| From the Ground Up: The Story of a First Garden |  | Author: Amy Stewart
Publisher: Thorndike Press
Buy New: $805.95
as of 3/20/2010 08:43 CDT details
New (1) Used (9) from $2.49
Seller: internationalbooks
Rating:  22 reviews
Sales Rank: 2504388
Format: Large Print
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 272
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.2
Dimensions (in): 9.5 x 6.5 x 1
ISBN: 0783894554
Dewey Decimal Number: 635.0979471
EAN: 9780783894553
ASIN: 0783894554
Publication Date: June 2001
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
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 Up is 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 Up tells 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
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| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 22
 Lovely story of an amateur gardener December 31, 2009
Paula (Charleston, SC)
Amy Stewart's book is a lovely story of her first garden. As a new gardener myself, I was excited to read about another gardener's experience putting together that first attempt: what to plant, learning about soil quality the hard way, fighting weeds, navigating the unexpected need for pest control. Stewart is a gifted writer, and she is at her best when she weaves her gardening story with the rest of her life. She builds this garden in the first house that she shares with her partner when she's in her early twenties, and they are trying to decide together what they want to be when they grow up.
Stewart focuses her narrative on the very relateable stories of failed crops, small successes, and backaches. She writes as a story-teller, not a garden writer, and this is to her credit. To balance it out (and because she correctly assumes that many of her readers are themselves inexperienced gardeners), she ends each chapter with an instructional section in which she condenses in a couple of pages the hard-earned lessons from the story she just told: tomato-growing tips, sheet composting instructions, and cover crop recommendations among others. This is where I found myself taking notes and realizing that, while Stewart might have been an amateur when she was living through the stories in the book, she soon became a consummate expert, one with all the more gravitas for having learned "on the field." The book jacket confirms as much: Stewart is now a professional garden writer, and continues to publish on the subject. Even more reason to enjoy this humble and delightful document of how it all began.
From the Ground UP October 13, 2009
Jan Fazzio
I really liked the synopsis after each chapter-makes for a great reference book for gardening!
from the ground up September 12, 2009
garden reader
Just a simple book about ups and downs of gardening. I'm a gardener so I enjoyed it very much but I think non-gardeners would also. Amy Stewart starts at the beginning when she knew very little and progresses through the stages and phases every gardener deals with. She also has a great sense of humor that she injects throughout the book.
My First Garden-From the Ground Up June 9, 2009
Teri A. Enright Maher (Monterey, CA)
This book was thoroughly entertaining and informative too. It really dealt with a go-getter first gardener right here on the central coast of California-just where I happen to live! She gave such useful information for dealing with weeds, pests, how to get your garden to live, and thrive.
Kind of a sad ending but well-worth the read for all beginning gardeners.
A gentle, West Coast read October 7, 2008
Valerie Adolph (Pacific Northwest)
I've enjoyed all of Amy Stewart's books, but this one took a much more personal turn than her others. Her other books required research, research and more research. This one was quietly personal with no research other than the experience of toiling in her first garden.
We've all had a first garden - a place to make our mistakes and be thrilled at what grew despite our best efforts. I still get thrilled over some flowers that other people call weeds, so it was a joy to know she had also been beguiled in the same way.
I enjoy Ms Stewart's apparently pointless meanderings, which always lead exactly where she intended them to go. Her observations of gardens and human nature are acute and vivid. Her mistakes and her successes remind us of our own.
This writer has a finely-honed vocabulary that she uses with precision to produce precisely the effect she aims for. This may not be great literature, but it is a pleasant read - a life and a garden accurately recalled.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 22
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