IN case you missed it, Friday was a holiday — National Arbor Day — although in my opinion, calling a day with no white sales, no extended store hours and no Hallmark card and which you celebrate by swinging a pickaxe for half a day a "holiday" is a bit of a stretch. Still, before the weekend is over I will have dutifully planted a shrub in the rocky clay that masquerades as soil on my Hudson Valley property. Or, as my son once put it as he watched me plant a rose bush, "That's not gardening, Dad - that's mining."

[Read the full op-ed]