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length of string in between. Cath would go to one side of the garden with a stick in hand, while one of her brothers went to the other side. When everything was lined up the way he wanted it, Grandpa would say so and the sticks would be driven in. Following the string, he would carefully mark out the arrow-straight row, hoe in his right hand, wooden cane in his left. Then he’d point to his thumb to indicate how deep each kind of seed should go: Here, to this knuckle .
    Even there in the vegetable garden, where the soil was dedicated to the serious business of food production, Grandpa found room for whimsy. In the first section, behind the lettuce, grew a row of red, white, and pink peonies. Mom didn’t like those in the house either: Ants swarmed the unopened buds, feeding on the sweet resin. Alongside the main vegetable plot—corn, potatoes and onions, carrots and green beans, cucumbers, zucchini and yellow summer squash—stood a row of tall delphiniums, pale blue and dark purple.
    Cath’s grandfather had gardened professionally, too, tending ornamental plantings for local estates and businesses right into his eighties. Right up until the day he finished tidying the flower beds around the funeral home in town, climbed into his ’49 Ford, put the key in the ignition, and slumped over, struck by a heart attack. The undertaker found him in the driver’s seat.
    When we moved in together that spring, Cath still had his tools: a four-tined soil rake, an edger, a weeder, a heart-shaped hoe. And she also had his passion for forging relationships with soil and plants. For her, making a home meant building a garden.
    The idea appealed to me. My time living in New York City, educational though it had been, had left me feeling estranged from nature. It had left me longing to “rest in the grace of the world,” as Wendell Berry put it. Though I had never gardened much, I remembered enjoying what little I had done as a child, helping my mother with vegetables and marigolds. And I was eager to learn, to start growing my own food. With our landlady’s permission, we set to it.
    The tiny house—nestled along one side of a large, grassy clearing, with woods all around—had a timber-and-stucco look that made us think of a Tudor cottage. Where an ell extended from the original structure, the front door opened onto a patch of ground perhaps ten feet square, tiled with pieces of dark-gray slate, tufts of grass poking up between them. The two outer sides of the small, rough patio were bounded by the sloping lawn.
    With shovels, we cut out the sod in a three-foot-wide swath alongside the slate, then started into the earth beneath. It was reluctant ground. Levered with a shovel blade, it moved in chunks, clay-laden soil packed between pieces of dark shale the size of dinner plates. But Cath and I won out bit by bit, breaking up the dense earth, extracting the rock.
    To define the edges of the small raised beds—and to keep them from collapsing—we built miniature stacked-stone walls, first using the shale our digging had yielded, then hauling more from a pile we found on the opposite side of the clearing. When the edges were finished, two gently curved beds cradled the rough patio, one reaching out from alongside each of the cottage walls. We smoothed out the piles of upturned soil with Grandpa’s longtined rake and planted salad greens and flowers. Cath wanted forget-me-nots, dark delphiniums, and hollyhocks like those her grandfather had tended. I wanted orange marigolds like the ones I had helped my mother plant when I was a boy, and delicate purple irises like those that had grown in little bunches around the quarry’s edge.
    In summer, we extended the garden, working up the slope beside the cottage with shovels and, for one bone-jarring day, an undersized rototiller. The machine wanted no part of the dense soil, nor of the pieces of shale it locked onto. We levered out one slab the size of a coffee table. We surrounded the piles