Word: garden
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...garden becomes the place to go when all else fails, when all other seductions and temptations have been tried and rejected. "I let the garden guide me," says Billy Barnes, a Manhattan talent agent. "It has changed my life-style, particularly now. People aren't smoking and drinking anymore; they aren't having sex. In this atmosphere, I find great solace from my garden." Barnes has landscaped an apartment terrace that looked like a heliport when he moved in. Stands of birches, pines and apple trees rustle in the winds on the 14th-floor roof. He smiles at his lofty...
Perhaps with that thought in mind, residents of Manhattan's lethal "alphabet city" have transformed a rubble-strewn lot into a community garden, with poetry readings and potluck dinners and tiny plots for 107 local gardeners. Some grow food or medicinal herbs: one woman grows a lawn, just so she can come out on Sunday mornings with her deck chair to read the newspaper. "I've lived here 20 years, and we never used to talk to people on the street," says Sandra Kleinman, now in her fourth year of nursing Egyptian onions and Japanese mustard greens. "I've never...
...moments of candor, even the most hardened gardeners will try to explain the redemptive potential of their calling. "When I first got here, I wouldn't talk with anyone," says Ted Stoddard, a tall, slender man with a serious mien and a gift for apricot trees. He is serving a life sentence for murder in Muskegon, Mich. "Prison has a tendency to make you angry. It's like quicksand. Your rights can be jerked at any time." But the garden provides him with a rare escape. He now teaches other inmates, though carefully, hesitantly. They will learn more through their...
...those who prefer not to improvise, garden stores are doing a land-office business in beneficial nematodes, antislug mulch and dozens of bio-organic plant boosters. The ranks of converts grow by the day. Actor Eddie Albert makes speeches and lobbies farmers about the pesticides. "I am rather militant about the poisoning of our food and our children," he says. "Gardening is the only way we can get clean vegetables." His advice to would-be gardeners? "Keep it simple. Then get the hell out of the way. Nature wants your garden to grow...
...only it were that simple. No matter what is growing out back, whether catnip, horehound and fleabane, or chubby cabbages and Creeping figs, or heirloom roses and masses of delicate ranunculus, the garden will eventually become all consuming, of time, money, concentration and passion. Around the time that new gardeners are feeling most warm and gratified with their endeavors, delighted with the fresh vegetables and thrilled with the view from the porch, they also discover the risks involved. "A garden," warned Ralph Waldo Emerson, "is like those pernicious machineries which catch a man's coat-skirt or his hand...