Product Description

Amy Stewart had a simple dream. She wanted a garden.

When she and her husband finished graduate school, they headed west to Santa Cruz, California. With little money in their pockets, they found a modest seaside cottage with a small backyard. It wasn’t much—a twelve-hundred-square-foot patch of land with a couple of fruit trees and a lot of dirt—but it was a good place to start.

From the Ground Up is Stewart's chronicle of the seedlings and weeds, cats and compost, worms and watering that transform a tiny plot of earth into a glorious garden. From planting the seeds her great-grandmother sends to battling snails, gophers, and aphids, Stewart takes us on a tour of her coastal garden and shares the lessons she's learned the hard way. In the process, she brings her California beach town to life—complete with harbor seals, monarch butterfly migrations, and an old-fashioned, seaside amusement park just down the street.

Delighting in triumphs and confessing to a multitude of gardening sins, Stewart dishes the dirt for both the novice and experienced gardener. With helpful tips in each chapter, From the Ground Up tells the story of a young woman’s determination to create a garden in which the plants struggle to live up to the gardener’s vision

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #131101 in Books
• Published on: 2002-03-05
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 272 pages

From Library Journal
How-to gardening books abound; how-not-to gardening memoirs are rarer. When Stewart and her husband bought their first home in California, she was eager to grow the bountiful, colorful garden she had so long envisioned. With much enthusiasm and little knowledge, she began her weekly trek to the local nursery to stock up on all varieties of seedlings. Why, she wondered, did they not flourish after being planted in the bare backyard? Only after many mistakes, much expense, and worrisome encounters with weeds and bugs was she able to transform her little plot into "a garden with soul," jumbled and luxuriant. Along with a witty description of her mistakes, the author shares her solutions. She gives other beginning gardeners tips on making earthworm manure, improving the soil by sheet composting, encouraging beneficial insects, and sharing excess produce with neighbors. Written in a humorous, conversational style, this book is recommended for public libraries.DIlse Heidmann, San Marcos, TX
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Stewart, a young Texan, creates her first garden from scratch in the beach town of Santa Cruz, California. Although the rental bungalow she shares with her husband, Scott, is close enough to the town's boardwalk for its amusement-park aromas and roller-coaster cries to infiltrate the not-so-private space of their house and yard, she rolls up her sleeves anyway and sets about beautifying the neighborhood. Accompanied by her feline pals, Stewart pursues a commendable path, one taken by a flourishing society of green thumbs bent on eradicating weeds and cultivating the soil so that flowers will grow and vegetables will prosper. In an episodic style, she writes of her progress from a novice with little know-how to a developing and altogether enthusiastic gardener intent on enriching a small plot of land. At the close of each chapter, Stewart offers recipes and tips to help ease the way for readers unfamiliar with garden basics. In a first book filled with promise, Stewart tellingly recounts the making of a garden and the essential life lessons the act of gardening so often teaches. Alice Joyce
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review
"A rich feast of a book that celebrates the extraordinarily satisfying joys of making and keeping a garden." -- Kirkus

Customer Reviews

How a gardener is born!
Amy Stewart tells the story of how she got to Santa Cruz & took over a patch of seaside earth in which a couple of fruit trees, a handful of shrubs & a host of weeds fought for life.

Each chapter includes helpful tips on neighborly propagation, composting, worm juice, rose pruning techniques, how to make a bug love you & concocting a gardener's bath. They are not what you think - some of this novice's results are hilarious while others are downright commonsensical. One of the first tips she gives us is on Making a Sun Map - do give it a go - I haven't looked at my garden the same since I discovered this clue.

Alongside the story of this young woman's determination to create a garden in which the plants will live up to her vision, she remembers family moments from her childhood while facing down obstinate natives more wily than her. Talk about turf wars!

A fine companion for anyone contemplating becoming addicted to gardening! Amy Stewart has since moved to northern California where she is hard at work on her second garden &, I hope, her second book.

From dreamer to doer
For those who enjoy digging in the dirt or simply admiring gardens, Amy Stewart's From the Ground Up is a charming read. The book offers many practical tips but its appeal is more than a "how to" manual. The reader shares Ms. Stewart's excitement in planting her first flowers and veggies in the ocean climate of Santa Cruz, CA, discovering the hard way what really works. The author shops for soil amendments and ladybugs the way some women revel in a Saks Fifth Avenue sale. Recipes using garden bounty pepper the narrative. The mood is like a cozy chat between friends. All this unfolds against a backdrop of a roller coaster next door, tourists stealing plants and cats gamboling in the greenery. Curl up in a comfy chair in a pleasant spot and enjoy the gardening expoeriences of Ms. Stewart from dreamer to doer.

I've Found the Bill James of Gardening!
When I'm diving into a new field I know nothing about - Buddhism, photography, wine, wrestling, or gardening, to take a few recent examples - I'm always looking for a certain kind of writer: an opinionated, first-person guide to this confusing new world. My model for this kind of writing is Bill James, the great baseball analyst. I'm always on the lookout for "the Bill James of wine" or "the Bill James of wrestling."

The point isn't that I want an expert to tell me what to think. Rather, I want to hear about this new universe from a distinct, coherent point of view. From there, I can develop my own perspective. I don't want an authority so much as a critical sensibility. These new subjects always teem with boggling amounts of details - the eightfold path of Buddhism, the varieties of wrestling holds, the latin names for all those flowers. I'll never learn all this stuff by trying to memorize it, and that wouldn't be much fun, anyway. Rather, what I want is to absorb the perspective of a savvy participant, so that the field as a whole makes sense to me. Once I do that, the details can fall in place over time, if I decide to stick with it.

I appear to be in the minority in this preference - most people seem to prefer the bland-to-cutesy textbook style of the Dummies guides. Guide series do have their places - I'm a big fan of the " . . . for Beginners" series of cartoon guides. When they're done right, as in the classic Marx for Beginners by Rius, those are a great way to get your bearings on a subject. The newer "Introducing . . ." cartoon series is also great. And Oxford University Press has a nifty ongoing series of "Very Short Introduction to . . . " books. The Jung books from both of the latter series have been great entry points into a massive body of work.

All this brings me to From the Ground Up, my entry point into the daunting world of gardening. I've picked up a half a dozen gardening reference books over the last few years, but all of them succeeded only in dazing me with a boggling array of disconnected tips, warnings, and factoids. What I needed was a theory of gardening that made sense to me. So I switched over from Borders's "Gardening Reference" section to the "Gardening Writing" section. I was wary, because I find nature writing often unbearably twee and smug in that Year in Provence mode. I was wary of this book too, given its sweet but very Provencial impressionistic cover painting of a front yard garden. I browsed the book over several Borders visits, each time wavering, then finally took the plunge.

It was a good call. I devoured the book over just a couple of days, and now I feel a new sense of comprehension of all this gardening stuff. Stewart writes about her first year of building a garden from scratch, as an enthusiastic but inexperienced amateur. Her tastes, reassuringly, are for wildness over rigid structure, and a few weeds and bugs over pesticidal warface. She strongly prefers organic methods, but isn't a compost Nazi when chemicals seem to be the only way to go. I don't really like her taste in vegetables - I can't stand tomatoes or zucchini - but I think I'd really enjoy hanging out in her garden.

This isn't one of those books where the putative subject becomes a metaphor for the writer's life. Sure, we learn about her husband, her beloved great-grandmother, and her two amazing cats. But the focus is always on the garden for its own sake, and that's plenty. We learn a lot about the virtues of compost, the overratedness of roses, and, in a great chapter, the lives of earthworms. (The latter subject must have really inspired her - she followed this book up with a whole book on worms.)

Stewart did have an inspired location for her garden: a rental house in Santa Cruz, across the street from an amusement park and just a block away from the beach. Gardening so close to the ocean - and to druken tourists - has its own specific challenges. And this microclimate has its own specific charms. One thing I'm learning is that gardening is always local. You can browse all these giant coffee-table books full of fantasy gardens, but what really matters is what will grow in your soil, under your sky. (That's why my next step is to start reading books specifically about gardening in the South - Tough Plants for Southern Gardens looks particularly promising.)

I'm still not sure I'll end up planting much more than my current batch of containers. Or maybe I'll just grow a huge row of something simple and useful, like mint - I really like mint. But even if I punt on this whole gardening project, I understand the gardener's worldview a little better now, thanks to Stewart.