On West Main Street in Richfield Springs, New York,(Zone 5) at the foot of the hill as you enter the center of the village, there is a white house, formerly, or perhaps still, the office of the Jordan architectural firm. Immediately adjacent to it, on the adjoining property, there was, in 1974, and may still be, a Water Beech grown upside down, the gnarled, contorted and twisted root crown producing a very dense canopy of healthy leaves, with dense shade underneath. If that tree is still there, there is your answer. This is, or was, a healthy tree, surviving the often brutal winters characteristic of the Mohawk Valley uplands. Consult Dave's Garden- they may have the answer. zoom in on Google Earth's satellite image of Richfield Springs, NY; It's on the south side of W. Main St. US 20, where it veers west-northwest up a long hill towards its intersection with NYS Route 28 just outside the village line. There is a side street two doors away. The tree, situated in the side yard between the two old houses, would show up on the satellite image as a relatively small, round, dense crown.

okra grows very easily to 5-8'+ with full sun and full sun is what it needs to produce pods properly. there are dwarf/pot varieties of okra that get only a few feet high, but the yields are pretty boring. it's not a heavy plant but it has large leaf mass if you have wind considerations. It likes to be anchored pretty firmly, but it's not as top-heavy and picky as corn is (for instance) about wind. growing it upside down probably won't save you any space given how tall it is and it'd probably look really freaky.

Hmmm let me think. They were about 6-8" tall from top to ground. Approx 1/2- 1/3 of the bottom was the green stalk, the upper portion was the "cone" of the flower. I cant describe the flowers well - but they were lots of small individual flowers or petals that made up the cone. I cant recall what the foliage looked like. Grandma lived in central Pennsylvania, zone 6a/6b. IIRC the flowers came in the spring when we would visit for easter. They were growing along the southern side of her house. The flowers were solitary in the sense that there was just one actual flower cone that was comprised by a bunch of petals. I cant recall if they were perennials - I want to say they are but am not sure. I dont know if they were from bulbs Thanks for the help - it's been 25 years. I would like to grow some in rememberance - Grandma loved those blue flowers, her huge peony and lilac bushes and always grew a bumper crop of zucchini.....thanks again for the help with such a vague description.

Hee, hee. It's still almost certainly not the fault of the writers and/or recipe developers; they were probably not there at the photo shoot. (The text & illustrations for a magazine are created by quite separate departments.) The photographer, probably working with a food stylist and maybe an art director, would have had instructions for what kind of photos to take (in a book this is called an "art manuscript"; I don't know if it has the same name in popular magazines but it'll be the same idea). The fault is that the author or production editor who wrote the instructions wasn't clear enough. There's no excuse. But I do have some sympathy; I used to write art manuscripts for educational texts, explaining to an artist or photographer what an illustration should be like, and it's AMAZINGLY hard to think of everything to describe the perfectly clear idea in your head. And amazing the number of things you have to think of to tell the artist NOT to do (like, in an illustration for a French text, not to have any English signs in the background). I teach a course for beginning editors; I think I have to get my hands on that issue. Everyone knows about typographical errors, but that is a great example of the kinds of other problems that can arise from poor process in publishing! Zabby