Food, Culture, and Sustainability in the Gardens of Ethnic America
by Patricia Klindienst

Inspired by her own family's immigrant history, Patricia Klindienst traveled the country in the early 2000s, gathering stories from gardeners who are rarely presented in books about American gardens, among them Native Americans in New Mexico, Khmer growers in Western Massachusetts, Gullah elders on St. Helena Island, South Carolina, and Italian immigrants in California.

 

In The Earth Knows My Name, Klindienst writes about the ways these gardeners maintain their cultural identities through their connections to their gardens. The beautiful gardens Klindienst discovered, each one an island of hope, offer us a model—on a sustainable scale—of a truly restorative ecology. Her unique book is an inspiring and lyrical exploration of the power of gardens in transmitting culture.