http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/19/garden/19garden.html
Out of the Loss of a Garden, Another Life Lesson
Randy Harris for The New York Times
Five months after a storm sent the Hudson surging over the garden of Joan Dye Gussow, theplot reflects changes she had long wanted to make
ANNE RAVER
PIERMONT, N.Y.
EARLY one morning a couple of weeks ago, I helped Joan Dye Gussow, 81, lug three bags of topsoil to the riverbank, before it became too hot and humid to work in her garden, which sweeps down from her house to the Hudson River.
It was hard to get a grip on the heavy plastic bag, but Ms. Gussow, a nutritionist and matriarch of the eat-locally-think-globally food movement, is amazingly sturdy for an octogenarian, and she marched me down the wide clover path toward the river.
“It likes being walked on,” she said of the white clover, as we trudged past her tomato cages full of ripening San Marzanos and Sungolds, self-seeded rainbow chard, sweet potatoes, newly planted peas, Malabar spinach and many other vegetables that make up Ms. Gussow’s year-round food supply.
More than 35 years before Fritz Haeg started his Edible Estates: Attack on the Front Lawn project in 2005 — his effort to turn the country’s lawns into vegetable patches — Ms. Gussow and her husband, Alan, an artist, were already in that mode. They laid down trash, kitchen waste and weeds, covered with newspapers and salt hay (killing the grass and making compost at the same time) on the front lawn of their Victorian in Congers, N.Y. Their goal: to grow food for themselves and their two young sons, Adam and Seth.
They farmed that lawn for more than two decades before moving here, to do the same thing, in 1995.
Ms. Gussow had gone back to school in 1969 to earn a doctorate in nutrition at Columbia University, at a time when nutrition was all about vitamins and chemistry, not how food was grown and where it came from. She began connecting the dots between what Americans were eating and how that food — be it factory-farmed chicken or Twinkies — was produced.
She created a legendary course, Nutritional Ecology, which she still teaches today, with a former student, Toni Liquori, who as director of School Food Focus, a nationwide program, works with school districts to buy more healthful, locally grown food.
Because Ms. Gussow dared to talk about energy use, pollution, diabetes and obesity as the true costs of food, she was initially viewed as a maverick crank, but her connections inspired the work of people like Michael Pollan, whose book “In Defense of Food,” echoes many of her revelations.
“She has been a powerful influence on the food movement,” said Mr. Pollan, adding that he admires her “clarity of thinking” and her ability to cut through complex issues to the simple truth: “We all know nutrients are important,” he said. “But Joan says, ‘Eat food.’ That’s the kernel of ‘In Defense of Food.’ ”
Ms. Gussow’s thinking, like Mr. Pollan’s, has always been grounded in the garden.
That muggy morning, as temperatures headed for the high 90s, we dumped the bags of soil near the boardwalk, where, only a few feet away, mallards were paddling peacefully in the quiet water. It was hard to imagine that in March a storm had brought the river surging over the boardwalk, tearing up its boards and pilings, ripping raised beds out of the ground as it moved toward the house, burying the long narrow garden — 36 by 100 feet — under two feet of water.
You can read the story on Ms. Gussow’s Web site, joansgarden.org: “I found myself quite numb — not hysterical as I might have expected. I think it’s age,” she wrote, after sloshing about in her rubber boots the morning after. “There’s absolutely nothing I could have done to prevent it.”
The day of the storm, March 13, had been a momentous one: she had finished the revisions to her new book, “Growing Older: A Chronicle of Death, Life and Vegetables,” published by Chelsea Green, and due out in November. And for the first time in her long writing life — she has written, co-written or edited five books — she was about to get an advance.
The morning after, finding herself blocked by the debris of what used to be raised beds and the boardwalk, she went inside to call Dave Avdoyan, the landscaper who had built the boxes for those beds, as well as a low stone wall on the north side of the garden, which in recent years had blocked river water rising in a storm. Now it, too, was submerged.
She figured her plants, including her beloved fruit trees and azaleas, were a total loss. But Mr. Avdoyan surveyed the wreckage, looked over the fence at the empty lot next door, which had better drainage and wasn’t as flooded, and proposed a radical solution: using the lot as a staging area and trucking in enough fill to raise her bathtub of a garden two feet.
Now, looking about at her ebullient plants, many resurrected from the flood, Ms. Gussow said: “I’m not religious and I’m not superstitious, but I really feel that Mother Nature took care of me. This was the first time in 100 years this lot was open. The owner took down the house in January, and was not going to rebuild until April.”
And she had the advance to pay what ended up costing $10,000 for the materials and labor. “It feels like a gift to me,” she said. “This amazing event occurred, and gave me the opportunity to do something I’d been wanting to do for years.”
Over the next few weeks, friends from the city picked up lumber, and a neighbor stacked bricks and pavers from the paths on the boardwalk. Former students helped move hundreds of plants, stashing them in the driveway, on the deck, any corner they could find. Mr. Avdoyan and a helper rebuilt the boardwalk and friends replaced the filter cloth behind the rocks to keep soil from washing out with the river.
Then, on March 30, a high tide flooded the garden again.
Another week went by, and finally, Mr. Avdoyan set to work with his Caterpillar, forklifting plants like the still-blooming peach tree, the low ilex hedges and the azaleas right out of the ground, and trundling them over to the empty lot, where they were set in mounds of donated soil and compost.
After Mr. Avdoyan trucked in 200 yards of fill, a crew of 17 staff members from Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture, in Pocantico Hills, N.Y., came down to spread 30 yards of soil and compost from McEnroe Organic Farm, in Millerton, N.Y., donated by Helena Durst. Then they laid down pavers and bricks for walkways that now lie flush with the vegetable beds.
“I’m so happy the wood is gone — it wasn’t pretty,” Ms. Gussow said, referring to the planting boxes, as we walked down the cross paths, admiring her crops.
“It was a lot of work,” she said, recalling how she singlehandedly repotted hundreds of plants, including precious lily bulbs.
I loved the soft, wide path of white clover, which rarely has to be mowed, and made a mental note to plant one in my own garden. Ditto for the perennial arugula, which was thriving beneath the trifoliate orange tree given to her by Barbara Kingsolver, who also lives off the land. The arugula, which returns year after year, was given to her by Larry Bogdanow, an architect and gardener, at the Just Food benefit held at Sotheby’s on April 25, where 300 locavores toasted and roasted Ms. Gussow, as the mother of their movement.
Other flood victims were thriving here as well: The kiwi vines, lifted out of their root-bound urns by the flood, are now climbing their trellis. The peach tree, relocated in a sunnier spot, bore 75 peaches in late June.
I had been in this garden in 2001, when Ms. Gussow’s first memoir, “This Organic Life: Confessions of a Suburban Homesteader,” was published. That book chronicled the constant floods and the battles with woodchucks and neighbors that she and Alan had begun waging six years earlier, when they moved into their 150-year-old house, a former Odd Fellows Hall that sat right on the street. But its backyard faced east, toward the sunrise, and ran right to the river. The house turned out to be so rotten they had to demolish it and rebuild. Alan had only two and a half years to enjoy it before he died of cancer, in May 1997.
“Growing Older” picks up that story, beginning with Ms. Gussow’s revelation that, to her surprise, she did not miss her husband, or even grieve for him.
“I kept experiencing it as a strange liberation from things I hadn’t known I was imprisoned by,” she writes. Such honesty is characteristic of Ms. Gussow, whether she is discussing intimate relationships or the one the United States has with oil.
In a recent speech before the Society of Nutrition Education in Reno, Nev., she did not mince words. “Your children’s children will never see an iceberg,” she told the audience. “They will never see a glacier. There will be no penguins, no polar bears.”
And here we stood in her garden, which was simmering in a week of high humidity, with no rain. The morning news had told of wildfires burning up the forests in Russia, and of hundreds of people dying from the heat.
We came inside, because it was too hot to work, to make a breakfast of those luscious Marzanos, simmered in a little oil and cumin, and eggs.
“If we work out there in that sunshine, we would die,” Ms. Gussow said, pulling the label off the little plastic bag that had held the cumin, so she could use it again for something else. (Is cumin good for you? I asked. “I have no idea,” she replied. “I tend not to eat for that reason.”)
Her hero is Bill McKibben, the environmental activist whose latest book, “Eaarth,” will be a key text in her course at Columbia this fall.
She summed up his message: “It’s too late to live on Earth. We have to figure out how to live on this new planet. It’s not the planet we grew up on.”
Every year, she tries to prepare her students for the despair they inevitably feel as they consume the readings she has compiled on the world’s population, poverty, hunger, pollution, disease, loss of habitat and farmland, melting ice caps, oil spills and the like.
“All you can do is say: ‘You can’t be optimistic about the state of the world — what you can be is open-minded. You’re going to look for solutions, and you’re going to make your own life mean something. You can no longer think that accumulating money or the biggest house is the answer,’ ” she said.
She is encouraged by all the young people going into agriculture.
“In this unreal world of electronic communication, they want to do something real, with their hands,” she said. “It’s very creative and very intellectually challenging, despite what people think.”
Ms. Gussow figures she has a good 20 years, at least, to garden in this watery paradise. But time is finite.
“Would I be down to 15 springs before the pawpaw tree I planted as a seed finally began to bear?” she writes in “Growing Older.”
She is already at work on her next book. It’s called “Starting Over at 81.”
How to Keep the Crops In and the Woodchucks Out
HERE are some tips for vegetable gardeners from Joan Dye Gussow.
Make your own sweet-potato slips by suspending a sweet potato, speared with toothpicks, over a glass jar filled with water. It should form roots in a week or so and begin sprouting from the top. If it doesn’t, turn it upside down; roots will grow from the bottom and the top will sprout. When sprouts have leaves, snap the shoots off at the base and root in a glass of water.
Keep woodchucks, rabbits and other varmints out of the broccoli and cabbage patch by placing a piece of construction wire, curved in a hoop, over the plants, along the length of the bed. Add a layer of chicken wire. The mini-hoop house offers support as plants like brussels sprouts grow, and critters cannot get to tempting crops.
Use 16-inch-square pavers, edged with brick, to make a path two feet across, wide enough for walking or rolling a wheelbarrow. The path gives a crisp look to the crops in the beds on either side, which, in Ms. Gussow’s new garden, are now flush with it, not raised and edged with wood.
Ms. Gussow used to start her own chilies, eggplants and tomatoes from seed, but now she orders plants from Cross Country Nurseries (908-996-4646, chileplants.com), in Rosemont, N.J. The company ships live plants nationwide from April through June, and fresh chilies from September to frost.
To preserve chard, de-stem the leaves, then roll them up to julienne and lightly sauté. Put cupfuls on a tray and freeze. Place frozen cupfuls in a plastic bag, and stash in the freezer, to be used as needed.
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Who are the people behind the Seed Library? The farm and business are run by partners Ken Greene (on right in photo) and Doug Muller (on left). Our friend Linda-Brook Guenther of 
Our Art Packs are each designed by a different artist from the greater New York region (this includes upstate New York, the Hudson Valley, the City, Northern New Jersey, and Connecticut). Each pack celebrates the beauty inherent in heirloom gardening. 
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