People with Dirty Hands

There was a wooden picnic table under the grape arbor, where Zelma sat all day when she wasn't actively gardening. She shelled peas, wrote letters, and mended clothes there. The older she got, she said, the less she wanted to be inside. Following Zelma's model, I will age ungracefully until I become an old woman in a small garden, doing whatever the hell I want. There was a time when this would have sounded unfulfilled to me, if not downright depressing, but now I look forward to it. Robin Chotzinoff From the Introduction

Introduction

1. Rustling Roses

2. Heat

3. Winter: Bugs and Seeds

4. City Dirt

5. Estates

6. Long Island Roots

7. Tomatoes

8. Natives

9. Road Trip: Medicine

10. Road Trip: Three Days in Oregon

11. What People Keep

Acknowledgments

Robin Chotzinoff is a staff writer for Denver's Westword and a contributor to Garden Design magazine, and she has written for New Republic and Outside. She lives with her daughter and her boyfriend in a log cabin outside Denver, where she gardens at 7,000 feet. People with Dirty Hands Why do some people have their hands in dirt? What causes someone to become obsessed with the process of growing something, whether it be a tangle of flowers, chiles hot enough to make your eyes water, or a rambling rose plucked from a tumbledown house? Author Robin Chotzinoff took a road trip (several, actually) across America to find the answers. People with Dirty Hands is what she found. It rings with the voices of people singularly possessed: Margaret Sharpe and Pam Puryear, founders of the Texas Rose Rustlers; Doug Beck, president of California Garden Ladies, who harvests hibernating ladybugs from their leafy beds for commercial sale; and Bill Palmer, whose garden is home to 450 tomato plants, simply because "You really can't buy a tomato." In vivid style, Chotzinoff captures the all-encompassing fervor—and hope—that can drive a person to create a vegetable garden from a concrete, hypodermic-strewn landscape or to plant seed while snow still threatens. It is the immutable promise of life. There was a wooden picnic table under the grape arbor, where Zelma sat all day when she wasn't actively gardening. She shelled peas, wrote letters, and mended clothes there. The older she got, she said, the less she wanted to be inside. Following Zelma's model, I will age ungracefully until I become an old woman in a small garden, doing whatever the hell I want. There was a time when this would have sounded unfulfilled to me, if not downright depressing, but now I look forward to it. Robin Chotzinoff From the Introduction