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How One Man Nearly Lost his Sanity, Spent a Fortune, and Endured an Existential Crisis in the Quest for the Perfect Garden
Algonquin Books
April 2006
288 pages
ISBN: 1565125037
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Memoir
William Alexander had a simple dream of having a vegetable
garden and small orchard in his backyard. It was a dream
that would lead to life-and-death battles with groundhogs,
webworms, and weeds; midnight expeditions in the dead of
winter to dig up fresh thyme; skirmishes with neighbors who
feed the vermin (i.e., deer); the near electrocution of the
tree man; and the pity of his wife and children. When Alexander decided to run a cost-benefit analysis,
adding up everything from the Havahart animal trap ($60) to
the Velcro tomato wraps ($5) to the steel edging ($1,200),
then amortizing it over the life of his garden, it came as
quite a shock to learn that it cost him a staggering $64 to
grow each tomato. A gardener with an existential bent, Alexander gives
excellent advice about everything from peaches to leeks,
while tackling such questions as What do our gardens tell us
about ourselves? Do we get the gardens we deserve? And why
does the groundhog have to take one bite from half a dozen
tomatoes when any gardener would gladly grant him six bites
of just one?
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