Greenhouse

In 1997, Diane Newbury and her husband, Steven Berman, bought a large 19th-century house in Chestnut Hill that needed overhauling from top to bottom. So did the two acres surrounding it. Imagine overgrown trees, poison ivy and patchy lawn. Superimpose a gummy pool and enough paved surfaces to park a truck fleet, a greenhouse covered with wood paneling, and a broken fountain filled with dirt. "A bit of a wasteland," says Berman. But Newbury was undaunted. In fact, she says, when she first laid eyes on this rather forlorn L-shaped property on the Montgomery County line, "I had tingles all over my body.

There is no greenhouse at the Plant Outlet in Bala Cynwyd. The large stock of house plants is crowded into a nearly windowless warehouse where most of the illumination comes from overhead fluorescent lights, rather than daylight. Also missing is the controlled humidity usually found in greenhouses. The Plant Outlet's owner, Harvey Oxenfeldt, views all this as an advantage. His plants are already accustomed to the conditions in a home or office, which are vastly different from those in the greenhouses where house plants are grown.

GORE'S ILLIBERAL APPROACH TO THE ENVIRONMENT Lately Sen. Al Gore and the distinguished biologist Paul Ehrlich have ventured into dangerous territory by suggesting that journalists quietly self- censor environmental evidence that is not alarming, because such reports, in Gore's words, "undermine the effort to build a solid base of public support for the difficult actions we must soon take. " Skeptical debate is supposed to be one of the strengths of liberalism: It's eerie to hear liberal environmentalists asserting that views they disagree with ought not to be heard.

An Allentown couple yesterday sued their accountant and financial adviser, accusing him of leading them to invest in a "worthless" tax shelter that resulted in problems with the Internal Revenue Service and losses exceeding $138,000. Neal and Gale Kramer accused the adviser, Baron Jasper, also of Allentown, of concealing numerous material facts about a tax shelter he promoted, including the fact that he was a board member of a company affiliated with the tax shelter and that he received commissions for each new investment he solicited.

Howard Brosius is trying to be heard above the buzz of a dozen small children recently liberated from day care. "Who wants some black-seeded Simpson?" he shouts, holding up the ruffled, light green leaves of this 150-year-old lettuce variety. In a room full of veteran vegetable gardeners, this would provoke a stampede. Here, in a small classroom at Awbury Arboretum in Germantown, the kids have no idea what black-seeded means or who Simpson was. But they know whatever "Mr. Howard" is offering, they want.

When Dan Taddeo, the flower man from Havertown, migrated from Italy in 1929 - a very, very bad year for most Americans - he got a job working in a greenhouse on the Main Line. It wasn't much of a job, but if you had a job in 1929, you thanked the Lord for small favors. And the pay wasn't that much either - a mere $12 a week for six, 10-hour days. But there was always Sunday afternoon and a baseball game at old Shibe Park and Danny Taddeo, a 15-year-old immigrant from Fallascosa in Abbruzze in the south of Italy, was always in the bleachers cheering for his first American hero - the late Jimmy Dykes, who played third base for Connie Mack's old Philadelphia Athletics.

The new solar dairy barn here is a palace for cows, complete with padded mattresses made from ground-up rubber tires. The black screen walls roll up in the summer to keep the cows cool. The animals can roam around the spacious barn, or they can lie down. They even have a computerized milking parlor. The University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine at New Bolton Center has completed construction of the Marshak Dairy Facility, the first greenhouse-type dairy barn in Pennsylvania.

The latest round of negotiations over international climate change policies has concluded, and once again, the United States is taking heat for holding back its support .. . .Though advocates of greenhouse gas reduction treaties will continue to flagellate the United States for its refusal to participate, and portray us as an arrogant and irresponsible force of global destruction, the Bush administration's decision is the right one.. . . The United States [has] only a certain amount of resources to invest in protecting us from all the risks we face.

How are you going to keep them in the classroom after they've seen the farm? For about 25 elementary school teachers, the orchards and fields of South Jersey were an open classroom during a tour sponsored last Thursday by the New Jersey Agricultural Society. The idea was to encourage these fourth-grade teachers, mostly from Camden County, to include agriculture in their lessons about life in New Jersey. The group visited Holland Floral Inc. in Waterford Works, Jack Donio's vegetable farm and composting venture in Winslow, Dennis Donio's peach and vegetable farm in Hammonton, and the Springdale Farm Market in Cherry Hill, where they were joined by Lucinda Florio, a former teacher and the governor's wife.