Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["TradingPostPaul" <tradingpost@riseup.net>]

http://www.insidebayarea.com/sanmateocountytimes/localnews/ci_3999644

Book dedicated to Redwood City pair lauds immigrant gardens
By Joan Aragone, CORRESPONDENT
Article Last Updated:06/30/2006 12:26:46 PM PDT
My father grew roses.

Under the heavy fog of the outer Sunset in San Francisco, he created a lush
wonderland of fragrant rose bushes surrounded by purple, red and white
sweet peas climbing trellises he had made, and primroses and pansies
marking the borders. Every night, my mother cooked with his tomatoes,
zucchini or rosemary or used lemons from the tree. To me, it was just "the
backyard."

Children of Italian immigrants, my parents considered a garden as basic to
a home as furniture. From the soil they drew both sustenance and beauty. It
was their tradition.

An excellent new book, "The Earth Knows My Name: Food, Culture and
Sustainability in the Gardens of Ethnic Americans," by Patricia Klindienst
(Beacon Press, 2006) explores this connection between ethnic Americans and
the land.

In 15 fascinating interviews, ranging from native Americans in the pueblos
of New Mexico to the descendants of freed African slaves (Gullahs) of South
Carolina, Cambodians in western Massachusetts, East Indians in Southern
California and other transplanted Americans, Klindienst talked with people
"keenly aware they straddle two cultures" whose connection to the land
allows them to remember their native cultures while they "put down roots"
in the new place and find nurturance for bodies and souls.

The book is dedicated to a local couple, the late Maska and Mario
Pellegrini, who lived and gardened in Redwood City, and whose stories are
included. Interviewed in 1999, Mario died in 2002 and
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Maska in 2005.

Klindienst, whose mother was the daughter of Italian immigrants, dedicated
the book to the Pellegrinis because, she said, "They helped me to
understand my mother's experience as an immigrant and my own Italian
heritage. I felt close to them and indebted to them."

She met them while visiting her own mother, who was suffering from dementia
and visited them after her death. "They were the only ones who died before
the book was published," she said.

Maska Pillanini, from the Veneto area of Italy, came to California with her
mother and siblings to join their father as Benito Mussolini was
consolidating his power in 1927. Mario, who had been born in Santa Cruz in
1904 and raised in Italy, left his Tuscan village in 1925, fleeing
retaliation after defending a friend against Mussolini's blackshirt thugs
(Mario's brother, musician Gino Pellegrini, was director of the Aurora
Mandolin Orchestra until his death earlier this year). The couple met in
the Bay Area.

>From Klindienst's book, it's clear the Mario and Maska transported to
California an Italian appreciation for growing, preparing and eating fresh
food, for respecting the land, for protecting environmental beauty and for
preserving skilled craftsmanship. They designed and maintained their large
garden, started in many cases with seeds Maska had carried from Italy.
Working as a team, stonecutter Mario prepared the ground, created the
design and lined the paths with large stones he had made while Maska did
the planting. They propagated and grafted plants and created a rich
landscape of vegetables, colorful flower beds, fruit trees, herbs,
varieties of tomatoes. Both pruned, canned and dried fruits, made jam and
shared their bounty with friends and relatives.

"Maska and all the people in the book never stopped for a moment in their
lives," Klindienst said. "They all supported small sustainable gardening."

Daughter Sonia Pellegrini Picone of Redwood City, who said she was unaware
of her parents' gardening skills until her mother's last illness, has begun
gardening herself.

For Klindienst, the gardens were a way for immigrants or other outsiders to
retain contact with their heritage.

"Pressure to assimilate was very strong, but the gardens were a place where
they did not have to assimilate," she said. "Many had fled hunger, so the
gardens were also important as a way to feed themselves."

A master gardener in Connecticut where she lives, Klindienst found her
subjects through personal contacts and focused searching. She learned of
the Pellegrinis through friends in Palo Alto acquainted with a friend of
Sonia Picone. Another friend supplied a news clipping of a Cambodian
family's garden in an East Coast town.

The original impetus for the book came from discovery of a 1927 photograph
showing Klindienst's family with a newspaper announcing the death sentence
of Italian immigrant Bartolomeo Vanzetti, charged, with fellow immigrant
Nicolo Sacco, with robbery and murder. Although witnesses had put them away
from the scene of the crime, other individuals had confessed, and federal
agents testified to belief in the Italians' innocence, the two were
executed the following day. Looking for reasons why her grandfather wanted
to remember that day with a photo, Klindienst read Vanzetti's letters.

In a final letter to a supporter, Klindienst found, Vanzetti reminisced
about the beauty of his father's gardens in Italy.

"What power does a garden have that a condemned man can turn from anguish
to rapture in remembering it?" Klindienst asked herself.

This lovely book and its conversations with immigrants from around the
world answers that question.

Klindienst teaches creative writing during summers at Yale.