"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.

"Though Klindienst imposes a strong philosophical structure on the narratives in this poetic collection, her political interpretations come second to the beauty and humor in what is essentially a set of portraits of both American gardens and gardeners. Woven into these stories are wide-ranging details of agricultural history: how to make blue corn piki bread, how the injustice of post-emancipation land sales affected one farmer, the fragrance of the sweet-sticky-pumpkin flower brought by refugees from Cambodia. Klindienst's writing shines when recounting her conversations with farmers, but her analysis of 'hunger for community' and how a 'garden can be a powerful expression of resistance' feels awkward. Luckily, between the prologue and the epilogue, Klindienst provides an unpretentious and touching tour of the increasingly rare corners of the country where land is worked by friendly locals who know the differences between five types of basil and can jaw for hours about plants, soil and the weather: 'Oh golly let me see. It would be the bush beans,' says one woman when asked about the type of seed she's been saving the longest (70 years, in this case). This book's broad scope touches on the best of nature writing, singing the rhythm of growth in both plants and people." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

"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

"A poetic title for a book about gardens that is sheer poetry....This is a book to savor, chapter by chapter." Hampshire Gazette

"A poignant book that shows, without undue sentimentality, the underlying element we all share and can bring to live with our hands." Orion

"A lyrical account." Booklist

"The Earth Knows My Name is 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. In protecting the land from the poisons of intensive agriculture, keeping alive knowledge of traditional farming and traditional foods, their battle is for the future of all of us — the future of planet earth." Jane Goodall, founder of the Jane Goodall Institute & UN Messenger of Peace

"Anyone who feels most at home in the garden will revel in this book." Yes! Magazine

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