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    Spring Weeds Paid Member

    By Wendy Johnson
    Spring comes to the coast of California in early February, like an over-eager dinner guest arriving an hour and a half before the appointed feast. We have barely recovered from bringing in the November harvest of Baldwin apples and winter potatoes when spring touches the bleak, windswept land. With a mixture of dread and awe, I watch as the white petals of our old plum tree push against their bud casings and burst open, announcing the new season. More »
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    Year of the Rat Paid Member

    By Wendy Johnson
    In early summer, just when gardeners should be tying up the waving tentacles of Marmande tomatoes or pinching back the tips of imperial larkspur, I find myself once again at the periphery of the garden, sowing a fresh border of Good Bug Blend. This miracle mixture of herb, flower, and vegetable seeds is sown to attract beneficial insects to the garden. These “good bugs” - the golden chalcid and the minute pirate bBug, the green lacewing and the big-eyed bug - are all natural pest control allies that keep the June garden clean of pernicious troublemakers. More »
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    The Nothingness of the Ground Paid Member

    By Wendy Johnson
    In the winter garden we have been pruning the Old Roses for a solid month, caught in a thicket of crossed canes and swollen buds. We planted this garden almost twenty years ago, and today I am the cowering servant of Rosa mundi and great maiden’s blush. These roses thrash me soundly if my pruning shear mindfulness wavers in their ancient presence. And it does. This morning there was an eruption of wildlife at the base of the great maiden’s blush, a rose whose original name in her native French is cuisse de nymphe, or “The Inner Thigh of the Nymph,” a name which evokes perfectly both the suffused pink color of the rose as well as the source of her modest, anglicized name. More »
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    Tell It Slant Paid Member

    By Wendy Johnson
    Of all the seasons in the garden I love the dead of winter best. In icy February when storms from the Gulf of Alaska pelt the frozen ground with hail, the bare-boned skeleton of the dormant garden stands revealed in the stiletto wind. More »
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    An Enduring Crop Paid Member

    By Wendy Johnson
    I remember that late spring morning about seven years ago, working in the lower fields of Green Gulch Farm, harvesting rainbow chard for our local food bank with a group of elementary school students from San Francisco. The kids were fanned out in a rainbow arc themselves, spanning the field, chattering as they harvested crates of greens. One child, a pale and strangely mute boy of about ten, wandered away from his classmates to stand alone at the edge of the field, where farm irrigation sprinklers were watering the next line of crops. The May morning was warm, without a breath of wind. More »
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    Non-Zen Elements Paid Member

    By Wendy Johnson
    I MET MY TAPROOT garden teacher, Alan Chadwick, twenty-six years ago at the end of his life. He had less than six months to live and he knew it. He was a gaunt, kingly man, seventy-one years old and impossibly handsome. A mixture of Old Testament prophet and renegade monk in the tradition of Ikkyu, Alan inhabited the still-fiery body and mind of an aristocratic mad English gardener and a Shakespearean actor. Although prostate cancer was ravaging his body, Alan had come home to Green Gulch not to die but to live out and teach his remaining days. More »