“Moving” was how a member of a local Garden Circle described a talk given by Patricia Klindienst, author of The Earth Knows My Name. I’m partway through the book and it is indeed inspiring. Skeptical me, some of the stories sound almost too perfect to be true. No matter. Author Klindients introduces us to the little known world of ethnic gardening – an approach that will only gain importance with time. Look at some of the material below and decide for yourself.
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The Book of the Year: The Earth Knows My Name
BPT, Money Changes Things
Last summer I received this book as a surprise gift from my son’s partner. The author is a like an aunt to her, and she thought I might enjoy it. I was very touched by this generous gesture and certainly hoped to like it; its vivid cover looked inviting and the topic intriguing, but my expectations were modest at best. Dutifully I delved into it – lo and behold, I didn’t just like it. I loved it. The writing is lyrical, the stories are powerful. Its narratives, chronicling the experience of people bringing forth food from the earth, put this book squarely on the shelf with Kingsolver’s Animal Vegetable Miracle and Pollon’s Omnivore’s Dilemma.
English lacks a word for people who grow their own food while working a day job: hence the book’s dissertation-length title, The Earth Knows My Name: Food, Culture, and Sustainability in the Gardens of Ethnic Americans. “Gardener” connotes flowers more than edibles; “farmer” and “grower” suggest full time professionals, and “subsistence farmer” conjures up hardscrabble sharecropping. Our closest term is kitchen or cottage gardeners. The author highlights eight gardens, each created and nurtured by people whose pleasure in growing things and deep reverence for the earth are powerfully and poetically expressed – especially captivating since few of them would be comfortable writing their observations and experiences.
(27 December 2007)
The Earth Knows My Name – interview (Audio)
Jean Feraca, Here on Earth: Radio Without Borders
Guest: Patricia Klindienst, master gardener and author of “The Earth Knows My Name”
Excerpts:
Just as you should never have a monocropped field, so you should never have a monocropped people. If we are going to think about diversity as the key to survival and saving the environment, I really think you can’t have biological diversity succeed without cultural diversity. (about 18:40)
… In preserving their heritage in the garden, they were also restoring and preserving the land. … Their traditions that they brought here are really about reverencing natural resources, – you waste nothing. Every one of them said to me, You waste nothing. You don’t waste effort, you don’t waste soil, you don’t waste food, you don’t waste water. They recycle everything. And they all said to me two things that were very interesting. We never called this organic gardening and we never used fancy words like sustainability. It was simply what everyone did. (about 19:00)
(6 May 2006 – this date may be wrong)
A Garden Cures Rootlessness
Larry Bloom, New York Times
AS the garden season begins, you may consider a different view of pepper or tomato plants than in springs past. If so, you may notice something of familial roots from, say, Warsaw or Bangkok or a Pueblo reservation. You can do this if you examine what you sow from the perspective of Patricia Klindienst, 55, master gardener and discoverer of universal histories in the soil.
But it will be best if you sidestep Ms. Klindienst’s specific path from horticultural illiterate (“I didn’t know the difference between an annual and a perennial”) to author of an eloquent book on gardening, “The Earth Knows My Name: Food, Culture and Sustainability in the Gardens of Ethnic America.” This volume offers readers not a hint of “how to” but lots of “why to,” featuring profiles of gardeners throughout the country who, by planting and harvesting, maintain ethnic identity and heritage.
To take the author’s precise path to these soul-affirming gardens, you would have to first suffer many personal setbacks – including untimely deaths of family members (including a 41-year-old brother), miscarriage, illness and divorce. You would voluntarily relinquish a tenure-track position at Yale to pursue a life so basic that paying a cellphone bill would be beyond your capacity.
(8 April 2007)
Book Review: The Earth Knows My Name
Deborah Schumacher, Port Townsend Food Co-op (Washington state)
It’s no accident that in America today agriculture and agribusiness are words that are often used interchangeably. The connection between farming, between growing food, and culture, is slipping away from our national memory and from the personal memory of many of our citizens. Farming is business, best seen as an efficient means to an end. We have decided without knowing it that growing food, preparing food, and eating food are activities that merit small attention and as little time and effort as possible.
Patricia Klindienst’s recently published book The Earth Knows My Name: Food, Culture, and Sustainability in the Gardens of Ethnic Americans is a reminder of what exactly we are losing. She leads us through the gardens of immigrants to America and we are witness to their strategy for holding on to the cultures they have left behind: the garden. Memory of home and ancestors are transported across geography and time when the gardeners in her book re-enact the agricultural traditions of the people they’ve left behind. These traditions are the methods for growing food, the kinds of foods that are grown, the ways these foods are prepared, and the sharing of the foods prepared with others. “Food is their favorite topic-the bridge that carries them over a river of loss” (24), she writes.
(no date)
The Earth Knows My Name: Food, Culture, and Sustainability in
Patricia Klindienst, Google Books
Inspired by her own family’s immigrant history, Patricia Klindienst traveled the country, gathering stories of urban, suburban, and rural gardens created by people rarely presented in books about American gardens: Native Americans, immigrants from across Asia and Europe, and ethnic peoples who were here long before our national boundaries were drawn. In The Earth Knows My Name, she writes about the beautiful gardens she discovered, each one an island of hope, offering us a model-on a sustainable scale-of a truly restorative ecology.
“A moving tribute to those who keep the ancient love of the land in their hearts, and who stand up to the giants of agrobusiness in their fight to preserve their cultural heritage.”
-Dr. Jane Goodall, DBE, founder of the Jane Goodall Institute, UN Messenger of Peace, and author of Harvest for Hope: A Guide to Mindful Eating
“Carefully weaving the threads of the cultures that were here before with those that came later, Klindienst makes her case for the deep, life-giving integrity of the earth . . . This is a poignant book that shows, without undue sentimentality, the underlying element we all share and can bring to life with our hands.”
-Edie Clark, Orion
Patricia Klindienst is a master gardener and an award-winning scholar and teacher. She lives in Guilford, Connecticut, and teaches creative writing each summer at Yale University.
(2007)
Excerpts from the Prologue and Chapter 1 from the book.
