From the Ground Up: The Story of a First Garden

About this book

Amy Stewart had a simple dream. She wanted a garden. When she and her husband finished graduate school, they headed west to Santa Cruz, California. With little money in their pockets, they found a modest seaside cottage with a small backyard. It wasn't much--a twelve-hundred-square-foot patch of land with a couple of fruit trees and a lot of dirt--but it was a good place to start. From the Ground Upis Stewart's chronicle of the seedlings and weeds, cats and compost, worms and watering that transform a tiny plot of earth into a glorious garden. From planting the seeds her great-grandmother sends to battling snails, gophers, and aphids, Stewart takes us on a tour of her coastal garden and shares the lessons she's learned the hard way. In the process, she brings her California beach town to life--complete with harbor seals, monarch butterfly migrations, and an old-fashioned, seaside amusement park just down the street. Delighting in triumphs and confessing to a multitude of gardening sins, Stewart dishes the dirt for both the novice and experienced gardener. With helpful tips in each chapter, From the Ground Uptells the story of a young woman's determination to create a garden in which the plants struggle to live up to the gardener's vision