Customer Reviews

From the Ground Up: The Story of A First Garden

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Amy Stewart tells the story of how she got to Santa Cruz & took over a patch of seaside earth in which a couple of fruit trees, a handful of shrubs & a host of weeds fought for life.

Each chapter includes helpful tips on neighborly propagation, composting, worm juice, rose pruning techniques, how to make a bug love you & concocting a gardener's bath. They are not what you think - some of this novice's results are hilarious while others are downright commonsensical. One of the first tips she gives us is on Making a Sun Map - do give it a go - I haven't looked at my garden the same since I discovered this clue.

Alongside the story of this young woman's determination to create a garden in which the plants will live up to her vision, she remembers family moments from her childhood while facing down obstinate natives more wily than her. Talk about turf wars!

A fine companion for anyone contemplating becoming addicted to gardening! Amy Stewart has since moved to northern California where she is hard at work on her second garden &, I hope, her second book.

For those who enjoy digging in the dirt or simply admiring gardens, Amy Stewart's From the Ground Up is a charming read. The book offers many practical tips but its appeal is more than a "how to" manual. The reader shares Ms. Stewart's excitement in planting her first flowers and veggies in the ocean climate of Santa Cruz, CA, discovering the hard way what really works. The author shops for soil amendments and ladybugs the way some women revel in a Saks Fifth Avenue sale. Recipes using garden bounty pepper the narrative. The mood is like a cozy chat between friends. All this unfolds against a backdrop of a roller coaster next door, tourists stealing plants and cats gamboling in the greenery. Curl up in a comfy chair in a pleasant spot and enjoy the gardening expoeriences of Ms. Stewart from dreamer to doer.

Amy Stewart captures the essence of gardening and living in Santa Cruz, CA. This is a gentle and graceful book that will make you want to run to your local garden center and buy everything, then go home and spend the whole weekend getting dirty. You will greatly enjoy this book regardless of the size or state of your garden or yard. A wonderful read, very well written, almost poetic at times...you will love it.

When I'm diving into a new field I know nothing about - Buddhism, photography, wine, wrestling, or gardening, to take a few recent examples - I'm always looking for a certain kind of writer: an opinionated, first-person guide to this confusing new world. My model for this kind of writing is Bill James, the great baseball analyst. I'm always on the lookout for "the Bill James of wine" or "the Bill James of wrestling."

The point isn't that I want an expert to tell me what to think. Rather, I want to hear about this new universe from a distinct, coherent point of view. From there, I can develop my own perspective. I don't want an authority so much as a critical sensibility. These new subjects always teem with boggling amounts of details - the eightfold path of Buddhism, the varieties of wrestling holds, the latin names for all those flowers. I'll never learn all this stuff by trying to memorize it, and that wouldn't be much fun, anyway. Rather, what I want is to absorb the perspective of a savvy participant, so that the field as a whole makes sense to me. Once I do that, the details can fall in place over time, if I decide to stick with it.

I appear to be in the minority in this preference - most people seem to prefer the bland-to-cutesy textbook style of the Dummies guides. Guide series do have their places - I'm a big fan of the " . . . for Beginners" series of cartoon guides. When they're done right, as in the classic Marx for Beginners by Rius, those are a great way to get your bearings on a subject. The newer "Introducing . . ." cartoon series is also great. And Oxford University Press has a nifty ongoing series of "Very Short Introduction to . . . " books. The Jung books from both of the latter series have been great entry points into a massive body of work.

All this brings me to From the Ground Up, my entry point into the daunting world of gardening. I've picked up a half a dozen gardening reference books over the last few years, but all of them succeeded only in dazing me with a boggling array of disconnected tips, warnings, and factoids. What I needed was a theory of gardening that made sense to me. So I switched over from Borders's "Gardening Reference" section to the "Gardening Writing" section. I was wary, because I find nature writing often unbearably twee and smug in that Year in Provence mode. I was wary of this book too, given its sweet but very Provencial impressionistic cover painting of a front yard garden. I browsed the book over several Borders visits, each time wavering, then finally took the plunge.

It was a good call. I devoured the book over just a couple of days, and now I feel a new sense of comprehension of all this gardening stuff. Stewart writes about her first year of building a garden from scratch, as an enthusiastic but inexperienced amateur. Her tastes, reassuringly, are for wildness over rigid structure, and a few weeds and bugs over pesticidal warface. She strongly prefers organic methods, but isn't a compost Nazi when chemicals seem to be the only way to go. I don't really like her taste in vegetables - I can't stand tomatoes or zucchini - but I think I'd really enjoy hanging out in her garden.

This isn't one of those books where the putative subject becomes a metaphor for the writer's life. Sure, we learn about her husband, her beloved great-grandmother, and her two amazing cats. But the focus is always on the garden for its own sake, and that's plenty. We learn a lot about the virtues of compost, the overratedness of roses, and, in a great chapter, the lives of earthworms. (The latter subject must have really inspired her - she followed this book up with a whole book on worms.)

Stewart did have an inspired location for her garden: a rental house in Santa Cruz, across the street from an amusement park and just a block away from the beach. Gardening so close to the ocean - and to druken tourists - has its own specific challenges. And this microclimate has its own specific charms. One thing I'm learning is that gardening is always local. You can browse all these giant coffee-table books full of fantasy gardens, but what really matters is what will grow in your soil, under your sky. (That's why my next step is to start reading books specifically about gardening in the South - Tough Plants for Southern Gardens looks particularly promising.)

I'm still not sure I'll end up planting much more than my current batch of containers. Or maybe I'll just grow a huge row of something simple and useful, like mint - I really like mint. But even if I punt on this whole gardening project, I understand the gardener's worldview a little better now, thanks to Stewart.

Amy Stewart has written a wonderful book about gardening that is funny, interesting and full of lessons about the beginnings and endings of things. Her story about moving from an urban woman yearning for the feel of a garden's dirt on her hands into a full-fledged gardener, compost pile and earthworm manure and all... is also the story of how to change a life and move towards what we love. I loved reading it and highly recommend it for gardeners and non-gardener's alike.

I'm in escrow right now on my first house and daily I walk over to it just to visit. It, like Stewart's, is a bare patch of earth with a few fruit trees. I loved this book and it was timed perfectly for me. It's mix of the dream garden we have in our heads and the pragmatic realities of the garden once we get out there -- ie. from wisteria to worm casings! is a delight. I ate it up in one day much like I hope one day to eat up my own sungold tomatoes and tender lettuces. A wonderful and honest portrait of a first garden. Good luck in Eureka A.S.!

I read Amy Stewart's fine book, From the Ground Up, last week on a very long plane ride home to California from Indianapolis, Indiana. I'd been to Indianapolis to speak to the Indiana Arborists' Association convention, as I am a garden writer myself (Allergy-free Gardening, Safe Sex in the Garden, etc.). My flight was delayed due to a snowstorm in Detroit but the extra long trip was made more than okay because I had this delightful book to read.
I'd received From the Ground Up as a present from my Mom. It is the story of one lady's first attempt at gardening, and as one who taught horticulture for 20 years, and who has gardened for almost 50 years, it was remarkable fun for me to see all the little mistakes she made, the discoveries she uncovered, the personal disasters and achievements that accompanied her quest to create a wonderful garden.
Really great gardens don't just happen, not at all. They are created with huge effort, smarts, learning, help and advice from other gardeners, with tips from garden books, and most of all by the vision of the gardener in charge.
There exists within the wide range of garden writing a host of some rather fabulously good writing. These are the books that combine solid garden advice with a large dose of very personal observance and experience. Although From the Ground Up is a first book, it reads as though written by someone who had been writing for many years, someone who had honed and polished her writing so that every line sparkled. I would expect that this book would appeal most to those who love to garden, but because the level of writing is so unusually excellent, I'd guess almost anyone who appreciates literate writing would enjoy it.
If you're one who is new to gardening you'll find a wealth of useful tips here, interspersed with some darn good recipes too for making gourmet meals of all that extra fresh produce you'll eventually have. I really can't say enough about this marvelous book. Reading it was pure pleasure.

Amy Stewart writes the story of her experience with her garden. It is easy to read and reality-based as she shares the joys and frustrations of creating her garden. I can't wait until her next book appears!

As I read From the Ground Up I felt torn between the desire to rush out and start gardening and the equally compelling desire to stay in my chair and continue reading.

Amy Stewart makes gardening come alive and she makes reading about gardening fun, both for real gardeners, and non-gardners, like me. I was reminded of Calvin Trillen's, Alice Lets Eat. Trillen made me yearn to join him in the search for the perfect fish boil. Stewart makes you want to be down in the dirt with her digging, laughing and learning.

I would highly recommned the book to anyone who enjoys clever and skilled writing. The fact that the book is crammed with gardening information becomes the icing on the cake. The cake is the writing and the world it lets you enter.

This is a quick, enjoyable read for anyone who can still remember the joys and tribulations of their first garden. Amy Stewart makes many of the mistakes we all made concerning bed preparation, the inappropriate flowers and vegetables planted with such hope, the unexpected hordes of four- and six-legged diners---no wonder 'paradise' is a common theme in most religions. Most of us have tried to create our version of the perfect garden in our own backyard, but this author is one of the few who have tried to tell the tale.

And a very sprightly job she does of it, too. She doesn't make the mistake of overloading her prose with too many adjectives (a common fault among gardening writers) and the short sentences keep us reading briskly onward. Each chapter is followed by a series of hints in bold type on subjects such as "Sheet Composting" and "Tomato Trouble." The author actually found a product that chases gophers out of her garden (usually) which I'm going to have to try on our moles.

Even though Amy Stewart's small backyard garden luxuriates in the sun (and shade) of Santa Cruz, California, she still has much to share with us gardeners in less fortunate climates. She's still got to do battle with snails, aphids, and gophers. The plants that looked great in the gardening center succumb to all kinds of nasty diseases and acts of Nature. Tomatoes seem especially prone to yellowing, drooping, curling up, and getting spots. The author refused the heartless advice of the gardening books to "destroy all infected plants" and nursed her tomatoes with her "crude and ineffectual remedies, feeling like a Civil War doctor who has nothing but snake oil and dirty bandages to offer the wounded."

Doesn't that sound like something you did or might do with your first tomato plants? As my husband is prone to say, 'enjoy your hundred dollar tomatoes,' and take a trip through the mishaps and discoveries of this honest, sometimes hilarious first-time gardener.