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Book review: 'Gate' keeper
The fruits of Wendy Johnson's labor—one helluva Zen gardening book...

by Elizabeth Stewart

GARDENING AT THE DRAGON'S GATE: AT WORK IN THE WILD AND CULTIVATED WORLD by Wendy Johnson. New York: Bantam Books, 2008. 447pp. $25.

The students of Zen Buddhism who studied in the '60s and '70s with Shunryu Suzuki Roshi at the San Francisco Zen Center have proved to be a wonderfully talented and creative group of poets, writers and artists. Though Suzuki Roshi died two years before Gardening at the Dragon's Gate's author Wendy Johnson arrived at Tassajara, she is one of their number. Nothing short of an instant classic, this long work—11 years in the writing—is part hard science, part history, part memoir, part distillation of Zen wisdom and part ardent protection for the world around us. It is also all poem. Johnson—a longtime gardener at Green Gulch Farm Zen Center, lay meditation teacher and founding member of California's food revolution—is a lyrical, fiery writer whose knowledge and spirit, commitment and humor shine off the page.

While an expatriate graduate student in Jerusalem in the early '70s, Johnson considered herself an activist, not a meditator. "Spare me!" she thought when a yoga teacher indicated that yoga was not her true path and offered to introduce her to Zen meditation. Nonetheless, she went to sit the next day and is still doing so more than 30 years later. She doesn't know what grabbed her, though in many years of teaching yoga, Johnson was the only student the teacher had ever singled out. "What held me from the first was the silent, wide-awake, undecorated truth of zazen, sitting meditation that somehow faced the world and deepened my life as an activist."

Shortly after arriving at Tassajara a few years later, where her gardening career "cracked open and took root," Johnson met her husband, Peter Rudnick. Before long the pair moved to Green Dragon Temple, as Green Gulch is formally known, and Johnson spent the next 25 years as a founder of the organic farm and garden program there, teaching gardening and environmental education, and establishing gardening programs in schools. These days she practices as a lay dharma teacher locally and nationally, while also teaching organic gardening for the Chez Panisse Edible Schoolyard program and elsewhere. "Our world faces unprecedented ecological destruction and soil destruction that includes a massive dying off of species..." Johnson writes, "We have no choice but to work together...The human race is 5 million years old...and it is time to act our age and fulfill our inheritance as human beings by responding to the cries of a world in trouble."

Though not the kind of person to seek out teachers—"the more they know, the faster I sprint"—Johnson does credit two remarkable men, "raw and ragged prophets," as mentors of a lifetime. Harry Roberts, part well-trained Yurok, part Irish, was the Green Gulch farm adviser in its early days. His main function: to help the students slow down and see the land. He wanted to pass on his Yurok medicine culture. It was Harry who correctly identified the fossil discovered by a student as a mastodon's tooth. Alan Chadwick, the eccentric English garden designer, had techniques that were "theatrical, rough and memorably vivid." He moved from spouting Shakespeare to strangling blue jays. He had a profound effect on Johnson, enlarging her vision of the garden and her place in it. Both men differed in procedure, not only from each other, but often from themselves as they offered slightly disparate versions of policy at various times. Far from finding this confusing, Johnson learned "how to trust my own wild, wobbling, and foolish self."

Gardening at the Dragon's Gate offers solid chapters on all aspects of gardening, each imbued with the Zen philosophy that lends itself so well to the cultivation of the land and the growing of fruit, flowers and vegetables. Soil composition, the secrets of compost, watering how-to's, weeding, pruning, "Gardening with All Beings" (subtitled "Pest or Guest?"), plant diseases and much more can be found here. Johnson's knowledge and interest go far beyond horticulture, though that is wide and deep. The reader enjoys the bonus of apposite quotations from many sources; poems; recipes, including a 500-year-old one for Leonardo da Vinci's pastels; menus; and interesting facts of every stripe. Nicely laid out and full of charming drawings by Davis Te Selle, the book's one drawback is its soft cover. Apparently the publisher did not fully connect with the material. Gardening at the Dragon's Gate will be around for generations and deserves better.