From the Ground Up by Amy Stewart

With apologies to those in colder climes, spring has come to our little garden. The daffodils are up and earlier this year, we let our seven year old friend plant our bulbs wherever he wanted. The result is a lovely madness of blooms. Bunched together in some spots and varieties mixed together willy-nilly. Makes me smile with delight.*

So there I was cutting these daffs to take indoors when my thoughts turned to our garden at large. So much to do after the rains – oh the weeds – the weeds. Luckily, our seven year old child laborer gardener is also keen to help weed. No matter if he pulls up the wrong thing – odds are in our favor that he does indeed pull mostly weeds.

The other evening, my thoughts turning to more gardening, I turned to my collection of gardening books and pulled out an old favorite. Not an instructional garden book, but a memoir of a first garden.

From the Ground Up by Amy Stewart

I read this first when it came out in 2001 — during those dark days after 9/11 and I needed simple distraction. I just re-read it again and was once again surprised by how much I enjoyed this little gardening book.

From the book’s flyleaf:

Amy Stewart had a simple dream. She yearned for a garden filled with colorful jumbles of vegetables and flowers. After she and her husband finished graduate school, they pulled up their Texas roots and headed west to Santa Cruz, California. With little money in their pockets, they rented a modest seaside bungalow 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. A good place to start.

From the Ground Up is Stewart’s quirky, humorous chronicle of the blossoms and weeds in her first garden and the lessons she’s learned the hard way. From planting seeds her great-grandmother sends to battling snails, gophers, and aphids, Stewart takes us on a tour of four seasons in her coastal garden. Confessing her sins and delighting in small triumphs, she dishes the dirt for both the novice and the experienced gardener. Along the way, she brings her quintessential California beach town to life—complete with harbor seals, monarch butterfly migrations, and an old-fashioned seaside amusement park just down the street.

This garden memoir is set just down the coast from us in Santa Cruz and I can relate to the coastal garden trials and tribulations. Furthermore, Ms. Stewart captures the mindset of the amateur gardener with all its joys, mysteries and disappointments. And I’ve made all the mistakes and I’ve had the joy and disappointment. From the Ground Up is interwoven with some viable garden tips — but it’s more than just a gardening book – it’s a book about life. Just read this excerpt:

But gardening is none of that, really. Strip away the gadgets and the techniques, the books and the magazines and the soil test kits, and what you’re left with, at the end of the day, is this: a stretch of freshly turned dirt, a handful of seeds scratched into the surface, and a marker to remember where they went. It is at the same time an incredibly brave and an incredibly simple thing to do, entrusting your seeds to the earth and waiting for them to rise up out of the ground to meet you.

If you have the gardening bug or you know someone who does. Whether you are into one specific species of plant or an eclectic gardener (we definitely fall into the latter category) — or even if you’d rather garden from your comfy chair – From the Ground Up is a delightful story of a new gardener, her first garden, and how she and her garden grew and changed.

Ms. Stewart is also know for several other garden books which are very well regarded.

One about the history of poisonous plants and their victims.

And another about the flower industry

Both look very interesting for someday.

But for now, From the Ground Up will go back to its place on my shelves for yet another re-read.

* Out here we have to plant new bulbs every year because in our temperate climate and without frost — very few bulbs re-bloom.

Lest you think we are the only ones with bulbs planted in wild abandon – check out the tulip garden in Golden Gate Park…also makes me happy. I wonder if they have their own child gardening helpers?