might argue that all were conservationist in that, whether for ornamenta-
tion or provisioning, gardens were created for permanence (even though
they constantly evolved) and demanded not only design but diligent atten-
tion.
Men have been and are gardeners, designer-creators of pleasure parks
and provisioning cornucopias alike. Thomas Jefferson was exemplary at
late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century Monticello. And among the
twentieth century’s most celebrated southern white male gardeners was
Eugene P. Odum (–), a giant of international science and a prin-
cipal developer of ecosystem ecology. Odum (to be visited again, below)
was the older son of another famous academic man, Howard Washington
Odum, founder of the sociology department and the Institute for Research
in Social Science at the University of North Carolina. The elder Odum was
also a farmer, renowned in the Carolina piedmont for raising dairy cattle on
his well-ordered place west of Chapel Hill. Eugene spent his own academic
career in his father’s native state, Georgia. There he was principal creator of
the university’s Institute for Ecology, trained generations of graduate eco-
logical scientists, wrote the first undergraduate textbook in ecology, and
gardened on a quarter-acre plot outside Athens. This last activity was, he
wrote to friends, a ‘‘reduced tillage, chemical, and water usage vegetable
garden.’’ Every fall he rototilled the entirety and planted a winter cover crop
of crimson clover, then kale and collards for winter greens, which would all
be picked before spring. The clover fixed nitrogen and left a ‘‘green mat.’’ In
spring, then, without further tillage, he planted his warm-weather crops di-
rectly into the mat. As his rows of tomatoes, potatoes, pole beans, squash,
and blueberries began to grow, Odum bought a pickup-truck-load of mulch
and bales of wheat straw. These reduced moisture evaporation and weeds
while supplying more soil nutrients as the mulch decomposed. He hoped to
avoid pesticides, but in emergencies he would apply ‘‘only short-lived’’ ones.
He hoped also to avoid irrigation but prepared for regular late-summer
droughts with an underground ‘‘ ‘jug irrigation’ system used for centuries in
arid countries.’’ (Odum added, parenthetically, that ‘‘we have a lot to learn
from traditional agriculture practiced in underdeveloped countries.’’) His
jugs, or pots, were permanently installed at root-zone depth, so he watered
only directly into the root zone. Such little reservoirs would conserve mois-
ture while it percolated or evaporated upward, directly on target. He also
added ‘‘small amounts of mineral fertilizer’’ only to the roots. Finally, he
kept a tall, latticed bamboo fence around his beans to protect them from