The Garden: New Book about the Counterculture and Organic Farming

Finally, a book that covers the connection between the counterculture and organic farming!

What’s the connection between organic farming and the counterculture? There surely is a connection—after all, a large percentage of the Baby Boomer organic farmers I’ve met self-identify as hippies. But organic farming is barely mentioned in most existing histories of the counterculture, which focus almost exclusively on sex, drugs, rock-and-roll, and politics.

That’s why Matthew Ingram’s new book The Garden: Visionary Growers and Farmers of the Counterculture (Repeater Books, 2025) is so important. Drawing from his deep knowledge of and sympathy with countercultural ideas, Ingram profiles numerous people who combined those ideas with organic farming. Much of the book is based on Ingram’s interviews with key countercultural organic farmers, including John Jeavons, Eliot Coleman, and David Holmgren. Ingram is British, but more than half of the people he profiles are Americans, and he traveled to the US to interview them in person.

The Garden is divided up topically, with chapters focusing on each key connection between the counterculture and gardening. He covers both countercultural gardening leaders and the earlier writers who influenced them. The chapter on biodynamics, for example, starts with Rudolf Steiner and moves on to Alan Chadwick and John Jeavons’s French intensive/biodynamic farming system. The organic farming chapter goes all the way from Sir Albert Howard to Dave Chapman and the Real Organic Project.

All the leading back-to-the-landers are there, from Ralph Borsodi to Helen and Scott Nearing. So is Jean Hay Bright, whose book Meanwhile, Next Door to the Good Life explains why many hippies eventually became disillusioned with the Nearings. Several leading communes are covered, with an honest assessment of their successes and failures from an agricultural perspective. There’s a detailed history of the New Alchemy Institute and the story of how Larry Korn worked to get Masanobu Fukuoka’s One Straw Revolution translated into English. Permaculture, ecology, macrobiotics, Findhorn, even marijuana—if it has a countercultural connection, it’s somewhere in this book. Plentiful subheadings make it easy to find each person and topic, which helps make up for the lack of an index.

At 518 pages, this book is a little on the long side, but it’s also the most comprehensive yet on the connection between the counterculture and organic gardening. Having tried to research the counterculture myself and knowing how incoherent some of the source material is, I’m especially impressed at Ingram’s ability to structure each chapter into a readable narrative. For example, he’s able to explain Raymond Mungo’s philosophy from the book Total Loss Farm, which I tried to read a while back but only made it through a few pages because of the incomprehensible (to me) style. Ingram translates the countercultural ideas into language that those of us who didn’t live through the sixties or take a trip on LSD can understand.

“For all the avalanche of popular and academic literature about the back-to-the-land movement and the communes, practically none of the writing and theorizing in what are otherwise often wonderful books deal with this generation-wide ‘will-to-grow,’” Ingram accurately observes (p. 157). His book fills in that gap and provides a valuable and much-needed contribution to the growing literature on organic farming history.