I FIRST MET JEANNE NOLAN IN 2007 ON A WARM OCTOBER MORNING AT the Lincoln Park Zoo in downtown Chicago. I had come to give a talk at Green City Market next to the zoo, and my friend Abby Mandel, who had founded the market, brought me over to see the five-thousand-square-foot organic garden Jeanne had planted. It was everything you’d want an edible garden to be: towering heirloom tomato plants with fruit still heavy on the vine, lush stands of Brussels sprouts, broccoli, eggplant, Red Russian kale, Bright Lights chard. Where a patch of sweet corn had been harvested weeks earlier, the dried stalks served as a natural trellis for climbing tricolor beans. There were Moulin Rouge and Mammoth sunflowers, whose huge heads drooped under the weight of their seeds, and the split-rail cedar fence that bordered the garden was barely visible beneath the Mexican flame vine and morning glories blooming in periwinkle, indigo, and cream.
It would have been beautiful anywhere, but here in the heart of the city, set against a backdrop of skyscrapers and highways, it was particularly moving. I watched Jeanne, with her loose braid and her wide smile, engage with visitors, and I was struck by her power as an educator. As dozens of visitors streamed into her garden—where, I later learned, some twenty-five thousand people visit in a year, most of them children, teachers, and parents—I watched them take part in a rich sensory experience, learning about the value of good food through touch, taste, smell, and sight.
This book, like an extension of Jeanne’s gardens, is wonderfully approachable. It does not get bogged down in complex instructions or arcane horticultural details, but it bears facts and insights that will educate even the seasoned farmer. In clear, lively, deeply personal prose, Jeanne tells her story of following her passion for growing organic food. She is unafraid to reveal how she stumbled and struggled, and shows, beautifully, how she found her way through.
Similarly, my own life’s path has been rooted in gardens. My mother tended a victory garden, and one Fourth of July, for a costume contest, she actually dressed me up as the Queen of the Garden! I was only three or four years old, but I vividly remember my outfit: a skirt made from big lacy stalks of asparagus gone to seed; a lettuce-leaf top; bracelets and necklaces made out of peppers and radishes; and a wreath of strawberries on my head. Much later, after I had opened Chez Panisse, I scavenged herbs and flowers from the gardens of my neighbors to take to the restaurant, and soon I had a large lettuce garden in my own backyard; every morning we would pick baskets full of lettuce—rocket, chervil, frisée, young romaine—for the salads we would serve. Edible gardens like this—the sorts of edible gardens that Jeanne is committed to building—connect us to the earth and to the changing seasons, to our friends and to our communities. They ground us, quite literally, and give us a deeper connection with nature.
Perhaps what moves me most about Jeanne’s story is the fundamental truth that growing your own organic food has a kind of healing power. When we first started the Edible Schoolyard at Martin Luther King, Jr., Middle School in Berkeley, it was inspired by the Garden Project, a program for ex-convicts and parolees from the San Francisco County Jail who grew vegetables for homeless shelters. The Garden Project was so successful—so rewarding for its participants—that I wanted to try to replicate it in a public school (if it could do that much to enrich the lives of ex-convicts, I reasoned, think what it could do for schoolchildren!). With the Edible Schoolyard Project, gardens and kitchens become interactive classrooms for academic subjects. Children are counting beans instead of buttons, measuring the vegetable beds for their math classes, and learning about the history of civilization when they’re harvesting corn. The program shows what a profoundly transformative exercise gardening can be—helping children learn the values of stewardship, nourishment, perseverance, and cooperation. Every year, the Edible Schoolyard Project is made stronger and better by the growing community of like-minded garden programs around this country, and the world.
What Jeanne shows so effectively is that virtually anyone, anywhere, can grow his or her own food—not just on rural farmland, but in settled suburban neighborhoods, in public parks, on high-rise rooftops, and in abandoned inner-city lots. “After all my travels,” Jeanne writes, “I had learned that the meaning and purpose I’d sought in extremity—an authentic way of relating to self, to others, and to the earth—is, in fact, available to us all in our own neighborhoods and yards, in our own suburbs and cities.” By turns a memoir, a manifesto, and a how-to, From the Ground Up lures the reader into this beautiful experience—the textures, scents, and the quiet, patient pleasure—of growing your own food.
