POWER GARDENING

By NANCY GIBBS

A gardener of the old school will argue that there are three essential pieces of gardening equipment: expendable shoes, impenetrable gloves and a deep sense of humility at the chance to act as God's hands. Absent from that list: a pair of $585 leather-handled rose shears from Hermes; a $1,995 vip Robotic Solar Mower that cuts the lawn while you watch from a $595 replica of the benches at Giverny; and a Poopet, a lump of cow manure sculpted by the Pennsylvania Amish into "functional fecal friends" that will "nurture and decorate your garden for years to come." These are available in many shapes, including rabbits, skunks and an amphibian, which they call a "large stool toad." Price: as much as $13 per Poopet.

Gardens have always served as a handy mirror of American tastes and obsessions. For the Puritans a voluptuous flower bed was a sentimental waste or, worse, an attempt to improve on nature's creation. After Pearl Harbor, when America already grew enough food to feed half the world, 20 million people planted Victory gardens in 1943 in, among other places, a Portland, Oregon, zoo and a Chicago racetrack. Such mass gardening was supposed to help prevent juvenile delinquency, improve the national health and, in the process, "help beet the enemy." Ever since, Americans have found plenty of high moral fiber in their yard work. In the dirt you could cleanse your soul.

But now at the fin-de-siecle, something has changed about what this hobby means to the American middle class -- a change that advertisers, publishers, catalog companies and entrepreneurs are scrambling to exploit. The garden is no longer a private refuge: it is a fashion statement. Far from getting back to nature, the competitive gardener defies it, coercing the most inhospitable climates into growing orchids, coaxing water to run uphill, carving animals in topiary, all for slightly more than it costs to put a child through a year at Harvard. "Louis XIV started small and watched Versailles grow," says power gardener Martha Stewart, who over the past 25 years has composted vanity, domesticity and commercial genius into a multimillion-dollar empire. "Gardeners today want it big and they want it now."

In many cases the new "diggerati" do not really want to garden; they just want to have a garden, which means they're more willing to spend money than time outdoors. This represents a departure from the renaissance that the hobby enjoyed in the '80s, when all kinds of people discovered the raw joy of eating tomatoes that they first met as seeds and spending long afternoons primping their hedges. Where once Americans took the products of their gardens to the market, now they are bringing the market to their gardens. In all, Americans spent nearly $26 billion last year alone, up 15.5% from the year before and $9.6 billion from five years ago. The $8.4 billion on lawns, the $3.1 billion on flowers are just the beginning. The Victorian watering cart from Smith & Hawken costs $1,500. Tiffany offers a full-size sterling-silver shovel for $9,500. Boutiques bristle with garden furniture, fountains, gargoyles, gazebos, antique Parisian paving stones and authentic-looking archaeological debris. Finally, like sailing and skiing and polo, gardening now offers the wardrobe that reeks of pedigree, clothes far too expensive to roll in the dirt, gloves so elegant they could be worn to church.

The sales figures testify to the genius of marketing moguls, since they have persuaded people to ignore nature's essential nature. Michael Pollan, a writer and gardener of the old school, argues rightly that nature abhors a garden: left to its own devices, your yard will revert to forest or swamp or meadow in a matter of years, if not months. But at the same time, if you are willing to do the work,

A perfectly respectable garden can be had virtually for free. The price is paid in muscle and devotion, applied to a few packages of seeds, some cuttings from a neighbor, a pile of compost distilled from last fall's leaves. To the purists, paying someone extravagant sums to install an instant garden is like hiring someone to have great sex for you.

Yet power gardening makes sense in an age of downward mobility, when a middle class eager to stem a free fall will grasp at affordable luxuries. They can't afford 500 acres in Shropshire, or even a house as big as their parents', but there is some solace in growing their own endive. For those anxious about the fate of the family, the garden at least offers the illusion of control, of nurturing something that won't run wild the minute it reaches adolescence. Those nostalgic for a simple, agrarian past can siphon the sense of virtue attached to the idea of a family farm, like Marie Antoinette tending her miniature dairy at the Petit Trianon. Grow a bushel of peas, and you have rooted your family in the American heartland.

The marketing experts have their own theories about why people want to sink so much money into the soil. A garden is certainly a nice thing to have, a place to unplug from a bruising, harried world into someplace ripe and unwired. For cocooning boomers, gardening presents the perfect stay-at-home hobby. It's environmentally correct, medically sound, and promises a nice return on investment. When a Bel Air, California, replica of Versailles, built for $8.1 million, sat on the soft housing market for years, the bank that repossessed it hired garden designer Eric Solberg. "We put in a $45,000 garden, and the house sold like that," he says.

There is nothing new about such conceits, of course. "Snobbery and gardening have gone hand in hand for hundreds of years," argues Pollan. There have always been those who plant old roses with good bloodlines, he explains, and those who go for high-tech hybrid teas with names like Chrysler Imperial-"a rose named after a car, for God's sake." What's different today, he observes, is that gardening has become such a fad. "You can pour vast sums of money into an acre of land and acquire the patina of sophisticated gardening very quickly." Horticultural social climbers speedily master the passwords. "There is a whole hierarchy of color," he says. "White flowers are considered the most prestigious because you have to be more sophisticated to appreciate white. Blue in a garden is almost as good as white. Red is a daclassa color because even a bull can see red. Yellows and reds are very low."

Pollan has a neat theory about American taste: what for so long kept Americans from having good gardens, he argues, is what kept them from having good food. "There was an excessive puritanism about the central pleasures of life," he says. "This country has a historical aversion to mixing nature and culture. To make good food and good gardens you have to be willing to mix up nature and culture in a very creative way. We used to have relentlessly utilitarian cuisine, and we used to have lawns. We got past the meat loaf, and now we're getting past lawns."

The person who has most perfectly resolved that old conflict is Martha Stewart, who manages to make the act of rooting hydrangeas seem like a supremely virtuous enterprise. She conquers residual puritanism by behaving so puritanically: in her magazine and on her weekend television worship service, she makes it all right to cook luscious Mile High Lemon Pie and grow Oriental poppies because she conveys so clearly how much hard work they demand.

Where there's virtue, there's also vice. The new crop of gardeners has brought the deadly sin of envy into Eden. Today's power gardeners are the spiritual heirs to the Empress Josephine, who, according to legend, grew dahlias brought to France from Mexico via Spain, at Malmaison. She was proud of her monopoly, until she learned that a member of her court had stolen some of the tubers. So she had every last one ripped from the ground. Some 200 years later, azaleas and marigolds suffer the same fate; the power gardeners want only the ground covers grown on the outer moons of Jupiter. Or maybe just the "first clear yellow clivia" at $950 each at White Flower Farm in Connecticut. "I want plants my neighbors don't have," says Tom Latimer, a Navy procurement clerk, who sips apricot cappuccino as he strolls through Homestead Gardens, a sprawling garden center in rural Davidsonville, Maryland. "It sets you aside, like a new coat or new pants or a new car."

Nurseries that used to stock 10 kinds of annuals now carry 30 or 40, and more than 200 perennials. Exotic and heirloom vegetables, like the prewar tomatoes bred for taste rather than durability, are gaining ground. "It used to be you could buy $16-a-lb. Mesclun, and your guests were suitably impressed," says Shepherd Ogden of Londonderry, Vermont, founder and president of the Cook's Garden, a seed catalog. "It was like giving them $8. But now if you grow it yourself, it's like giving them $400 because it takes two hours of your valuable time to grow and prepare it. You have given them something of both status and cash value."

So fierce is the competition in some exclusive tracts that gardeners have taken to raiding one another's property by night, not just snipping cuttings but unearthing shrubs. "By far the greatest worry people have is the theft of plants," says Lee May, a garden columnist for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. "As the peer pressures mount for people to grow more and more expensive gardens that they can't afford, there is a corresponding degree of theft.''

All these intersecting demands -- for instant gardens and exotic ones, for status plants and designer landscapes -- converge to boost the catalog business. The largest seed company, Burpee, alone sent out 6 million catalogs this year, up 20% from last year. Novices can buy a book, Gardening by Mail, just to help them shop. Author Barbara Barton guesses that there are between 1,200 and 1,500 catalogs covering just seeds, plants, bulbs, trees and shrubs, plus an additional 1,000 garden-related catalogs with everything from ornaments and greenhouse kits to clothes and tools.

People who are restoring old houses want old plants -- the heirloom varieties. Nativist gardeners are looking to plant only native plants, nothing that would not have been here before the colonists arrived. Herb gardeners can choose from 10 different kinds of basil, including licorice. Others want to plant "wild gardens" that are designed to provide food for critters. And there are ways to make more critters part of natural dacor: the Sharper Image catalog offers three different sizes of bat houses built of red cedar. The company claims each bat will consume up to 600 mosquitoes an hour; the biggest bat house will accommodate 100 bats. "You might not believe it," says Sharper Image's director of marketing Brian Peck, "but we sell a significant number of these."

With their vast and specialized offerings, the catalogs offer the variety that varsity gardeners are demanding. But at the same time, they can reach out to the rookies, who would like a complete garden in a can. "If you look through garden catalogs, or even retail displays sometimes, you will see companies that actually package gardens for them," says Barbara Newton, publisher of Organic Gardener, the largest gardening magazine in the world, with 800,000 subscribers. "It will say, 'If you buy this whole set it will give you a 14-ft. by 22-ft. garden to go in front of a shady wall. You will have color throughout the season, and if you plant it according to the diagram, your higher plants will be in the back and the lower ones will be in the front and bang-there's your garden.' "

The catalogs have a garden for every taste and timetable. White Swan markets the Moonlight Garden, a can of seeds for flowers, mainly white, that "reflect the moon and stars," for people whose long hours mean they only get to see their gardens at night. Eighteen dollars buys a straw mat from Smith & Hawken impregnated with 8,000 wildflower seeds, which the impatient gardener can roll onto an awaiting bed of dirt. Just add water.

Among the best positioned to capitalize on the tastes -- in fact it has probably done the most to invent tastes where they didn't exist before -- is Smith & Hawken, a 16-year-old gardening purveyor that now mails out its catalog to 16 million customers. With a name reminiscent of the reliable groundskeepers of a Sussex estate and a canny sense of American snobbery, Smith & Hawken has spent the past year searching for new and wonderful ways to market $72 Haws watering cans and $42 Felco pruners. Already it has opened 15 stores, with 20 in all planned by the end of this year.

The latest to open is, naturally, in Beverly Hills, where Jessica Ervin has come in search of Mihama stones. These luscious pebbles, which cost $2 per lb., are found on one particular seacoast in Japan and imported specially for those, like Ervin, who believe they are the only rocks to use when forcing bulbs. "They have a certain luster to them you just don't see on other rocks," she says. "You can use other kinds of rocks to force bulbs, but it's just not the same experience. These rocks make the flowers look better." She is discouraged to learn that the store has sold out-in fact, it can't keep up with demand. "We've got someone now traveling around Indonesia looking for a new source for us," says assistant manager Christina Denkinger. The gold-leafed pots have also sold out. "People in Beverly Hills," says the store's "visual merchandiser," Jerry Wingate, "like shiny things."

Last year two Smith & Hawken marketing executives set out across the English moors in search of a man known to be the last of the withie crafters. Withies are conical willow trellises used in Britain to corral sheep "We were trekking through the most remote parts of England, and we were completely lost and it was getting dark," says Bonnie Dahan. "Finally, we came upon this man's workshop, and the withies were fabulous. It was a 200-year-old design, and he was the last craftsman who made them. So we made the deal, and we carried them in our catalog as English vine trellises." The real things cost $139; a replica sells for only $28. "We give consumers a choice, that's what we do," says Dahan.

The catalog companies' success has not come at the expense of the nurseries, which can offer the impatient gardener much more instant gratification. This is not your corner garden shop anymore. The paths between the perennials are paved, so high heels will not plunge into the mud. There is Italian soda available at the door, and tarragon-turkey sandwiches on pita bread. "Today retailing is theater," says Don Riddle Jr., president of Homestead Gardens in Maryland, whose $10 million in revenues last year were up 21% from the year before. Homestead sold $60,000 worth of orchids last year alone, triple the amount from the year before. Among this year's favorites are tropical patio plants, a 4-ft.-high golden-daisy or a blue-potato bush. "These plants are instant," says Homestead's manager, Tom Farley. "And what's instant is very popular. Our customers don't have a lot of time. They want to buy it, place it and be done."

Just as the baby boomers behave as though they were the first generation to have children or cook a good dinner from scratch, they also approach their gardening with a professional zeal. Traditional gardeners have customarily sought advice over the back fence, from wise neighbors with experience in their particular climate, or from grandparents with a lifetime of trial and error to draw upon. The power gardener, however, doesn't seek wisdom; he seeks information. And so gardening has entered the information age.

When the little black bugs eat the bonsai and the fountain fades to a dribble and the water plants are indistinguishable from the algae, the power gardener knows just where to turn. Contrary to their earthy image, gardeners are twice as likely as the general population to own a computer (60%). Next month Sunset Publishing, the Northern California-based book-and-magazine company most noted for its expertise on Western gardening, will release a CD-ROM with the largest encyclopedic plant data base on the market. Ken Winchester says the gardener will be able to type in a ZIP code and every plant species that thrives in that specific zone will pop up. Better Homes and Gardens unveiled the cd-rom of its Better Homes and Gardens Complete Guides to Gardening last year and has a best seller of more than 100,000-at $49.95. Already on the market is the company's 3-D Landscape cd-rom, which shows a three-dimensional rendering of plants, walkways, walls, pools, gazebos, decks, garden ornaments and sprinklers. There is a shadow-casting feature to help judge how the light will fall on the plantings through the day, and an aging feature to show what the garden will look like 10 years from now.

"Twenty years ago, we were smokin' grass," says Joe Armstrong, publisher of Garden Design. "Now we're cuttin' it." Formerly publisher of Rolling Stone, he has followed his baby-boomer generation into its latest passion. Once a dry periodical for professional architects and gardeners who speak fluent Latin, Garden Design was redesigned and reintroduced last April with a price of $5 an issue and a circulation of 50,000: average age, 43; median income, $71,000. Like other high-end offerings, its glossy editions feature gorgeous photography, closeups of sweaty petals and buxom peonies, landscapes that cry to be painted. Here the advertisers are more likely to be selling single-malt Scotch and leather goods than power mowers. For the more modest-and practical-Hearst has launched Country Living Gardener, and Meredith offers Home Garden. Conda Nast will re-enter the gardening market in the fall of 1996 with the defunct HG, relaunched as House & Garden, under new editor Dominique Browning.

All this excitement and attention bemuse the traditional gardeners, those lifelong devotees for whom the hobby is a necessity, not a luxury. "They would garden," observes Allen Lacy, who has been writing about the original tribe for years, "even if everyone else considered that gardening was a sign of a diseased mind and uncouth habits." Yet Lacy is convinced that whatever motive draws gardeners in, whether vanity or foolishness or the need to bury their treasure in the ground, the actual experience outdoors will come to exert its own pull. "I know nobody who has given it up, except for reasons of infirmity, advancing age and incapacity," he says. "It holds the attention firmly, because there is always something new to learn, new discoveries to make." People who want a garden because the neighbor has one and hire someone else to install it may gradually be smitten by what's out there, want to know more, marvel at the changes each morning in the drape of a vine or the paths of the bees. Soon they will no longer have a garden; their gardens will have them.

--Reported by Ann Blackman/Davidsonville, Marguerite Michaels and Jane Van Tassel/New York and Tara Weingarten/Los Angeles

With reporting by ANN BLACKMAN/DAVIDSONVILLE, MARGUERITE MICHAELS AND JANE VAN TASSEL/NEW YORK AND TARA WEINGARTEN/LOS ANGLES