Within the six acres, which were once a neglected field of knapweed, came stories fertile with inspiration that reached beyond the rows of sweet corn and robust basil.
Farmers, like artists, know intimately what dreams and perseverance can achieve, and the farmers of this Rattlesnake garden have watched tendrils of individual acts weave into a stunning tapestry of community committed to health and local agriculture.
Several seasons ago, as hands and hearts tended the garden, talk of a book, a collection of prose and artwork, floated among seedlings in the spring and matured like tubers with the coming winter harvest.
A chapbook, it was decided, a locally produced and organized effort, would contain the reflections on food and farming.
Writers and artists connected to western Montana were asked to help express the profound experience called farming.
Authors such as William Kittredge, Gretel Ehrlich, Barbara Kingsolver and Wendell Berry, songwriter Greg Brown and poet Deborah Slicer - and many others - were eager to oblige.
When the idea came to fruition, it would be called "Staying Home" - a showcase of how the land nourishes and strengthens this place we call home.
The work is now ready for consumption and is available in local bookstores. The hands that made it happen will be signing the collective creation at Missoula's Fact & Fiction bookstore at 7 p.m. Tuesday.
"There are some wonderful pieces of writing that give voice to the importance and pleasures and hardships of participating in something so basic and vital as our food," said Tim Ballard, director of the garden's Youth Harvest Project, a therapeutic program for Missoula-area youth.
"It's also about the unexpected rewards of attending to the ground one is standing on and how this feeds us in ways far beyond physical nourishment," he said. "Anyone who has ever had a garden or even an apple off their backyard tree - or goods from a local gardener - knows this."
Between the book's covers are delicious servings of history, drawings, photos and literary works by renowned Western writers and from the laborers who tend the garden.
"My hope is that the people who read this book will get excited about preserving Missoula's agriculture heritage, and as they read, they become more linked with the place they live," said Josh Slotnick, farm director.
"In the 1950s, the biggest employment sector in this area was in food processing, and now we have none," Slotnick said. "If we were to revive that history, if more people were to buy locally grown products, we would have a lot more jobs.
"I think society has largely forgotten that if we nurture the land, it will give back."
And thus begins "Staying Home":
"Missoula: the Garden City. So named when a Deer Lodge newspaper editor waxed poetic about the 'acres of flamboyant floral blooms, flourishing crops of vegetables, and orchards of apple, pear, and plum trees,' he observed during a visit to Missoula in 1869.
"It was an apt name at the time."
Reporter Betsy Cohen can be reached at 523-5253 or at bcohen@missoulian.com
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