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Overview
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.This eccentric, cross-country journey to discover why some people just have to make things grow simply rings with the singular voices of the people possessed. From wild-haired, rose-rustling ladies in Texas to an herb healer on a backwater Louisiana bayou to a manure-toting green guerrilla in New York City, Chotzinoff captures the fervor of the all-encompassing passion that can drive a person to grow an eight-pound tomato.
Synopsis
From a New York City Green Guerrilla to the Texas Rose Rustlers and a Colorado tomato fanatic, Chotzinoff serves up colorful profiles of americanca’s quirkiest, most fervent gardeners.
Publishers Weekly
There's no better antidote to the dreary non-gardening months than a great read, and in this gallery of colorful portraits, Chotzinoff, a columnist for Garden Design, delivers one of the most amusing, eclectic gardening books in recent memory. Curiosity led her to some unusual corners of the U.S.-locales as different as a Louisiana bayou, a New Mexico chile farm, an elegant Virginia estate and Manhattan's wild underbelly to name just a few-where she met with diverse and offbeat gardeners to find out what makes them tick. The result is a series of lively and highly entertaining interviews. Her subjects, sensing a kindred spirit in Chotzinoff, prove a winningly chatty group, and the author makes the most of their willingness to run on about their individual passions-be they rustling roses in Texas, collecting heirloom seeds or growing prize-winning giant tomatoes with names like "Radiator Charlie's Mortgage Lifter." Pull the chair up closer to the fire, sit back and enjoy the company. This group is sheer delight. (Feb.)