In a time when the word “immigrant” conjures up negative images of night-vision border crossings and fear, the The Earth Knows My Name steers the conversation in a more humane direction.

The author Patricia Klindienst reminds us that, whether we are first generation Asian-Americans or eighth generation descendents of Spanish settlers, almost all American families immigrated to this land. And land lies at the heart of this book: homeland and adoptive land, farmland and forgotten land.

Klindienst, a master gardener and creative writing teacher in Yale’s summer courses, presents the stories of 15 American gardeners, ranging from recent Punjabi immigrants to an 11th-generation descendent of the earliest European settlers. Her own family having emigrated from Italy, the author settled on the topic after a discovering a family photograph that hinted at an even older story of American immigrants and gardening, a story that ended in the wrongful execution of two men in 1927. Initially she spoke with only Italian-American gardeners, later broadening her scope to many ethnic backgrounds while intentions and methods remained the same.

The Earth Knows My Name is a successful and compelling fusion of oral history and personal narrative. Gardening proves to be an appropriate and fertile vein through which to approach the immigrant experience, with its appropriate metaphors of uprooted plants and transplanting, new soil and a certain hope in the bounty of the future.

Gardens are more than mere ornamentation; they are sources of familiar fruits and vegetables. Food serves not only as a source of nutrition for these ethnic gardeners, but also fulfills some deeper craving.

“Food is a form of deep memory,” says Klindienst. “Through food they are linked to their native landscape, to its soil, its water and its trees.”

And it is here, in the gardener’s recognition of the connectedness of the social and natural world, that The Earth Knows My Name offers its greatest lesson.

This article orginally appeared in the January/ February 2007 edition of World Ark, the magazine of Heifer International. Reviewed By Jaman Matthews, Heifer Staff Writer. Used by permission.