Word: thalassa
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Azaleas too pooped to pop? Fluffy ruffles lost their curl? Pollypoddies look like a tossed salad? Take heart. For every ailment, TV Horticulturist Thalassa Cruso has a remedy: "A highhanded plunge into a bathtub full of sudsy water will do wonders for your plant." If not, well, "then throw it out. You'll feel much happier replacing it with a fresher, sprightlier plant...
There is nothing highhanded about Thalassa, a 59-year-old British-born grandmother who finds "relief from the everyday pressures of life by working among living things which refuse to be hurried." On her twice-weekly show, Making Things Grow, which is carried on five educational stations in New England, she is to spathiphyllum cannae-folium what TV Chef Julia Child is to pate en croute...
...best, her way is always unpredictable. On one show, when a guest expert on bonsai objected to Thalassa's shears, she snipped right back: "Aren't you being a bit fussy?" Then, casting a rueful glance at the guest's shears, she added: "That thing looks like something out of a medieval torture chamber." Another time, while administering to a Star of Bethlehem, she suddenly cried: "Oh, good Lord! Signs of slugs!" Rummaging through the soil like a Roto-Rooter, she exclaimed, "Aha! There's the little brute!" and flipped it onto a table...
Fatshedera in a Mini. Thalassa's pitch is like a cactus-plain yet prickly. Holding up a wire-looped hanging pot, she sniffs: "I consider this pot a bore." Banging down a tray of bulbs on her worktable, she declares: "Now this is a rather ratty object, a relative of the onion called tritelia. It's really not worth the trouble of growing, but some people do, so I have to show it to you." She talks about cow dung as if it were French perfume, condemns tinfoil wrapping as "a crime against a blooming plant...