In My Father's Garden (Deep South Books)

This memoir is a heartfelt and touching portrait of a father and son overcoming their estranged past through a shared passion for gardening.


In My Father's Garden is a wise and moving account by award-winning essayist and journalist Lee May of reestablishing his relationship with his father after 39 years of separation. On a scorching June day in 1989, May cautiously made his way up a concrete walkway to the porch of a small house in Meridian, Mississippi. There in a porch chair sat his father, bent and gray at 80 years of age. The reunion was awkward, the conversation halting-until father and son walked around the house to the garden and stood before the immaculate rows of beans, peas, tomatoes, okra, peppers, potatoes, and squash.


May, himself a devoted gardener and nationally known writer on the subject, was immediately delighted and appreciative; in those fertile rows lay their common ground. The two men would build a new relationship out of their shared love of the earth and its fruits-both metaphorical and literal. Self-sufficiency, the appreciation of natural beauty and chance, respect for all growing, living things-these, they would agree, are the lessons that gardening teaches.


First published in 1995 to critical acclaim, In My Father's Garden offers a universal message of hope for broken or empty human relationships. As May's father says, "It's a risky run any way you go. If you fail, just plant again." The University of Alabama Press is proud to add this volume full of grace and homespun wisdom to its Deep South Books collection.