Summary

William Alexander had a simple dream of having a vegetable garden and small orchard in his backyard. It was a dream that would lead to life-and-death battles with groundhogs, webworms, and weeds; midnight expeditions in the dead of winter to dig up fresh thyme; skirmishes with neighbors who feed the vermin (i.e., deer); the near electrocution of the tree man; and the pity of his wife and children. When Alexander decided to run a cost-benefit analysis, adding up everything from the Havahart animal trap ($60) to the Velcro tomato wraps ($5) to the steel edging ($1,200), then amortizing it over the life of his garden, it came as quite a shock to learn that it cost him a staggering $64 to grow each tomato. A gardener with an existential bent, Alexander gives excellent advice about everything from peaches to leeks, while tackling such questions as What do our gardens tell us about ourselves? Do we get the gardens we deserve? And why does the groundhog have to take one bite from half a dozen tomatoes when any gardener would gladly grant him six bites of just one?

Author Biography

William Alexander, the author of two critically acclaimed books, lives in New York's Hudson Valley. By day the IT director at a research institute, he made his professional writing debut at the age of fifty-three with a national bestseller about gardening, The $64 Tomato. His second book, 52 Loaves, chronicled his quest to bake the perfect loaf of bread, a journey that took him to such far-flung places as a communal oven in Morocco and an abbey in France, as well as into his own backyard to grow, thresh, and winnow wheat. The Boston Globe called Alexander "wildly entertaining," the New York Times raved that "his timing and his delivery are flawless," and the Minneapolis Star Tribune observed that "the world would be a less interesting place without the William Alexanders who walk among us." A 2006 Quill Book Awards finalist, Alexander won a Bert Greene Award from the IACP for his article on bread, published in Saveur magazine. A passion bordering on obsession unifies all his writing. He has appeared on NPR's Morning Edition and at the National Book Festival in Washington DC and is a frequent contributor to the New York Times op-ed pages, where he has opined on such issues as the Christmas tree threatening to ignite his living room and the difficulties of being organic. Now, in Flirting with French, he turns his considerable writing talents to his perhaps less considerable skills: becoming fluent in the beautiful but maddeningly illogical French language.

Prologue: Gentleman Farmer	p. 1
Whore in the Bedroom, Horticulturist in the Garden	p. 3
We Know Where You Live	p. 21
One Man's Weed Is Jean-Georges's Salad	p. 47
No Such Thing as Organic Apples	p. 75
You May Be Smarter, But He's Got More Time	p. 96
Nature Abhors a Meadow (But Loves a Good Fire)	p. 131
Shell-Shocked: A Return to the Front (Burner)	p. 146
Christopher Walken, Gardener	p. 162
Cereal Killer	p. 186
Statuary Rape	p. 208
Harvest Jam	p. 220
The Existentialist in the Garden	p. 238
The $64 Tomato	p. 247
Childbirth. Da Vinci. Potatoes	p. 256
Acknowledgments	p. 267
Suggested Reading	p. 269
Recipes	p. 271
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

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Excerpts

Whore in the Bedroom, Horticulturist in the Garden "Nature, Mr. Allnutt, is what we are put in this world to rise above." -Katharine Hepburn to Humphrey Bogart in The African Queen Bridget arrived for her interview late, breathless, and blond. As we drank herbal tea around the kitchen table, she dug deep into a leather portfolio, emerging with glossy photographs of gardens she had designed for previous clients. Anne ooh-aahed over the photographs, which looked like rather ordinary gardens to me, but to be fair, I was only seeing them peripherally. My eyes were riveted on the hands holding the photographs. Delicate, lightly freckled hands with dirty-filthy-fingernails. Real gardener's fingernails. The effect was startling, at once repulsive and erotic. The phrase whore in the bedroom, horticulturist in the garden popped into my head. I tried to blink it away. When I finally looked up, Bridget smiled and squinted her crinkly green eyes at me. A winkless wink. Had I been caught ogling her dirty hands? After reviewing her credentials and our project, we strolled through the property, Bridget and I falling into lockstep as Anne trailed slightly behind. Passing various anonymous plants and flowers, Bridget would point to what was to me some nameless weedy shrub and exclaim in a breathless whisper something like, "Ah, a beautiful Maximus clitoris ." She knew all the botanical names, the Latin rolling off her tongue like steamy profanity in the heat of passion. We hired Bridget on the spot, without interviewing anyone else. It seems she'd made an impression on Anne as well. "Did you notice her beautiful teeth?" Anne sighed as Bridget drove off in her battered Toyota, vanishing in a cloud of smoke and noise. Beautiful teeth ? Who were we talking about, Seabiscuit? My wife, a physician, tends to be a little clinical at times. Sometimes I catch her taking my pulse or listening to my heart murmur while I think we're making love. So the fact that she would sit across from a beautiful woman and mainly notice her teeth should not have surprised me. In fact, Anne is fascinated with, and jealous of, anyone with better teeth than she, which is to say just about anyone born after about 1970. "Her teeth? Not really," I said, being more interested in my burgeoning dirty-fingernail fetish. We hired Bridget even though she had never designed a vegetable garden. Who has, after all? People hire landscape architects to design entire landscapes, or patio and pool plantings, or civic gardens. Who hires a professional to figure out where to put the tomatoes? You put down a few railroad ties and throw down some seeds, right? Not us. After two years of staring at "the baseball field," the elongated, sloping piece of land in a hollow between our kitchen and the neighbors' driveway, and after hours of studying garden-design books, we still hadn't a clue how to proceed. We wanted something more than the usual boring rectangular beds. We wanted a little pizzazz with our parsley. And it was, to be sure, a challenging space. Bordered on our neighbors' side by a railroad-tie retaining wall and on the opposite side by our ninety-year-old stone wall, the garden was oddly below grade and, after a rain, held water like a huge sponge. Furthermore, it sloped about fifteen feet along its seventy-five-foot length, so some type of terracing seemed inevitable. We needed professional help. The fact that we even had a suitable plot for a garden had come as a bit of a surprise. We had nicknamed the area "the baseball field" because both before and after we moved into our house, the neighborhood kids used it daily for baseball. Not our kids, of course. Katie was still a toddler, and Zach#8