Gardening at the Dragons Gate – At Work in the Wild and Cultivated World

Gardening at the Dragons Gate At Work in the Wild and Cultivated World

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.

User Ratings and Reviews

5 Stars Earth Starved
Gardening At The Dragon's Gate is for the Earth Starved – I love gardening and do not take the time to do it enough; however, Wendy Johnson's well written, heartfelt, intelligent, humorous, historical and motivating novel has brought me back to my own love of the earth – Each day I read it, I vow to go back to dirty fingernails and the rich taste of earth dust as I crawl around digging and planting – This book rivets you back to your own lovely moments communing with your own garden, however great or small it might be – This book is informative too. I lived in San Francisco and visited Muir Beach and the area many times – I wish I had known of Green Gulch – I plan on visiting now – Any one who has any affinity to the earth, to gardening, to eco-consciousness and to living a life near the soil of their home will be completely pleased, and engrossed in this timely and lovely rich writing and teaching of how to love, and to care for our earth, simply by loving it where ever you are -

5 Stars Don't want this one to end.
It's been a while since I have come across a book that I do not want to see end, and this is such a book.

I am about a third of the way through Gardening at the Dragon's Gate and already I am sad that it will eventually end. I do know, however, that once I have read it through I can have the pleasure of opening it at any point and enjoying it again, and again.

It is a book about gardening, about nature, about life, written beautifully, at times touching, at times funny. More than once I've found myself sitting on the bus reading it with tears suddenly stinging my eyes.

In fact, what am I doing sitting here, when I could be reading!?

5 Stars Much more than a garden book
My dirty little secret is that I do not love gardening. I stuck with it for years before tossing in the . . . um . . . trowel, then I quit. Since then, though, I have often been assigned to the garden crew at the Buddhist retreat center I frequent, and there, I find, I do not love it but I also do not not love it. It's there. It needs doing. I do it. And I find myself absorbed in it in ways that go beyond planting seeds and pulling weeds. Or not.

I do not love gardening but I love this book. It perfectly illustrates the interconnectedness of all things, and all of us. It's on my bedside table where–another confession–it was recently joined by a seed catalog. Maybe it's time to pick up that trowel again.

5 Stars gardening at the dragon's gate
Wonderful book…great detail and insight to gardening as a complete eco-system. I have alot more appreciation for digging in the dirt and it goes full circle from mental to spiritual to being out there in the garden.

4 Stars Too in Depth
The beginning of the book is absolutely lovely sharing the history of the areas and the author's beginnings as a gardener, including her move from the the Tassajara Zen Mountain Center in the Ventana Wilderness, east of Big Sur, where she started, to Marin County at the Green Gulch Farm and Zen Center. As the book continues, though, it gets increasingly detailed. So much so, that I started skipping parts in an effort to get to those portions of chapters that had information I could use in our small garden. The author's gardens are a huge undertaking and her accomplishments are amazing. While I hope to get to the end of the book, I'll never get all of it read. The writing is outstanding and the book is a testament to the author's love of the earth and gardening. A perfect version of this book, for me, would have been the beginning exactly as it is followed by a condensed version of the balance. For those who enjoy Gardening at the Dragon's Gate or are looking for a book that is an easier read, you may also want to check From the Ground Up: The Story of a First Garden, Amy Stewart, (no Zen) and Plant Seed, Pull Weed: Nurturing the Garden of Your Life, Geri Larkin (lots of Zen).

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