Why do you garden? For fun? Work? Food? The reasons to garden are as unique as the gardener. The Roots of My Obsession features thirty essays from the most vital voices in gardening, exploring the myriad motives and impulses that cause a person to become a gardener. For some, it's the quest to achieve a personal vision of ultimate beauty; for others, it's a mission to heal the earth, or to grow a perfect peach. The essays are as distinct as their authors, and yet each one is direct, engaging, and from the heart. For Doug Tallamy, a love of plants is rooted first in a love of animals: "animals with two legs (birds), four legs (box turtles, salamanders, and foxes), six legs (butterflies and beetles), eight legs (spiders), dozens of legs (centipedes), hundreds of legs (millipedes), and even animals with no legs (snakes and pollywogs)." For Rosalind Creasy, it's "not the plant itself; it's how you use it in the garden." And for Sydney Eddison, the reason has changed throughout the years. Now, she "gardens for the moment." As you read, you may find yourself nodding your head in agreement, or gasping in disbelief. What you're sure to encounter is some of the best writing about the gardener's soul ever to appear. For anyone who cherishes the miracle of bringing forth life from the soil, The Roots of My Obsession is essential inspiration. Why would any sane person spend hours on hands and knees, courting aching joints and a ruined back, just to raise a bunch of plants? A rich, complex, and human answer can be found in the pages of The Roots of My Obsession. Thomas C. Cooper is senior editor at Boston College Magazine. He is also the former editor of Horticulture magazine and The Gardener. He has written for the New York Times and the Atlantic and is the author of Odds Lots. He lives in Watertown, Massachusetts. Introduction by Thomas C. Cooper There are at least thirty reasons that people end up as gardeners. The essays that follow are proof of that. In fact, the motivations are far more numerous. A few folks seem born with a seed clutched in their fists; others make the choice deliberately, having ruled out banking or triathlons. But for most people, including the authors of this book, their transformation into gardeners is evolutionary, the result of years, often generations, of small unnoticed actions, the way a piece of land is shaped by wind, rain, sunshine, and the antics of man, until it has been changed entirely. The accounts in the pages beyond, by many of today's finest garden writers, are portraits of that metamorphosis. I was raised on a strain of gardening that combined the minor virtues of engineering, math, Cold War chemistry, and internal combustion. My parents were a part of the victory garden generation, raised in an era when farming touched most recent family histories and those who had some land naturally grew food and flowers as part of their genetic makeup, not as an exercise in outdoor decorating. People were comfortable with the land and the tools for working it. Families had Ball jars on their shelves and big freezers in the basement. A power outage meant more than losing an unsaved email; it put the summer's beet crop, stored in neatly stacked white cartons, at risk. Gardening was a tangible and often essential part of life, which was lived closer to the ground. My father was the gardener in our family (my mother was the freezer, canner, and cook), and he was an active one. I don't know where he acquired the urge, although there was a family farm (with a water wheel and an Indian farmhand-he lived in a teepee, we were told) in Monsey, New York, some thirty-five miles northwest of Manhattan. It was a rolling, open landscape in the early days of the twentieth century, when lime was just gaining popularity. Whatever the instigating factors,

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