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Gardens have often been used as metaphors for spiritual nurturing and growth. Zen rock gardens, monastery rose gardens, even your grandmother's vegetable garden all have been described as places of refuge and reflection. Drawing on her experience working at Seattle's premier gardening center, Zen teacher Geri Larkin shows how the act of gardening can help you uncover your inner creativity, enthusiasm, vigilance, and joy. As your garden grows, so will your spirit.

Larkin takes you through the steps of planning, planting, nurturing, and maintaining a garden while offering funny stories and inspiring lessons on what plants can teach us about our lives. As soothing as a bowl of homemade vegetable soup, Plant Seed, Pull Weed will entertain, charm, and inspire you to get your hands dirty and dig deep to cultivate your inner self.

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A Book About Pulling Weeds in Your Yard -- and in Your Spiritual Approach to a Better Life

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Geri Larkin's life has taken her from the heights of American business to the simplicity of Buddhist practice. She began her career as a jet-setting business consultant -- and is ending it as a sort of free-lance teacher and landscape consultant living in a tiny home in the Pacific Northwest. In fact, in this new book she writes that when she volunteers at an emergency food bank -- it's impossible to tell her and the other folks running the program from the clients in need of the emergency food. It's a wonderful journey, which Geri has laid out for readers in a series of books that are half spiritual memoir and half Zen advice about everything from personal relations to -- in this new book -- cooking up the dandelions you've pulled from your front yard. Around the time her previous book, "The Chocolate Cake Sutra," was published, I invited a group of high school students to spend time interviewing Geri for a documentary film on prayer and meditation. Geri was heading back to southeast Michigan for a few days from her new home in the Pacific Northwest, and I told the students that the cost of a seat with Geri was reading her book. If you know anything about the busy lives of teenagers, the idea of reading a book on Buddhism sounds like an impossible challenge. But, on the day of the interview, an eager little crowd of students pulled couches up around Geri's own easy chair. They pulled out these beautifully well-thumbed copies of her book -- their pages sprouting bookmarks, sticky notes and slips of paper with questions scribbled to ask Geri. That's the best way I can convey the excitement of her spiritual voice. It can hook and hold a busy teenager -- or a busy middle-aged writer like myself. These are books not to be missed, because they leave you with a hopeful smile on your face -- and a fistful of good ideas to make sure that smile is shared with someone else. They're great for small groups -- easy reading, but deep provocative wisdom in each chapter.