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Reviews and Blurbs |
The Rockland Review
The Rutland (Vt.) Herald
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Murphy’s Law strikes the garden
What gardener doesn’t indulge in schadenfreude from the smug perch of an
armchair in early spring, before their own epic mistakes come to roost in
their exotics? THE $64 TOMATO is a delicious ride
through one man’s seriocomic horticultural adventure: to create the most
impressive garden ever to set off his historic, rundown old heap of a house in
New York’s Hudson Valley. And that man, William Alexander — husband,
father and director of technology by day — meets his emotional and intellectual
match while cultivating a few acres of fruits, vegetables,
roses and cottage flowers. Encountering the
"jolly" act of weeding more than 20 beds and trying to
figure out how the sod mealworms got up the hill to
his corn, his transformation to gentleman farmer
well-versed in Murphy’s Law is presented in chapters
including One Man’s Weed Is Jean-Georges’s Salad,
Nature Abhors a Meadow (But Loves a Good Fire),
Statuary Rape, and Whore in the Bedroom,
Horticulturist in the Garden. As Alexander cans
peaches, learns to garden with his wife ("like trying to
grow mint and horseradish in the same bed"), fights
Japanese beetles and works with a gardener who looks
and acts suspiciously like the actor Christopher Walken, readers will relate to
his basic philosophical dilemma: am I becoming my garden, or is my garden
becoming me? Through follies and mistakes and temper tantrums and bad
decisions that reveal more about personality and character than he’d like to
admit (this "committed environmentalist" once soaked his vegetables in the
pesticide diazinon in a fit over bugs), Alexander is eventually humbled and
awed by Mother Nature’s final word, always delivered without anger or
acrimony.
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