From Booklist
Des Camp drives around the streets of Portland, Oregon, in a Volvo station wagon dubbed the Fleshy One. The nickname is rooted in the vehicle's coloration, but it hints at the writer's humorous bent. Look for just such a spirited disposition permeating Des Camp's lighthearted saga of her reluctant if ultimately total immersion in the basic tenets and tricks of flower gardening. Portland's reputation as a gardeners' heaven aside, when Des Camp proceeds to plant her first garden, along with husband, Kevin, the beautification campaign they launch in an urban realm not yet gentrified is not without its ups and downs. With the yard surrounding their first home in need of tender loving care, Des Camp rather tentatively acquires knowledge of implementing the soil, seeding a small lawn, caring for and feeding plants, composting, and other valuable horticultural lessons. Allowing readers to accompany her on a crash course in Gardening 101, Des Camp tells a tale full of such diversionary tactics as slug tossing--a critical lesson for frenzied gardeners across the nation. Alice Joyce
From Kirkus Reviews
The education of a gardener, ultimately about as interesting as watching grass grow, from freelancer DesCamp. Before she moved with her husband into their Portland, Ore., home, the very idea of getting dirt under her nails was appalling to DesCamp. Her family were inveterate gardeners, and DesCamp just didn't get it: Plants were plants, why the obsession? But her yard was a shambles, and slowly, grudgingly, she caught the bug, literally and figuratively. Her husband had sod laid on the back 40; she sowed her own grass in the front. She became versed in the ways of mushroom compost, steer manure, peat moss (``Peat moss. What the hell is peat moss?''). She learned a thing or two about the weather coming off the Pacific, and more than she ever wanted to know about the great gray garden slug, that prolific slimeball, which she plucked from the plants and hurled onto the street fronting her house. Admirably, she stays true to her sense of the organic``I'm not a granola head with a different Guatemalan string bag for every social occasion . . . but I do think it's important to leave the earth a little better, rather than a little worse, from my gardening efforts.'' So she turns ladybugs loose on the aphids rather than a dose of metaldehyde, and composts, much to the appreciation of the local raccoon population. Unfortunately, theres too much tedious everyday detail in this story: too many trips to the garden shop, too many garden books plowed through. Nor does DesCamp ever ruminate on the reasonsphilosophical, physical, aestheticbehind her conversion. What motivated this reluctant tiller of the soil, why are her nails now caked with mud? As her husband said to the pricey arborist, ``We'll get back to you on that.'' -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
