The Earth Knows My Name: Food, Culture, and Sustainability in the Gardens of Ethnic Americans
A critical travelogue that visits immigrant and Indigenous gardens to think about food, culture, and belonging.
Work Information
It presents gardens as places where memory and community connect.
The author travels across the country, tracing immigrant and Indigenous gardens to show the relationship among soil, food, and culture. It is concrete like a photograph yet intellectually expansive.
Review Summaries
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Readers praise its rich way of building cultural history from the familiar setting of the garden.
Book Information
- Publisher
- Beacon Press
- Published
- 2006-04-12
- Pages
- 280 pages
- Language
- 英語
- Size
- 14.61 x 3.18 x 22.86 cm
- ISBN-13
- 9780807085622
- ISBN-10
- 0807085626
- Price
- 11557 JPY
- Category
- 洋書/Outdoors & Nature/Ecology
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.
Patricia Klindienst is a master gardener and an award-winning writing teacher. She lives and gardens in Guilford, Connecticut. This is her first book.
Reviews
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The book arrived on time in good condition.
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I read it for the enjoyment of knowing more of the American “melting pot” through newly arrived people from all over the world.
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A look at how culture and food intersect. This book is a great for explaining how the connection between food & history & culture come together as a whole. I would highly suggest reading this if you love food culture.
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Fantastic read if you like gardening and culture and food!
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I liked the people who were the subjects of the author, and one even lives not far from me. I did not like the author however, as I found her judgemental. For example, she called one person's living situation as being in a "dense suburb of Los Angeles" which is actually in Orange County on "less than a quarter of an acre." Maybe to a professor living in a wealthy suburb of Connecticut that seems crowded. A much better book is People with Dirty Hands, in which the author truly delights in the gardening adventures of the people she meets without patronizing them.