Read Joyce Wadler’s story about William Alexander in today’s Home & Garden section of the Times.
The section is usually home to items like “The Reluctant Lily,” a Q and A. Urk.
Wadler is significantly more sophisticated; not just making lemons out of lemonade, she’s really writing now. Ostensibly it’s a book review: ‘WILLIAM ALEXANDER, by vocation a technology guy, is a home gardener for the love of it and the author of a new book, ‘The $64 Tomato: How One Man Nearly Lost His Sanity, Spent a Fortune and Endured an Existential Crisis in the Quest for the Perfect Garden.'”
But it’s so much more. Read it for grafs like these:
But trying to create the perfect garden took a toll. Mr. Alexander began with a dream of organic farming, which failed. The cost of creating the vegetable garden was considerable — $16,565, not counting yearly expenditures on seeds and plants. Mr. Alexander spent every leisure moment in the garden. At book’s end Mr. Alexander, now suffering from a torn disk, is wondering how to make gardening fun again.
Money, sex, aging. That’s real gardening!
– Tom McGeveran
