cover image Gardening from the Heart: Why Gardeners Garden

Gardening from the Heart: Why Gardeners Garden

Carol Olwell. Antelope Island Press, $24.95 (238pp) ISBN 978-0-917946-04-2

Why do gardeners do it? ``I was gardening, in part, to maintain my mental health; it was better than going to a psychiatrist.'' ``A lot of people like murder mysteries. I have the same feeling, only I like to unravel the mysteries of plants.'' ``I get a sense that I'm part of an ecosystem.'' ``The garden was home.'' From a market gardener to a university-trained plant geneticist, 21 plantsmen and women from the Western U.S. here explain the rhyme and reason of their enthusiasm in their own words. Introduced by Olwell ( Women of the West ), who also photographed each garden with zest and care, this appealing collection of oral histories should be enjoyed far and wide, inviting readers to discover that gardeners with grit can do their work nearly anywhere--in the Alaskan wilderness, the Utah desert or the San Francisco County Jail. What's needed, as Olwell makes clear, is persistence: one interviewee, a self-described ``terminal case,'' moved over 75 tons of rock in order to create a San Francisco oasis. Less a how-to than a why-to, Olwell's opus informs and inspires. (June)