Editor Reviews:

Product Description:
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.

Rating : - 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).