Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, July 15, 1990 TAG: 9007180095
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: C-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Reviewed by HILARY SIEBERT
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Every day, Bill Hatke, a self-sufficient gardener with a Ph.D. in sociology and no formal employment, can be seen cultivating one of his several plots in the town of Lawrence, Kan. "I could be talking to somebody, and there might be a patch of unused land, and they would let me plant it . . . I counted up the other day, and since I've been here, I've gardened 56 different places. I ride all over on my bike and carry my tools and harvest in a little cart attached to the rear wheels."
Every year, Grant Cushinberry, born in a town of ex-slaves in Kansas, tills and plants "God's Little Half Acre" on his land to feed the hungry who come to his garden for food. "We lived beside the railroad tracks. And in the old days, a train'd come by and the shack would rock. Well, all the bums would get off the train and come to our house. I think they must've been told there was good eating there. All of us kids and my mother'd always find something good to give them!"
These are just two of the people who inhabit this book of stories told by gardeners about their lives, about the role of gardening in making them who they are today. This is not a book strictly about gardening, nor is it a book strictly for gardeners. Yes, there are theories about gardening, all kinds of practical techniques. But the theories offer as much a reflection of each gardener's humanity as they do a guide to effective practices.
Some of the more unusual techniques illustrate this. Father James Henderson, a Trappist monk, tells how he learned to heal broken tomato stems within a week: Use a Band-Aid. Floyd Brannon, a retired machinist, doesn't bother watering. "The good Lord sends rain down, and that's the way the ground's supposed to get wet."
But it's the reasons for these practices that are revealing. As a monk, Henderson seeks a nurturing relationship with his environment, moving a pathway to let the lemon-balm spread, calling the wrens to his greenhouse to eat the tomato hornworms, warming the ground for his sweet potatoes with mulch and black plastic. Brannon plants a garden only "because I like to grow things." Separated from his wife, his children out on their own, Brannon carefully sows and tends his garden, while his family returns each year to reap what he has grown for them - with or without rain.
Jane Anne Staw and Mary Swander composed this book carefully, traveling in a pickup truck during the hot, dry summer of 1986 through seven states, from Iowa to Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, Nebraska, Missouri and Kansas. In the process, they interviewed more than 50 gardeners, and finally gleaned 12 full narratives. Additional words from the others preface each of the book's four sections. Marion Wendlandt tells her husband, "Sarge, tell them about the parsnips, the parsnips." Thus the authors learn about the virtues of parsnips in the snow. Larry Cassatt recals his mother's canning motto: "You eat what you can, what you can't, you can."
Between the lines of each gardener's tale, a portrait of a human being emerges, full of hopes, disappointments, and finally, a sense of endurance and survival. The key to the authors' achievement is that they allow the voices to speak for themselves, while at the same time focusing each portrait on an essential quality in the person's life. Both authors are published poets as well as skilled photographers. The language of their portraits is precise and sympathetic, adding to the gardener's words brief perceptions of their own.
Accompanying the pages of each narrative are several black and white, suggesting more the gardener's attitude and mood than providing any practical artifacts. Questions of gardening take on metaphoric, even metaphysical overtones, and the gardeners become subjects of interest in their own right.
"Succession," the book's second section, explores the concept of succession in both gardens and lives. While presenting Bill Hatke's horticultural concept of "succession planting," the authors offer a few words of their own to note how his gardens "give him the space and variety essential for him to play out the multiple scripts in his life. Buffoon, philosopher, Zen Buddhist, skeptic, intellectual, farmer, artist, engineer, recluse, Bill has at least as many sides as his garden does . . . "
At first, readers will notice how Bill's crops and gardens follow on one another's heels, often in irregular, helter-skelter fashion, peas emerging suddenly from beneath the melon vines that have died back in the fall. Gradually, we come to see how, like his gardens, Bill too thrives on innovative, spontaneous actions.
After reading half a dozen books about vegetable gardening this spring, I was puzzled by the vast, often contradictory array of techniques advocated by each author. "Parsnips in the Snow" has shown me why these contradictions exist. Like all theories, they reflect the belief system of the individual. In its study of the attitudes toward gardening, this books reveals how personality - rather than scientific "fact" - plays a key role in the way people choose to sow and reap.
by CNB