A calendar for the ages

We have grown accustomed to - no, make that attached to - the calendar on the wall of our kitchen that reproduces the vintage drawings from something called Album Benary, an archive so foreign to us that we have long assumed (wrongly) it was of Italian extraction.

It's labeled the Farmer's Market 2010 calendar, which isn't quite its actual focus: the vegetable illustrations, as carefully detailed as Audubon prints, date from 1876, when they were made by the noted seed collector and breeder Ernst Benary, a German, it turns out.

Atop each month, on ivory-colored stock, are depictions, for instance, of varieties of luminous, silken onions that might be (if inflated) antique hot-air ballons; or dusky cabbages whose folds have an almost feminine delicacy; or snowy white carrots, their tops strikingly green.

The calendar was a gift from our son, who purchased it from the USDA's National Agricultural Library. Its rare-book special collections in Beltsville, Md., include an original (and rather hefty, according to librarian Ellen Mann) album of Benary's varieties, including the strain of peas Gregor Mendel used in his seminal genetics experiments.

The resulting chromolithographs are so enchanting and quirky and alternately stolid (in root vegetable months) and fanciful (in the frilly month of peas) that the calendar has come to affect how my wife and I define the passage of time: "Look, dear, it's just four days until knobby melon month."

But this Christmas, there was no 2011. We were told, and it appears to be true, that Cavallini & Co., the San Francisco calendar maker that has the rights to the images, isn't doing an Album Benary edition this year.

I called Felicia Tyler, another librarian at the National Agricultural Library. Yes, she said, after digging around, there would be no 2011, although there were some pleasant garden calendars and others with colorful seed packets.

In a panic, our son had made a substitution himself. He gave us a vintage poster from the 1940s issued by the Committee of Public Safety, a branch of the U.S. Department of Food Supply operating out of South Penn Square next to Philadelphia's own City Hall.

Its message could have been ripped from the pages of one of the latest Michael Pollan advisories. "Food," it announces: "Buy it with thought, cook it with care, serve just enough, save what will keep, eat what would spoil, home-grown is best."