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GLADIOLAS FOR TET
Viet Nam at the turn of the year 2007
We pass mile after mile of gardens woven into farms forming an agriculture unbelievably democratic and sustainable, a Jeffersonian vision of egalitarian productivity and choice, and on nearly every plot you see a patch of gladiolas planted in expectation of the Tet New Year. I suppose they are planted optimistically for market, but by my count there must be a hundred gladiolas planted for every Vietnamese. Many must end up flowering to the end in the garden they are planted, like some fragment of the flag...............
Shangrila is a relatively useless descriptive because it has been misused to describe places like Ojai, California or Tashkent in Uzebekistan of the Hunzas. Applying the fantastic term to Dalat is more correct, and to attribute it to some false Shangrila like Ojai, where I live and grow vegetables, is an error because Ojai’s weather, while enjoyable, is marked by freakish temperature swings. It’s a nice place to grow tangerines but it is no Eden. Temps may swing during a winter day from a freezing 30 Farenheit to 87 F, and the valley definitely has seasons. Ojai-Shangrila can achieve get-out-of-town burning hot temperatures in the summer and can freeze keister in the winter. Twenty three degrees, a year ago, and that knocked the spunk out of my Romaine. Spring and fall can be perfectly idyllic, to be sure, except it may freeze on May Day and around Halloween a Santa Ana wind will kick up temperatures near one hundred Farenheit, dry the hills to tinder and then start a conflagration. That is no paradise, it is merely California, which to anyone from southern Colorado, like my grandparents, would seem like a paradise relative to Huerfano County. From them I learned to appreciate the place.............
Dalat, on the other hand, produces an entertaining mix of pulsing strange succulents next door to avocados, tangerines, leeks, bitter melon and artichokes. Rogue papaya trees poke their unmistakable heads above the order on the ground. One may plant any of them on any day of the year but people here pretend they have seasons. Day length must wander back and forth a bit because we saw the season’s last persimmons in the market next to some “oranges” that are always green because it never gets cold enough to make them color up, and there are no oranges more orange than an Ojai Navel in December. Tomato seedlings were newly in the ground and ripe tomatoes were piled into little pyramids throughout the market. The tomato grown here is a four to six ouncer. Its probably a shipper they always harvest ripe for local consumption because they are always good..................
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The Friends Committee on National Legislation, in 
