Growing awareness Gardening guru Leslie Land answers many questions in new book

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Leslie Land stood barefoot on the kitchen floor of her Cushing cottage, tending to a lobster pot brimming with peonies.

“Come in,” she beckoned, as the heady perfume wafted through the screen door.

Summer weather came late to midcoast Maine this year, as it did along the whole Eastern Seaboard. Her peonies had barely shown a hint of pink in Cushing, so she imported dozens of the flowers from her garden in Moores Mill, N.Y., where she spends half the year.

Land knows that when it comes to gardening, sometimes you need to improvise as you wait for nature to do its thing, as with the peonies. Other times, say, when you have asparagus beetles, you need answers. And you need them now. That’s when Land’s new book, “The New York Times 1000 Gardening Questions & Answers” ($19.95, Workman), comes in handy.

“We wanted to be sure that the basics are covered in a book that you can still pick up without a forklift,” she said over a glass of iced coffee at her kitchen table.

Land had plenty to work with. Since 2000, she has written the “Gardening Q & A” column for the Times, first with co-writer Dora Galitzki of Rockport, and most recently on her own. For this book, she was part editor, part author, adding to past columns with comprehensive sidebars and arranging everything into a manageable format.

“I’m really excited that you can get 1,000 gardening answers for the price of a pizza and a beer,” Land said. “You don’t have to justify it. Here’s a useful, ready reference.”

For Land, utility was key. She has a background in service journalism that dates back to the 1970s, when she wrote a food column for the Camden Herald. She had just moved to Maine from Berkeley, Calif., where she went to graduate school and stayed on as a chef and caterer. At the time, she wasn’t sure what she wanted to do, but the Pennsylvania native knew she wanted to come back East.

“I just got in the car and drove until it looked good, and that turned out to be here,” Land said.

After her first winter in St. George, she heard about a sculptor in Cushing who had a summer place for rent. The sculptor in question was Bernard “Blackie” Langlais, who was hardly expecting a young woman to call him about a house that he had always rented to friends.

“I called him and said, ‘I understand you have a cottage to rent,’ and he said, ‘Who the hell are you?’ ” Land said, laughing. “It was like one of his sculptures. It was this little house right on the river, no running water, no plumbing of any kind.”

What it did have after Land’s first summer was an enormous vegetable garden. She had come to Maine from California, and the local grocery stores didn’t have quite the same selection.

“When I came, iceberg was the only lettuce, and canned peaches were a vegetable,” she said. “It was pretty minimal.”

So she took matters into her own hands, tearing up a quarter-acre plot of land and planting it with a mix of conventional and unconventional produce.

“It was a ridiculous size, but I didn’t know that at the time,” she said. “In part because I had so much land, I started to grow flowers, too. All hell sort of broke loose from there.”

She spent her summers in the garden and her winters looking after the home of Lois Dodd, a painter who spends part of the year in Manhattan. When Langlais’ wife tore down the summer cottage in 1979, Dodd told Land she could build on her property. There, she carved a series of gardens out of an overgrown, sloping parcel.

As her interest in gardening grew, it began to infiltrate her free-lance work, first in the context of food, and later in the context of the landscape. In time, she became the food-and-garden editor at First for Women magazine and then at Yankee, where she worked until 2000. By that time, she had moved to New York to be with her husband, Bill Bakaitis, a professor at Dutchess Community College.

“I’d still be here if I didn’t fall in love with someone who was tenured at Poughkeepsie,” Land said.

She spends summers in the Cushing cottage, though, and, with a little help from her green-thumb friends, Land’s gardens have evolved. Closest to the house is a plot of herbs and white flowers, edged by a shrub border. Beyond that, a white lilac stands, bonsai-like, heavy with blooms. Years of pruning have given the tree an unusual look and a small stature.

“Most lilacs will make big trees and most people let them, but lilacs take quite well to quite severe pruning,” Land said.

During an informal tour, she noted the interesting cultivars, including ‘Purple Majesty’ millet, which was named the annual of the year in 2002 by All-America Selections; and a grape-scented iris in her blue-purple plot. Like many of the plants in her garden, the iris was a gift from a friend.

Still barefoot, she walked up and down paths lined with straw and wood chips, plucking weeds along the way. She stopped at a bed of rocket (aka arugula), where flea beetles had chewed lacy patterns into the leaves.

“I’m not running a restaurant,” she said, snapping off a leaf and popping it into her mouth. “I don’t really care.”

Land isn’t a gardening perfectionist. She makes room for happy accidents, such as the volunteer larkspur and poppies that have crept in among the herbs; and the bed of dill that self-sowed in an unused spot. When weeds come in, she pulls them out, mulches heavily and deals with it.

“This garden is not too awfully tidy, but tidy gives me the pip,” she said. “It’s finding that place between order and just not worth worrying.”

Her flowers and vegetables coexist peacefully in a plot at the bottom of the hill, and one of her more recent projects, a yellow and pink border, was just starting to bloom. Land found inspiration for the border in a china bowl that she uses to serve cherries, proving that gardeners don’t need to look too far for ideas. In fact, Land says, many of the best tips can be found in a neighbor’s back yard.

“Go on garden tours,” Land said. “Get out of your garden, put on some comfortable shoes and go look because I can guarantee you’ll see something. Even if all the gardens that you see are fairly conventional, somebody will be doing something you can take away.”

If you need more advice, Land says, go to a local garden center staffed by people who know what they’re doing. If you need more than that, write her a letter. Who knows? Your question may even end up in a New York Times book.

But “1000 Gardening Questions & Answers” hardly needs a sequel. It covers the entire spectrum of gardening – flowers, landscaping, fruit, vegetables and herbs, container plants, compost, and insects. You don’t have to be a serious gardener to learn something from the book, but it may inspire you to become one.

“I think there’s a very bright line between people who just want something cheerful in the yard and people who truly enjoy gardening,” Land said.

“Everyone who genuinely loves gardening loves process as much as product. All the things about a continuous evolution of a relationship that involves growing things, that’s what makes a gardener.”