You Grow Girl™

Noah's Garden: Restoring the Ecology of Our Own Backyards
by By Sara B. Stein
©1993 Houghton Mifflin

Like most bookworms, I have definite preferences in regards to book genres—after careful thought, I've decided I just don't like nonfiction. There's really only three types of nonfiction that I'll deal with, and only two of those do I feel any happiness about. The first, and non-happy type, is political nonfiction that I feel duty-bound to read. The second type, and this one I do indeed enjoy, is how-to books, everything from how-to build your own treehouse to how-to cook focaccia to how-to balance your checkbook. Some are dry as dust and others are so beautiful to look at it's almost a guilty pleasure, but all make me feel like I'm finally becoming the person I want to be, be it responsible, handy, or anything in between. The third type of nonfiction, however, is the one that does me the most good—and that's the inspiring, daydreaming, castle-in-the-sky type. And, yup, you guessed it, Stein's book falls right into this category.

Sara Stein, already an accomplished author, wrote this book after realizing that her efforts at gardening, and she is indeed a master gardener if ever there was one, were in fact hurting her land and environment, not helping it, however unintentionally. She details the changes occurring on her land—the wildlife that no longer appears, the plants that once common are now hard to find—and ties them together to the general sprawl and destruction of not only suburbia with its' subdivisions but general cultural attitudes towards nature. In language that made me want to swoon at times for its beauty, wit, and intelligence, she explains how she went from being an 'illiterate gardener' to not being a gardener at all but rather almost a scientist to being, ultimately, happily, a 'steward of the land'. And, not just content with that, she wrote this book as a call-to-arms for all of us who work with, and love, nature, to similarly become stewards rather than landowners or even, perhaps, gardeners.

In the preface, she states she wrote this book not only for the accomplished gardener but for "whoever digs, whoever plants, whoever by even raking leaves tinkers with a system of which, sad to say, horticulture is shockingly ignorant. My purpose in letting in the hoi polloi is eventually to similarly fling wide the garden gate, to loosen the land's esthetic corset, let it grow more blowsy and fecund, allow it to bed promiscuously with beasts and creatures of all sorts."

This book embellishes my dream of that day when I have a bit of earth to tend to, of how I will be a responsible and respectful steward and not try and control so strictly the nature around me. It helps me imagine a possibility of being attuned to the changes around me, of nature shifting from season to season, of flowers blooming and dying. All this while stuck in a giant concrete city populated with miles of gridlocked cars—quite a feat indeed. - andrea hull