. It’s art.

Well, last week the neighbors finally got their way. The city arts commission voted to remove the art bench. In a few weeks it will either be reworked so nobody can sit on it, or, more likely, installed elsewhere.

It’s the first time, at least that anyone at the art commission could recall, that public art in Seattle has been uprooted due to a public outcry.

“We are committed to keeping public art on display, but we also don’t want to have artworks out there that are being chronically vandalized or misused,” says Lori Patrick, spokeswoman for the city’s Office of Arts and Cultural Affairs.

When I first wrote on this subject, I was ridiculed by some artists and art critics. They said I was a dim reactionary missing an obvious point: Art doesn’t hurt people. People hurt people.

This seemed like an odd take coming from people who spend their lives celebrating the power of art.

No, the art bench didn’t force anyone to be a pimp or a junkie. But if good art can help revitalize a public space - as is often claimed - then why can’t art that is poorly chosen or is simply bad lead to the opposite?

It’s a variation on the broken-windows theory. I love public art and think it brings incalculable energy to a city. But there are places where it feels like the art drains the charge rather than sparking it.

Ballard’s Jeremy Mattox has a nominee. He says his neighborhood has been under an art pall for three years due to “five towering thingamajiggers” - sculptures on top of cedar posts called “Witness Trees,” erected in Bergen Place Park in Ballard’s downtown.

“Whereas the Belltown art bench attracts crime and litter, our public art repels most anything a rational person would associate with humanity,” he says.

Gerald Guite, of Normandy Park, has been demoralized by the same work of art nearly every day since 1979.

It’s called “Earthwork at Johnson Pit #30.” It’s located in what used to be a gravel pit in SeaTac overlooking the Kent Valley. The county had a worthy idea of reclaiming some of these wastelands as giant sculptures.

So an artist terraced the 4-acre site and put in 16 tree stumps painted black with tar, called a “ghost forest.”

In a sign at the site, the artist says it wasn’t his goal to refurbish the gravel mine into an idyllic, attractive place. That would have “socially redeemed those who wasted the landscape in the first place.”

Guite says the artist got his wish.

“It’s an ungodly place,” he says. “Which is saying something, because it has such a great view of the valley.”

Dozens of readers sent examples of art they think has gone bad. “Aurora Borealis,” those glare-inducing towers of multicolored metal in the water alongside the Evergreen Point Floating Bridge. “The Wall of Death,” that spiky contraption beneath the University Bridge that often doubles as a trash dump.

The art I loathe most is “The Kingstones,” a hideous sculpture of a family watching television on the sidewalk at the front door to the KING-5 studios on Dexter Avenue North. It’s there because a car once crashed into the building, and KING execs wanted art that would double as a car blockade. It seems they got a people repellent, too.

Kurt Kiefer, who made the Belltown art bench, was kind enough to respond to me despite the bad things I’ve written about his “evil bench,” as he put it. He says I’m sliding down a slippery slope.

“If my bench is disliked for attracting illegal activity, then it could very well make sense to move it,” he e-mailed. “If, on the other hand, a resident of the block just doesn’t like it because they think it’s ugly, or because they don’t agree with the artist’s premise or because they simply hate the notion of art in public places, then that’s obviously a different story.”

Agreed. I’m not advocating a mass art purge. But art isn’t sacred, either.

Kiefer urged me to write about something that matters. Race, gentrification, poverty, global warming, fortified-wine sales or bus rapid transit would all make better topics, he suggested.

Sorry. Art always matters. And not only when we appreciate it.

Danny Westneat’s column appears Wednesday and Sunday. Reach him at 206-464-2086 or dwestneat@seattletimes.com.

Bye weeks: Jacksonville, New Orleans, Tennessee, Washington.

Last week’s record: 10-6. Season record: 30-17 (.638)

Game of the Day

Denver at Indianapolis, 1:15 p.m., Ch. 7

The Broncos allow just 108 passing yards per game, best in the league. They have intercepted four passes and allowed just two TD passes. Now here come Peyton Manning, Reggie Wayne and Marvin Harrison to test Champ Bailey, John Lynch and the rest of the Broncos secondary with an offense that ranks No. 4 in the league in passing yardage.

That was some kaffeeklatsch the Greater Seattle Chamber of Commerce threw on Thursday: a thousand or so people filling one of the town’s watering holes and buzzing about the state of the region - and whether Ron Sims had just turned in his King County citizenship.

County Executive Sims had, that morning, released a column on his strongly held opposition to the Nov. 6 roads and transit package - $18 billion or so of new stuff for transportation from Snohomish County to Tacoma. Sims would have been hissed at had he entered the room. But the theme of the day was the history the region shares - of resources, technology and the march of aviation across our skies. It was a portrait of everything good about Seattle and, to be fair, warnings from some smart people that the future could close on us like a clam.

The first of these Chamber gatherings took place in 1882 and daringly secured $12,000 for Seattle to become the mail-delivery base to Alaska, beating out Portland.

Seattle has not looked back. Soon, the Gold Rush came, and then Pacific commerce, then the wars and commercial aviation’s birth.

Scott E. Carson, executive vice president of Boeing, took us on a little trip to the days of forests and fish, up to the new Boeing 787, a miniature model of which was on table after table. Carson remembered the old, noisy jets and their plumes of black smoke that trailed the skies.

“We blew it,” he said of the aviation industry, where quieter airplanes, more efficient and cleaner, are now entering the market. Carson’s talk was about the aviation industry’s responsibilities in a world where global warming touches every move we make.

Carson also called on the region to invest in a “single, integrated transportation plan” that would help rid Puget Sound’s communities of their bottlenecks and mind-numbing congestion.

Speakers before him entertained the same theme of history, about some bad decisions in the past and the steadfastness needed for decisions to be made soon.

But this is a region uncertain what its leadership wants, what is expected of us and where the milk went sour.

The Sims commentary on these pages was a precis on the faults within the transit-and-roads plan. Like Carson, Sims also speaks of global warming and the impact of effluents in the air.

Strangely, leaders of government and industry are saying we truly do have a choice in November about what to do: Build more, or take a pause and build differently.

I take Sims at his word, as I do Carson and others who ask us to think this through before the vote.

“If we do nothing in November, we will do nothing for years” is a common refrain from the pro-vote bloc. “What’s your answer instead of these taxes and investments?” they ask. Well, that’s a fair question but also one government should now immediately address.

This is what a newspaper should do in running the Sims commentary just at the cusp of a major community debate. Without contrivance or conspiracy, The Times Opinion page presented a view from Sims hardly whispered aloud in the region. Bomblets have gone off before over the Cross-Base Highway near Fort Lewis, the cost of getting to Northgate and the use of light rail to connect Seattle to the Eastside.

Yet, never have we been asked to think very hard about it. You were either for or against it based on old arguments of taxes and other forms of mobility. Carson’s linkage to history, mobility and education was a strong motive to make it easier for Boeing to stay here. History is on our side, he seemed to be saying, but maybe not the future.

Today, we present the last piece of both future and history written by populist historian Walt Crowley. In the adjoining space we saved for Walt, his final etchings on the mirror of our region emerge. They may be prophetic words, or you may find them alarmist. But in this turbulent past week, it’s nice to have someone pull some of the pieces together.

James F. Vesely’s column appears Sunday on editorial pages of The Times. His e-mail address is: jvesely@seattletimes.com for a podcast Q&A with the author, go to Opinion at seattletimes.com

SEASIDE HEIGHTS, N.J. - A man authorities say was seen on a surveillance video using his 4-year-old granddaughter to steal a purse from a boardwalk-arcade worker was arrested Saturday in Connecticut, police said.

Police said Daniel Twomey, 52, was arrested after being found asleep in his car in a McDonald’s parking lot in Greenwich, Conn. Police tracked him using a tip that a signal from his cellphone had been traced to the area, said Greenwich Sgt. Jim Marr.

Twomey was expected to be extradited back to New Jersey after the weekend, said Seaside Heights police Capt. Dave Szalkowski.

Seaside Heights police said the theft happened just after midnight Sunday at Lucky Leo’s in Seaside Heights.

The video, shown widely by media outlets, shows an adult with shoulder-length brown hair using a foot to push a girl under a swinging security door and the child taking a worker’s purse.

The investigation eventually focused on Twomey after an anonymous phone call and an attempt to use the victim’s ATM card, Szalkowski said.

The girl was identified as his granddaughter, Szalkowski said.

Twomey faces potential charges of endangering the welfare of a child and employing a minor in a criminal act, Szalkowski said. Bail had been set at $150,000 upon Twomey’s arrest.

Bishops from 13 Episcopal and other Anglican groups in North America formed a partnership as the first step to creating a rival to the Episcopal Church, the American branch of the worldwide Anglican Communion.

The announcement Friday by the group, the Common Cause Partnership, marks a widening of the fissures within the Episcopal Church and in the greater communion over the church’s stance on homosexuality.

“This is a time of reformation,” said Robert Duncan, Episcopal Church bishop of Pittsburgh who convened the group. “We hope to go through this in a way that brings honor and glory to God.”

He said his group included 51 bishops and bishops-elect representing “tens of thousands of Anglicans in North America.”

There are about 2.4 million members of the Episcopal Church, the U.S. branch of the 77 million-member global Anglican Communion, as the worldwide church is called.

The U.S. church has been divided and estranged from parts of the global church since 2003, when it consecrated V. Gene Robinson, of New Hampshire, as the first bishop known to be in a gay relationship in church history.

After meetings in New Orleans last week, the Episcopal bishops promised “restraint” on the gay-bishop topic and said they would not authorize specific rites for blessing same-sex unions but did not outlaw them.

The stands were largely reaffirmations of existing Episcopal Church policy that have upset traditionalists such as Archbishop Peter Akinola, of Nigeria, who has installed bishops loyal to him in the United States.

At the end of the three-day meeting in Pittsburgh, the College of Bishops of the Common Cause Partnership announced a timeline for organization and a plan to appeal to individual archbishops in the global communion for recognition as the true representative of Anglicanism in North America. Some Common Cause bishops attended the New Orleans meeting but left early.

The Rev. Jan Nunley, a spokeswoman for the Episcopal Church, said such breakaway groups had tried to form at different times in the past 30 years, with little success.

“Every one of them has splintered into competing factions within a short time,” Nunley said in an e-mail. Experts on the church across the theological spectrum agreed most splinter Christian groups withered over time. But they said the Common Cause statement could not be easily dismissed, given how tense relations were in the Anglican Communion, the world’s third-largest Christian body.

“They’ve set up a timetable that means that they are moving forward,” said the Rev. Ephraim Radner, a leading Episcopal conservative and professor of historical theology at Wycliffe College in Toronto.

“They will ask for recognition as an alternative to the Episcopal Church even before there’s been a resolution to the actual status of Episcopal Church in the communion.”

Material from Reuters is included in this report.

Some people just go to the grocery store and buy food. Others read the labels to make sure that what they’re getting has the ingredients they’re looking for.

When it comes to mutual funds, however, labels can be deceiving, and they can change.

Investors saw living proof recently when many experts expected South Korea to be moved from the ranks of “emerging markets” into the higher ground of “developed nation.”

The country actually wears both labels now, with index providers Dow Jones and Wilshire Associates considering South Korea developed, while FTSE Group and MSCI Barra have it as an emerging market.

London-based FTSE Group - which maintains thousands of indexes covering most of the world’s markets - was expected to change its label recently on South Korea, but the firm instead gave developed-nation status to the technology-laden economy of Israel.

As one of the most stable emerging-markets economies - and with a dominant position in many emerging-markets funds - a change in status for South Korea could cause tremendous shifts in the funds that invest in emerging countries.

Depending on which benchmark a fund uses - one that includes South Korea in the emerging side or one that doesn’t - investors could see big swings in performance. An emerging-markets fund that includes South Korea might be more stable than one that has more exposure to lesser economies.

“In the benchmarking world, this kind of status can be the difference between being in or out of an investment,” says Kurt Schacht, managing director for the CFA Centre for Financial Market Integrity. “For an investor, the change in a label can mean a change in the fund, and the issue becomes ‘Does this fund invest in what I think it’s buying?’ ”

The situation is in the news because of emerging markets, but it’s actually a much bigger debate in the mutual-fund world.

Most investors don’t really know the rules a fund follows when it comes to assets. A “balanced fund,” for example, can have three-quarters of its assets in stocks or bonds, rather than seeking a more “balanced” split.

A fund can be named for a sector or industry, such as an Internet fund, and keep a quarter of its assets invested in other industries. And that same Internet fund can define what makes an “Internet stock” based on its own definition.

Apply those vague standards to investors and you’ve got a recipe for people being disappointed or surprised by what they find in their own portfolios. The global marketplace has been merging many traditional standards, so that a “large-cap growth fund” might have a huge chunk of its assets invested in big foreign stocks.

Says Gregg Brewer, executive director of research at Value Line: “The labels we put on funds may fit less and less every day, so it falls down to you to know what you own.”

Chuck Jaffe is senior columnist at MarketWatch. He can be reached at cjaffe@marketwatch.com or Box 70, Cohasset, MA 02025-0070.

SHANGHAI, China - U.S. coach Greg Ryan dropped goalkeeper Hope Solo - a former Washington Huskies standout from Richland - from the team for today’s Women’s World Cup third-place match against Norway.

Ryan’s decision, which he said has player support, was made two days after Briana Scurry replaced Solo for Thursday’s semifinal against Brazil.

Brazil won 4-0. After the match, Solo said, “It was the wrong decision, and I think anybody that knows anything about the game knows that. There’s no doubt in my mind I would have made those saves.”

Scurry, 36, was to start today’s match, scheduled to start at 2 a.m. Pacific. In today’s title match, Brazil plays defending champion Germany.

Ryan said Solo, 26, would not attend the Norway match. He indicated Solo might have a future with the U.S. team.

“We have moved forward with 20 players who have stood by each other, who have battled for each other,” Ryan said.

U.S. captain Kristine Lilly and star striker Abby Wambach said Solo apologized at a team meeting.

Ryan said he decided to drop Solo from the match after meeting with team leaders.

“The circumstance that happened and her going public has affected the whole group,” Lilly said. “And having her with us would still be a distraction.”

Notes

• Goalkeeper Marcus Hahnemann, a former Seattle Pacific and Seattle Sounders player, was on the losing side as Portsmouth outscored Reading 7-4 in the highest-scoring match (for total goals) in the English Premier League’s 15-year history.

• In Major League Soccer matches, D.C. United beat Toronto FC 4-1, New England beat Colorado 1-0, Real Salt Lake and New York played to a 2-2 draw, and Chicago tied CD Chivas USA 1-1.