There Is a Garden in the Mind: A Memoir of Alan Chadwick and the Organic Movement in California

There Is a Garden in the Mind presents an engaging look at the work and life of pioneering organic gardener Alan Chadwick and his profound influence on the organic farming movement. In this wide-ranging and philosophical memoir, author Paul Lee recounts his first serendipitous meeting with Chadwick in Santa Cruz, California, in 1967, and their subsequent founding of the Chadwick Garden at UC Santa Cruz, the first organic and biointensive garden at a U.S. university.

Today, there are few who would dispute the ecological and health benefits of organically produced food, and the student garden project founded by Chadwick and Lee has evolved into a world-renowned research center that helps third-world farmers obtain high yields using organic gardening. But when Chadwick and Lee first broke ground in the 1960s, the term "organic" belonged to the university's chemists, and the Chadwick Garden spurred a heated battle against the whole system of industrial existence. Lee's memoir contextualizes this struggle by examining the centuries-old history of the conflict between industrial science and organic nature, the roots of the modern environmental movement and the slow food movement, and the origin of the term "organic." His account of Chadwick's work fills in a gap in the history of the sustainable agriculture movement and proposes that Chadwick's groundwork continues to bear fruit in today's burgeoning urban garden, locavore, and self-sufficiency movements.

Table of contents:

Chapter one The English Gardener Arrives

Chapter two The English Gardener Goes to Work

Chapter three The Garden Plot

Chapter four Goethe the Vitalist contra Newton the Physicalist

Chapter five Urea! I Found It!

Chapter six USA and Earth Day

Chapter seven The Method

Chapter eight Chadwick Departs

Chapter nine A Moral Equivalent of War

Chapter ten The Death of Chadwick

Chapter eleven California Cuisine and the Homeless Garden Project

Chapter twelve A Biodynamic Garden on Long Island

Chapter thirteen Chadwick's Legacy

PAUL LEE studied philosophy at St. Olaf College and received his divinity degree and PhD from Harvard. He has taught at Harvard, MIT, and UC Santa Cruz, where he founded the UCSC Chadwick Garden with Alan Chadwick in 1967. In 1985 he founded the organization that became Santa Cruz's Homeless Services Center. His works include a book on homelessness, The Quality of Mercy, and a play, A Lullaby for Wittgenstein. The author lives in Santa Cruz, CA.