The Earth Knows My Name: Food, Culture, and Sustainability in the Gardens of Ethnic Americans - Hardcover

Klindienst, Patricia

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0807085626 ISBN 13: 9780807085622

Publisher: Beacon Press, 2006

Synopsis

Why have we tamed the history of gardening in America? Patricia Klindienst asks in The Earth Knows My Name. We are a democracy of gardeners yet, with few exceptions, the garden is presented as the province of the privileged and the white. Garden writing tends to exclude the stories of the ethnic peoples who have shaped our landscape for centuries. As a result, the idea of the garden has been stripped of its cultural weight.

The Earth Knows My Name speaks directly to this gap in our understanding, exploring the deeper implications of what it means to cultivate a garden and to grow one's own food.

The fifteen gardens presented in The Earth Knows My Name have all been fashioned by people usually thought of as other Americans: Native Americans, immigrants, and ethnic peoples who were here long before our national boundaries were drawn, including Hispanics of the Southwest, descended from the Conquistadors, and Gullah gardeners of South Carolina, descendants of West African slaves. All of these gardeners straddle two cultures-mainstream America and their culture of origin. Their stewardship of the land is an expression of the desire to preserve their heritage against all that threatens it. And so each garden becomes an island of hope and offers a model, on a truly sustainable scale, of a restorative ecology that renders justice to both the land and the people who cultivate it.

About this title

About the Author

Patricia Klindienst is a master gardener and an award-winning writing teacher. She lives and gardens in Guilford, Connecticut. This is her first book.

Review

An original and exemplary kind of cultural study, The Earth Knows My Name is essential reading for anyone seriously interested in the growing reality that an ancient ecological relationship, imaginative and religious in its intensity, is slipping away.--Geoffrey Hartman, author of Scars of the Spirit: The Struggle Against Inauthenticity

"There is so much in each chapter of this extraordinary book that you might want to grasp it in one large bite, but you can't, for here the world of farm and garden and food takes us to a far deeper place than we're used to going, to a world that is not separate from politics, despair, refuge, beauty, and ultimately the salvation of heart, life, and culture. We who are far removed from our own immigrant roots will do well to study these eloquent stories and learn from them. Patricia Klindienst has given us nothing less than a great gift in The Earth Knows My Name."--Deborah Madison, author of Local Flavors: Cooking and Eating from America's Farmers' Markets

"The Earth Knows My Name is a beautifully written testament to the transformative power of working the land-its capacity to create stability in the uprooted and exiled, to instill faith in the local, to shape history, and to lend promise to the future."--Jane Brox, author of Clearing Land: Legacies of the American Farm

"Patricia Klindienst provides an intimate portrait of an immigrant nation and some of the remarkable individuals whose traditions are being kept alive through their work on the land. Klindienst's stories demonstrate the cultural and spiritual imperative that keeps us growing familiar plants and foods, and they reveal the power of the garden in maintaining our connection to our homelands and to the natural world."--Michael Ableman, farmer and author of Fields of Plenty: A Farmer's Journey in Search of Real Food and the People Who Grow It

Edition details

• Publisher: Beacon Press
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0807085626
• ISBN 13: 9780807085622
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 280