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Gardening at the Dragon's 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.
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.
464 pages, Paperback
First published February 26, 2008
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591 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 49 reviews
July 1, 2012
Turn 30: check
Quit drinking hard liquor: check
Attempt to quit smoking and fail: check
Develop a passionate and abiding interest in stuff you used to think was kind of boring, like gardening and Buddhism: check.
If Buddhist powerhouse Pema Chodron and Bay Area master gardener Pam Peirce somehow contrived to have a lovechild, it would be Wendy Johnson, the wry, wise author of this beauty of a book. Not just for people obsessed with their wee planties, Gardening at the Dragon's Gate is a beautiful, lyrical tribute to the material world and what it calls forth from the human spirit. I must disclose that I sort of want W.J. to admit to sometimes trying to sheet mulch with a wicked hangover, just to puncture her placidity, but I'm 99.9% sure this is because I'm jealous. She does such a good job of balancing the poetry of landscape with pragmatic concerns about how to be in the garden and in the wider world that I'm totally willing to forgive her for being a far better person than me.
Quit drinking hard liquor: check
Attempt to quit smoking and fail: check
Develop a passionate and abiding interest in stuff you used to think was kind of boring, like gardening and Buddhism: check.
If Buddhist powerhouse Pema Chodron and Bay Area master gardener Pam Peirce somehow contrived to have a lovechild, it would be Wendy Johnson, the wry, wise author of this beauty of a book. Not just for people obsessed with their wee planties, Gardening at the Dragon's Gate is a beautiful, lyrical tribute to the material world and what it calls forth from the human spirit. I must disclose that I sort of want W.J. to admit to sometimes trying to sheet mulch with a wicked hangover, just to puncture her placidity, but I'm 99.9% sure this is because I'm jealous. She does such a good job of balancing the poetry of landscape with pragmatic concerns about how to be in the garden and in the wider world that I'm totally willing to forgive her for being a far better person than me.
November 7, 2009
My overall feeling as I read this book was that it was longwinded with few new insights for me.
However, as I thumb through the book to write this review, I have to admit that there were more "gems" than I remembered, especially as regards the relationship between the gardener and the garden. For example, I love Johnson's recommendation to meditate in the garden so that you can truly begin to understand it. I'd forgotten, too, that it was her recommendation to name your own months of the year based on what was occurring in your garden. I'm still working on that idea, and it's amazing how grounded it makes me feel.
However, as I thumb through the book to write this review, I have to admit that there were more "gems" than I remembered, especially as regards the relationship between the gardener and the garden. For example, I love Johnson's recommendation to meditate in the garden so that you can truly begin to understand it. I'd forgotten, too, that it was her recommendation to name your own months of the year based on what was occurring in your garden. I'm still working on that idea, and it's amazing how grounded it makes me feel.
June 6, 2010
Inspirational and informational. I'm not sure how to categorize this one - it's part memoir, part gardening primer, and part Zen. I'll have to add "Tour Green Gulch Farm" to my bucket list for sure. This covers so many different topics, from plant families, to pests, to design, to Zen, to cooking, to seed saving, organic gardening and farming, eating local, community gardening, prison and school house gardening. I'll definitely refer to this one again and again in the future. Excellent book, web, organization, and catalog resources in the back as well.
Page 379: "All children deserve to be fed well and to know where thier food comes from and how it gets to their table. This is not a privilege but a basic right and a necessity."
Page 304: "Recognizing that ten multinational corporations control one-third of the twenty-three-billion-dollar commercial seed market and 100 percent of the market for genetically engineered or transgenic seed crops, inspries me to work my hardest to avoid using the seed of these same corporations that also control the global pesticide and chemical agriculture market".
Page 121: "From the beginning, the fertility of the garden depends on the fertility of the gardener's imagination, on that wild mind that sees death as a gateway into life, a mind that turns with the same delight toward the toothless jaws of decay as toward the untwining, green shoot. Watching the things of the world come apart and recombine is core Zen work and the fundamental anchorage of every gardener's life."
Page 379: "All children deserve to be fed well and to know where thier food comes from and how it gets to their table. This is not a privilege but a basic right and a necessity."
Page 304: "Recognizing that ten multinational corporations control one-third of the twenty-three-billion-dollar commercial seed market and 100 percent of the market for genetically engineered or transgenic seed crops, inspries me to work my hardest to avoid using the seed of these same corporations that also control the global pesticide and chemical agriculture market".
Page 121: "From the beginning, the fertility of the garden depends on the fertility of the gardener's imagination, on that wild mind that sees death as a gateway into life, a mind that turns with the same delight toward the toothless jaws of decay as toward the untwining, green shoot. Watching the things of the world come apart and recombine is core Zen work and the fundamental anchorage of every gardener's life."
November 23, 2014
Moving tales from Green Gulch Farm Zen Center in CA - a stunningly beautiful book that will take me forever to read as I plan to hand-color it as I move through. Watch for this one on my "currently reading" shelf for ~ the next 2 years....
An update from 11/2010: I have read and colored to page 100. My collection of green colored pencils is admirable. My favorite part of each evening is my time with this book....I'm in a delicious section about the texture, fragrance, taste of soils.
Update on 7/31/2012: past p.200 now.....coloring and reading at leisure. Especially loved the chapter "Gardening With All Beings".
And final update on 11/23/2014: I'm somewhat stunned to actually finish reading and hand-coloring this beautiful book....and fittingly, on a quiet Sunday after spending a rainy hour weeding and mulching in the winter garden. In the end, I spent 5 years - perfect.
An update from 11/2010: I have read and colored to page 100. My collection of green colored pencils is admirable. My favorite part of each evening is my time with this book....I'm in a delicious section about the texture, fragrance, taste of soils.
Update on 7/31/2012: past p.200 now.....coloring and reading at leisure. Especially loved the chapter "Gardening With All Beings".
And final update on 11/23/2014: I'm somewhat stunned to actually finish reading and hand-coloring this beautiful book....and fittingly, on a quiet Sunday after spending a rainy hour weeding and mulching in the winter garden. In the end, I spent 5 years - perfect.
August 25, 2008
Oh how I loved this book. I wish I head read it years earlier. The early part of the summer was spent with this book in my yard, enjoying all the inspiration she had put on paper. I was so enthused by it that I bought one for my mom to read with me. Well worth it.
February 10, 2010
I'm at page 107 and am deeply in love with this book. I have purposefully slowed way down in my reading pace because the writing is so meditative and elegant. This is a love story between a Zen Buddhist gardener and her little patches of earth, what grows and what lives therein. If you can read page 57 and 58 and not be completely enraptured by the world of plants then maybe gardening is not for you, nor is this book. It's definitely for me!
2/10/10 update: just finished what has become one of my favorite reads of all time. some reviewers have said this book gets preachy or tedious...and at moments it may have, but only because she cares so much. it was also evident that it was written over a long period of time and comes from years of journal entries, which I loved about it. but what I took away from it, well, it was a beautifully and lovingly written story about tending the earth and I will using it as a muse and reference source. thank you Wendy, for reminding why I garden, and care so much too.
2/10/10 update: just finished what has become one of my favorite reads of all time. some reviewers have said this book gets preachy or tedious...and at moments it may have, but only because she cares so much. it was also evident that it was written over a long period of time and comes from years of journal entries, which I loved about it. but what I took away from it, well, it was a beautifully and lovingly written story about tending the earth and I will using it as a muse and reference source. thank you Wendy, for reminding why I garden, and care so much too.
February 14, 2011
I wanted to like this well-blurbed book so much, I really did. In my twenties, I had the good fortune to have spent some time at Green Gulch Farm, knew several people who lived and worked there when I lived and worked as a gardener in San Francisco, and am an avid reader of garden writing and Zen philosophy in general, but I couldn't even get through the first chapter of this dragon of a book. Completely odd to me--and incongruous--that this book explores what it meant (and means) to spend a life gardening at a Zen retreat and pastoral organic farm in northern California, and yet the language used to tell us about that experience, though precise and surely authoritative, is technically wordy and tedious to read. I felt that there was likely great wisdom lurking here (why I give it two stars instead of one), but I can't get to it because of the endless "writing" which gets in the way. It made me feel as if I were back in school reading a lifeless textbook. Maybe you'll have better luck. Too bad.
June 16, 2020
This is the most amazing book I have ever read on gardening/farming. Having spent a good bit of time at the Green Gulch Zen Center and Tassajara, I have seen and experienced first-hand the honorable legacy Wendy Johnson and team have patterned into the land. Wendy Johnson was part of the original crew of the SF Zen community -- she is a zen practitioner, a knowledgeable farmer/gardener, a food and farm activist, and someone who is deeply rooted in the cycle of life. This book is packed with information on soil composition, insects/pests, and plant care -- in the most poetic way. Read this and you'll be out the door and in the dirt in no time!
Read
January 16, 2009If you can get past the jealousy of not living at Green Gulch Farm and Wendy Johnson's somewhat insufferable Zenness, it is a nice meditation on plants and being, and can be easily digested in bite-sized chunks. I am about 100 pages in, still enjoying it, feeling simultaneously that I want to go out and ready my side garden beds even though it's the dead of winter and the ground is frozen, and that I will never be able to tame the weeds, amend my soil, or bring order to the verdant chaos that is plantlife in an Iowa summer.
March 31, 2010
"Part Zen koan, part love poem to the land, part master's manual in the art and craft of gardening,..." autobiaography of Johnson's 30 years plus of living, meditation, and gardening at the Green Gulch Farm Center in northern California. There's something beautiful here for just about everyone! ann
February 4, 2020
Absolutely incredible book ... I was left wanting to read more!
So beautifully and poetically written.
Wendy takes you on a journey deep into the soil, into her heart and into the depths of gardening.
Her unique voice and perspective leaves readers feeling as though they had just been with a dear friend. I yearn to read more from her!
So beautifully and poetically written.
Wendy takes you on a journey deep into the soil, into her heart and into the depths of gardening.
Her unique voice and perspective leaves readers feeling as though they had just been with a dear friend. I yearn to read more from her!
December 13, 2024
It may have taken me over a year to finish this but considering it took Wendy 12 years to write it I’m not going to be hard on myself!
This book is a true delight and overlap of my passions for zen practice, gardening, and supporting local food systems. Wendy artfully weaves together gardening instructions, zen teachings, personal stories, and lively descriptions of the natural world to create a stunning resource that I will be coming back to for years on end. It reminds me of the zen version of Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle.
Every time I picked up this book I was inspired to go outside, slow down, and spend more time observing the miracle of nature. What a gift she has given us!
This book is a true delight and overlap of my passions for zen practice, gardening, and supporting local food systems. Wendy artfully weaves together gardening instructions, zen teachings, personal stories, and lively descriptions of the natural world to create a stunning resource that I will be coming back to for years on end. It reminds me of the zen version of Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle.
Every time I picked up this book I was inspired to go outside, slow down, and spend more time observing the miracle of nature. What a gift she has given us!
January 19, 2023
This book took ages to read, but in a good way. Johnson is a Buddhist gardener, who spent a lot of time in the Tassajara community and is the head gardener at Green Gulch in Marin. She talks about gardening through a Buddhist lens. So helpful for me as a spiritual gardener - not wanting to kill bugs, what do you do when they're eating everything? What is the process for mindful gardening? Loved these reflections; it's a book about Buddhism and a book about gardening.
June 20, 2019
I have been slowly reading this book for years, both cover to cover, and as a reference. It's inspiring, beautifully written with great little pencil sketches, and makes me want to eat things I can grow!
January 1, 2018
I return to this book again and again to remind me to reconnect with the deep spirit of the garden
March 12, 2019
This is a book to read slowly. Pick it up, read a chapter, set it down to let the information sink in and repeat. It takes a while to finish a book this way but it is worth it. More sticks with you.
did-not-finish
January 12, 2022really enjoyed it so far. unfortunately I had to return it to the library before I could finish. I'll come back to it when I can :)
September 22, 2023
The best book. The most beautiful book. My favourite book. Great for people who like Buddhism, gardening and beautifully descriptive prose. I like all three
July 14, 2024
Lovely, helpful, and inspiring. Best gardening book I have read.
June 18, 2013
A book about zen and gardening? Intriguing, eh? I was recommended this book by Christine Sine, author of Return to Our Senses: Reimagining How We Pray in a gardening seminar that she taught at her urban backyard garden.
The book is a slow entry (and it seems that many other Goodreads reviewers agree). The author is a devoted Zen practitioner and begins her story with a good bit of memoir and illumination of the Zen way. Even for somebody intrigued with Zen, this was difficult to absorb, written leisurely and ethereal as it is.
However, by the hundredth page or thereabouts, when the author begins really to blend Zen and gardening, I fell in love with the book and broke out sticky tabs to begin to mark a dozen pieces that I want to return to over and over again. The sections on soil and on composting were highlights for me.
A small nit from my perspective: The author is clearly not a big fan of small kids in her gardens, and while I understand why, i quickly tired of the attitude whenever the subject arose.
Yet this is a beautiful book about life and land, a good illustration of Zen, and a wonderful exploration of organic gardening.
The book is a slow entry (and it seems that many other Goodreads reviewers agree). The author is a devoted Zen practitioner and begins her story with a good bit of memoir and illumination of the Zen way. Even for somebody intrigued with Zen, this was difficult to absorb, written leisurely and ethereal as it is.
However, by the hundredth page or thereabouts, when the author begins really to blend Zen and gardening, I fell in love with the book and broke out sticky tabs to begin to mark a dozen pieces that I want to return to over and over again. The sections on soil and on composting were highlights for me.
A small nit from my perspective: The author is clearly not a big fan of small kids in her gardens, and while I understand why, i quickly tired of the attitude whenever the subject arose.
Yet this is a beautiful book about life and land, a good illustration of Zen, and a wonderful exploration of organic gardening.
September 15, 2011
I could not finish this book and it is rare for me to not finish a book. Too much rambling about this and that. The genuinely interesting part of the book is where the author tells her story; she has a very interesting background as a 60's era hippie who to this day lives in a commune. After reaching about page 400, i finally gave up and returned it to the library.
June 3, 2016
A lovely and delicate book, a slow, but not ponderous read, with rewards and drawings scattered throughout. Johnson has a different and maybe more adventurous, maybe more sedate, life. Her daily routine is the science and art of gardening, the art of sharing what she knows, and she knows a lot!
Peaceful, well-written, erudite and full of feeling, Johnson enthralls and compels thought.
Peaceful, well-written, erudite and full of feeling, Johnson enthralls and compels thought.
June 11, 2011
Great book not a reference book but undoubtedly will become a reference for me Wendy knows her plants and her fun story telling approach to teaching you about them is worth the time to read this tome
May 11, 2011
I've wanted to garden for a long time but never got around to it. This was the book that stirred me to motion and taught me a new way to look at gardening. If it weren't for this book my budding garden might still be the seed of an idea in my mind.
March 16, 2013
A work of intense love and devotion, filled with the trials and triumphs of zen gardening. I appreciate the depth and breadth of this gardening guide and memoir, but perhaps not the best read to read in the spring when I'm impatient to get started.
August 12, 2014
I cannot bring myself to finish this book. It is a treat every time I open it. It is so rich and wise and lovely that I want to keep it with me always. This one isn't one to finish but to savor for a very long time in small doses.
April 7, 2015
Beautifully written, humorous at times. Insight into many gardening methods for the purely organic gardener, and those of us who are working at becoming purely organic. There is also some Zen Buddhist insight and how the gardening can be a part of it. Very good book, recommended.
June 17, 2020
The book is profoundly beautifully written and inspiring on so many level. Yes, there is a lot of practical advice in here for gardeners, but it also opened my eyes and heart to a more meaningful relationship between me and the little plot of earth I call my garden. So grateful for this book.
Read
August 26, 2008Couldn't finish.
November 20, 2009
Fabulous book by an inspirational local gardener.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 49 reviews