Author(s): Scott Chaskey (Contribution by)

Gardening

As a farmer with decades spent working in fields, Scott Chaskey has been shaped by daily attention to the earth. A leader in the international Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) movement, he has combined a longstanding commitment to food sovereignty and organic farming with a belief that humble attention to microbial life and diversity of species provides invaluable lessons for building healthy human communities. Along the way, even while planning rotations of fields, ordering seeds, tending to crops and their ecosystems, Chaskey was writing. And in this lively collection of essays, he recalls learning to cultivate plants and nourish reciprocal relationships among species on the ancestral lands of the Abenaki, even as he was reading Years and beginning to write poems. He cycles across Ireland, meets Seamus Heaney, and farms in Cornwall's ancient landscape. He travels to China, then to the pueblo of Santa Clara in New Mexico, where he joins a group of Indigenous women harvesting amaranth seeds. Closer to home on the Southfork of Long Island, he plants redwood saplings and writes verse under the canopy of an American beech. "Enlivened by decades of work in open fields washed by the salt spray of the Atlantic"-words that describe his prose as well as his vision of connectedness-Scott Chaskey has given us a book for our time. A seed of hope and regeneration.