Leslie’s Garden

Letters grow into book

By Emmet Meara
Bangor Daily News

Leslie Land has carefully created one of the most famous gardens in the country. It has appeared in articles in The New York Times and Yankee Magazine, had appeared on international television and is about half the subject of “The 3,000 Mile Garden,” a gardening book Land created inadvertently when she started corresponding with English “pen pal,” Roger Phillips.

This celebrated plot of land will be opened Saturday, during an open house and garden tour, for the price of $75, all of which will go supporting the Georges River Land Trust. The ticket will include an autographed copy of the book, some tasty samplings from the Land kitchen, and an heirloom tomato seedling. Tours will be conducted at 9:30 a.m. and 1:30 p.m.

Over the last 15 years, Land has created two gardens on her tiny Cushing plot. The cutting garden has larkspur, cosmos and sweet peas, and tomato plants. The main garden features lilies, iris, sage, artemisia and a giant cow parsnip, among other flowers.

Gardens were always in the background of Land’s life. Her mother carefully tended generous gardens in their Pennsylvania home. When Land attended Berkeley, she worked to scratch the earth in a small yard dominated by tree roots. “There was no dirt,” she said.

When she left California after an overdose of trendiness on the West Coast in 1973, Land acquired a vintage car, learned to drive and kept on driving until she ran out of road, on the Maine coast. It was about as different from California as you could get.

Just what she wanted.

In a Rockland bar, she heard that a “Cushing sculptor” had a small cottage to rent at a price she could afford, next to nothing. If you want something in Cushing, you call Fales’ Store. From that socioeconomic center, she learned of the existence of Bernard “Blackie” Langlais, known unfortunately as Cushing’s “other artist.” First place was occupied by a man named Andrew Wyeth.

Langlais did indeed have a heatless, waterless, toiletless cabin hard by the St. George River.

Just what she wanted.

The place was available because some other back-to-the-land type had dropped out, at the last minute, possibly taking a place with running water. Land was ecstatic, since the place had 6 or 7 acres of fallow land, a perfect canvas for her suppressed desire for a garden.

Her desires ran wild as she ordered up a rototiller and created a 60-by-80- foot monster garden. She was already a gourmet cook, a talent which supported her on the West Coast. If you wanted eggplant, fresh basil or special lettuce in Maine in 1973, you had to grow it yourself. “There were very few farm stands. I tried to grow as much food for myself as possible,” she said. Land always had a big freezer available to store the fruits of her gardens.

But the most interesting part of Blackie’s cabin was something that was growing all by itself, something that would guide and change Land’s life in ways she could not imagine – mushrooms.

“It was one of those Maine summers. It was wet all the time. Down by the river under the oak trees, where the sun does not shine in a good year, there were mushrooms growing everywhere, millions of mushrooms. I knew a little bit about mushrooms. But here were 10, 20 different kinds in my dooryard,” she said.

Never one to sit idly by and watch soap operas (since she does not own a television) Land started out on a knowledge quest, which led her to the local mushroom guru, artist Lois Dodd.

The mushroom thus introduced her to Dodd, who has become her very best friend. The mushrooms brought her to her new house on land next to Dodd, where she placed a former garage and created a home. In 1980, she started her new garden there, on land actually owned by Dodd.

The mushrooms were not done yet.

In 1989, Land went to a mushroom conference in Rindge, N.H., where she met not only her significant other, William Bakaitis, but an Englishman named Roger Phillips, who had already sold a few million  books on flowers and gardening.

“It was the three days which shook the world,” Land said.

Coincidentally, Land had an article on The New York Times about her Cushing garden, which Phillips read before he went back to England.

Land recalled, “About three weeks later the phone rang and the voice on the other end said, ‘This is Roger. I have written you a letter and I want your address. If you give me your address I will send you the letter.’ So I did and he did and that is the first letter in the 3,000 Mile Garden. We just began to correspond. It was so much fun to have this pen pal. We had been writing the letters for about a year when he showed them to a personal friend, who happened to be an editor.

”She looked at this correspondence and asked of he considered publishing them. We really hadn’t. Being writers, we were always conscious writing to each other, wanting to write well. But it was a private thing.” Once it was decided to publish, “there were places where we filled in a gap or removed a personal thing. But the letters you read in the book are the letters we wrote,” Land said.

The magic mushrooms were still not done.

The book was published in England to good reviews. “It was putting along politely,” Land said. “It was not a blockbuster. We hardly knew what we were doing. A woman editor for Channel 4 in England read the book and thought it would make good television. There was no agent, no mutual friend. She was looking at 1,000 scripts a week. This was her bedside table book and she felt it would be a good television show.”

The woman approached Land and Phillips. After some fears were quieted, they agreed. Simultaneous productions started in England and Maine. Phillips was used to crowds, but Land considered her garden an intensely private effort. It took her some work to accept a film crew of seven or eight traipsing around her for almost a year.

The first broadcast aired in England in February 1995. The first showing in the United States was Christmas Eve 1995. The show debuted in Maine in April 1995. “I do not have official ratings, but I understand it is doing very well,” Land said. About 150 stations in most major markets have picked up the show.

“I don’t expect to get rich on the book. No one gets murdered in this book. There is no part of this book that is terrifying. There is no part in this book that a 10-year-old can’t read. Those are basically the ingredients for a best seller,” Land said. She guessed that the book has sold 20,000 to 25,000 copies.

Now there are plans for a second book, and possibly a second television series. Land and Phillips will address the National Geographic Society in Washington D.C. in November.

And all this success goes back to Blackie’s magic mushrooms.