Gardeners use roots to keep past alive

Our notions of right and suitable food are strongly colored by early experience. For me, the ideal dinner was, and always shall be, that served by my Virginia grandmother during World War II: a roasting chicken brought by horse and buggy from a Mennonite farm, asparagus and tomatoes from my great-aunt's victory garden, and grocery-store rice, plus biscuits and devil's food cake baked that very day in my grandmother's kitchen. Today, no matter where I am, that dinner retains its primacy.

In her grand new book "The Earth Knows My Name," master gardener Patricia Klindienst crosses the United States to talk with men and women who have re-created New World gardens faithful to their native cultures. One of them, Polish-American Gerard Bentryn, now a vintner on Bainbridge Island, Wash., crystallizes the immigrant experience when he tells her, "First you lose your costume. Then you lose your language. The last thing you lose is your food."

Her quest was inspired by an unlikely gardener, the anarchist Bartolomeo Vanzetti. As he lingered in prison before his execution, he found solace in memories of his father's lush gardens in Italy (not incidentally, the native land of Klindienst's family). Vanzetti's words led her to this theme: "Where might we begin the work of remembering who and what we are? The simple answer I offer here is, in the gardens of ethnic Americans."

Oh, the gardens she tours! They are as multifarious as the people who cultivate and cherish them. The first garden is that of Clayton Brascoupe, a Native American living in Tesuque Pueblo, N.M. He aims with considerable success to restore traditional Three Sisters practices -- gardens interplanted with corn, squash and beans -- to this arid land. Why aim for restoration? Haven't the three sisters been the prime crops since time immemorial? As she does on every garden visit, Klindienst looks here into the history of this region -- the coming of the Spaniards, their introduction of foreign livestock and crops, and the native population's loss of much, from language to religion. Brascoupe, understanding that the land is sacred, teaches several methods by which it can maintain its integrity: biointensive gardening, which restores soil, and permaculture, "a design system for creating sustainable human environments."

Soon Klindienst takes us across the country to two Gullah gardens on St. Helena Island, S.C. It is a community, possessed of a black majority, in which African, Native American and European cultures have long intermingled. Since plantation days, its gardens have been many and diverse, from cash-crop fields and kitchen gardens to provision gardens tended by slaves for their own use. Black people have owned land there since attaining freedom in 1863. One of the Gullah gardeners is reviving a crop that was once an economic staple -- indigo. Another gardner raises vegetables which he sells from his tailgate. "I love my land," he says. "I love right where I'm at. You got to love your land. Just like you love your husband or wife."

But agribusiness and condominiums threaten, and the community's youngsters move away.

The farmers on Washington's Bainbridge Island face a similar dilemma: the arrival of high-dollar developments and an astronomical increase in real estate taxes. Can farms survive in onrushing commercialization? Klindienst provides no answers but lets us see instead the history of the people who work the farms today. Akio Suyematsu, a berry farmer sharing land with Gerard Bentryn, was interned during World War II and, as a consequence, nearly lost the property that his family had long owned.