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    A Trace of Figs Paid Member

    By Wendy Johnson
    Not so long ago I had just finished pruning a beloved Black Mission fig tree when breaking archaeobotanical news rocked my world. A handful of charred figs, carbonized and unearthed in the ruins of a burned village north of the ancient city of Jericho, pushed the known dawn of agriculture back a thousand years to 9400 B.C.E. More »
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    Arranging Garbage Paid Member

    By Wendy Johnson
    IT WAS ALMOST DARK when I came upon the bobcat, walking alone on a steep overgrown trail far above the Green Gulch valley. She had been dead for weeks, her black-rimmed lips pulled back in a snarl of protest, tiny soot flies scouring her empty eye sockets. Her belly was slit open and she lay, disemboweled, in her own dry blood. The acrid stench of death rose off her matted fur. I considered carrying the bobcat down to bury her in the farm compost pile but decided against it. She was her own sovereign palace of decay, already well-consumed. More »
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    Winged Messenger Paid Member

    In high summer, when soft green butter lettuce is woven into a tapestry of opal basil and garnet radicchio, I stand in the center of the garden stretching my tired back muscles and watch the dragonflies work the warm afternoon air, harvesting a feast of insects. One of the fiercest and most effective carnivorous predators in the garden, a single dragonfly consumes twenty percent of its body weight daily by ingesting beneficial and pestiferous insects, including up to three hundred mosquitoes a day, as well as a few tender larvae from its own Odonata order of the “toothed ones.” More »
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    Original Flavor Paid Member

    By Wendy Johnson
    “Love winter,” wrote the poet-monk Thomas Merton, “when the plant says nothing.” Would that this were so for me, but when the ice winds of late January undress the last of the garden fruit trees, rather than abiding in dormant silence these plants begin to whisper in tongues, unraveling their long, winding stories. Whether I know the plants well or not makes little difference, as I learned last year while visiting the garden of some dharma friends in Sacramento for the first time. More »
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    A Harvest of Learning Paid Member

    By Wendy Johnson
    One day a week my Zen Center work includes leaving the well-ordered calm of our windbell meditation garden and heading east to Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School, where I work with a rowdy, rotating population of eleven- to fourteen-year-olds and their dedicated teachers cultivating a one-acre Edible Schoolyard garden in the heart of north Berkeley. “A school garden carries the life of the community,” proclaims a 1909 pamphlet on suggestions for garden work in California schools. This has been true for the Edible Schoolyard since its conception in 1995, when a local resident and the founder of Chez Panisse restaurant, Alice Waters, met with King Middle School principal Neil Smith to plan not only a garden within the school community but a school within the lively continuum of its garden and kitchen “classrooms.”More »
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    Medicine and Disease Subdue Each Other Paid Member

    By Wendy Johnson
    On the summer solstice of this year my youngest sister, Debbie, was diagnosed with breast cancer, revealed in a routine mammogram. The mother of two young sons, ages six and seven, she wasted no time in responding to this diagnosis, and by early August I found myself in her tenth-floor New York Hospital room awaiting her return to life following eight hours of major surgery. More »