There Is a Garden in the Mind

There Is a Garden in the Mind presents an engaging look at the work and life of pioneering organic gardener Alan Chadwick and his profound influence on the organic farming movement. In this wide-ranging and philosophical memoir, author Paul Lee recounts his first serendipitous meeting with Chadwick in Santa Cruz, California, in 1967, and their subsequent founding of the Chadwick Garden at UC Santa Cruz, the first organic and biointensive garden at a U.S. university. Today, there are few who would dispute the ecological and health benefits of organically produced food, and the student garden project founded by Chadwick and Lee has evolved into a world-renowned research center that helps third-world farmers obtain high yields using organic gardening. But when Chadwick and Lee first broke ground in the 1960s, the term organic belonged to the university's chemists, and the Chadwick Garden spurred a heated battle against the whole system of industrial existence. Lee's memoir contextualizes this struggle by examining the centuries-old history of the conflict between industrial science and organic nature, the roots of the modern environmental movement and the slow food movement, and the origin of the term organic. His account of Chadwick's work fills in a gap in the history of the sustainable agriculture movement and proposes that Chadwick's groundwork continues to bear fruit in today's burgeoning urban garden, locavore, and self-sufficiency movements.Table of contents:Chapter one The English Gardener ArrivesChapter two The English Gardener Goes to WorkChapter three The Garden PlotChapter four Goethe the Vitalist contra Newton the PhysicalistChapter five Urea! I Found It!Chapter six USA and Earth DayChapter seven The MethodChapter eight Chadwick DepartsChapter nine A Moral Equivalent of WarChapter ten The Death of ChadwickChapter eleven California Cuisine and the Homeless Garden ProjectChapter twelve A Biodynamic Garden on Long IslandChapter thirteen Chadwick's Legacy