Gardening at the Dragon's Gate: At Work in the Wild and Cultivated World »

Wendy Johnson is one of the founders of the organic Farm and Garden Program at Green Gulch Farm Zen Center in Marin County and now lives with her family in nearby Muir Beach. A Buddhist meditation teacher who is deeply engaged in environmental work nationally, she is an advisEr to the Edible Schoolyard program of the Chez Panisse Foundation and has helped to establish many garden programs in public schools and local communities throughout the Bay Area. Her column, “On Gardening,” has appeared in Tricycle: The Buddhist Review for more than ten years. This is her first book.

Gardening at the Dragon’s Gate is fundamental work that permeates your entire life. It demands your energy and heart, and it gives you back great treasures as well, like a fortified sense of humor, an appreciation for paradox, and a huge harvest of Dinosaur kale and tiny red potatoes.

For more than thirty years, Wendy Johnson has been meditating and gardening at the Green Gulch Farm Zen Center in northern California, where the fields curve like an enormous green dragon between the hills and the ocean. Renowned for its pioneering role in California’s food revolution, Green Gulch provides choice produce to farmers’ markets and to San Francisco’s Greens restaurant. Now Johnson has distilled her lifetime of experience into this extraordinary celebration of inner and outer growth, showing how the garden cultivates the gardener even as she digs beds, heaps up compost, plants flowers and fruit trees, and harvests bushels of organic vegetables.

Johnson is a hands-on, on-her-knees gardener, and she shares with the reader a wealth of practical knowledge and fascinating garden lore. But she is also a lover of the untamed and weedy, and she evokes through her exquisite prose an abiding appreciation for the earth—both cultivated and forever wild—in a book sure to earn a place in the great tradition of American nature writing.

Introduction: Into the Tangle     ix
Valley of the Ancestors     3
The Voice of the Watershed
Getting Down to Bedrock
A Forest Thicket
Gardening for Five Hundred Years
Root Teacher
The Garden Makes the Gardener     53
The Blue in Beets
North Star Plants
The Three Sisters
Leave the Flowers to the Wind
The Threshold Oak
The Living Soil     87
The Ground of Beginner's Mind
True Grit
The Flow of Fertile Soil
The Web of Life
Groundwork
Life into Death into Life     121
Nature's Round
The Breakdown Ball
Arranging Garbage
Spreading the Wealth
Tending the Garden     163
Bare Noting
Water So the Soil Can Dry Out
Flowers Fall, Weeds Thrive
Cutting Through
No Trace
Gardening with All Beings     205
Pest or Guest?
Stiff-Spined Pests
Scarab Beetles and Assassin Bugs
Medicine and Disease Subdue Each Other
The Dung and Drool Garden
Returning to Origin     261
Inward Seeds of Fire
Purity and the Horsetail Fern
Propagating Mystery
Roots and Shoots of Eden
Sun Face Buddha, Moon Face Buddha
Gift-Bestowing Hands
Beauty Counts     311
Divinely Superfluous Beauty
Plotting Paradise
The Wind of the Family House
Tales of Eden
Harvesting Fields of Greens     359
No Anonymous Food
The Mamadella's Garden
Keep the Links Alive
Dragon Greens
Resources     401
Permissions     428
Acknowledgments     429
Index     431
About the Author and Illustrator     445
About San Francisco Zen Center     446