The Earth Knows My Name: Food, Culture, and Sustainability in the Gardens of Ethnic Americans

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Patricia Klindienst

The Earth Knows My Name

Food, Culture, and Sustainability in the Gardens of Ethnic Americans

Patricia Klindienst

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English

Beacon Press
01 September 2018

Cookery, food & drink; Gardening

Patricia Klindienst crossed the country to write this book, inspired by a torn and faded photograph that shed new light on the story of her Italian immigrant family's struggle to adapt to America. She gathered the stories of urban, suburban, and rural gardens created by people rarely presented in books about American gardens- Native Americans, immigrants from across Asia and Europe, and ethnic peoples who were here long before our national boundaries were drawn-including Hispanics of the Southwest, whose ancestors followed the Conquistadors into the Rio Grande Valley, and Gullah gardeners of the Sea Islands off the coast of South Carolina, descendants of African slaves.

As we lose our connection to the soil, we no longer understand the relationship between food and a sense of belonging to a place and a people. In The Earth Knows My Name, Klindienst offers a lyrical exploration of how the making of gardens and the growing of food help ethnic and immigrant Americans maintain and transmit their cultural heritage while they put roots down in American soil. Through their work on the land, these gardeners revive cultures in danger of being lost. Through the vegetables, fruits, and flowers they produce, they share their culture with their larger communities. And in their reverent use of natural resources they keep alive a relationship to the land all but lost to mainstream American culture.

With eloquence and passion, blending oral history and vivid description, Klindienst has created a book that offers a fresh and original way to understand food, gardening, and ethnic culture in America. In this book, each garden becomes an island of hope and offers us a model, on a sustainable scale, of a truly restorative ecology.

By: Patricia Klindienst
Imprint: Beacon Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 215mm, Width: 139mm, Spine: 16mm
Weight: 322g
ISBN: 9780807085714
ISBN 10: 0807085715
Pages: 276
Publication Date: 01 September 2018
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

Patricia Klindienst is a master gardener and an award-winning scholar and teacher. Her debut collection, The Earth Knows My Name, received a 2007 American Book Award and has been praised by readers as diverse as Dr. Jane Goodall and Barry Lopez. She lives in Guilford, Connecticut, and taught creative writing at Yale University.

Reviews for The Earth Knows My Name: Food, Culture, and Sustainability in the Gardens of Ethnic Americans

An original and exemplary kind of cultural study, The Earth Knows My Name is essential reading for anyone seriously interested in the growing reality that an ancient ecological relationship, imaginative and religious in its intensity, is slipping away.--Geoffrey Hartman, author of Scars of the Spirit: The Struggle Against Inauthenticity <br> We who are far removed from our own immigrant roots will do well to study these eloquent stories and learn from them. Patricia Klindienst has given us nothing less than a great gift. --Deborah Madison, author of Local Flavors: Cooking and Eating from America's Farmers' Markets <br> The Earth Knows My Name is a beautifully written testament to the transformative power of working the land--its capacity to create stability in the uprooted and exiled, to instill faith in the local, to shape history, and to lend promise to the future. --Jane Brox, a