Gardens: Joan Dye Gussow didn't give up after a flood submerged her garden

It was hard to get a grip on the heavy plastic bags, but Gussow, matriarch of the eat-locally-think-globally food movement, is amazingly sturdy for an octogenarian, and she marched me down the wide clover path toward the river, past her tomato cages full of ripening San Marzanos and Sungolds, self-seeded rainbow chard, sweet potatoes, newly-planted peas, Malabar spinach and many other vegetables that make up Gussow's year-round food supply.

More than 35 years before Fritz Haeg started his Edible Estates: Attack on the Front Lawn project in 2005 - his effort to turn the country's lawns into vegetable patches - Gussow and her husband, Alan, an artist, were already in that mode. They laid down rubbish, kitchen waste and weeds, covered with newspapers and salt hay (killing the grass and making compost at the same time) on the front lawn of their property. Their goal: to grow food for themselves and their two young sons.

They farmed that lawn for more than two decades before moving to Piermont, to do the same thing, in 1995.

Gussow had gone back to college in 1969 to earn a doctorate in nutrition at Columbia University, at a time when nutrition was all about vitamins and chemistry, not how food was grown and where it came from. She began connecting the dots between what Americans were eating and how that food was produced. She created a legendary course, Nutritional Ecology, which she still teaches today. Because Gussow dared to talk about energy use, pollution, diabetes and obesity as the true costs of food, she was initially viewed as a crank, but her connections inspired the work of people like Michael Pollan, whose book, In Defense of Food, echoes many of her revelations.

Gussow's thinking, like Pollan's, has always been grounded in the garden.

That muggy morning, we dumped the bags of soil near the boardwalk, where, only a few feet away, mallards were paddling in the quiet water. It was hard to imagine that in March, a storm had brought the river surging over the boardwalk, tearing up its boards and pilings, ripping raised beds out of the ground as it moved toward the house, burying the long narrow garden - 36ft by 100ft - under 2ft of water.

You can read the story on Gussow's website, www.joansgarden.org: "I found myself quite numb. I think it's age," she wrote, after sloshing about in her rubber boots the morning after. "There's absolutely nothing I could have done to prevent it."

The day of the storm, 13 March, had been a momentous one: she had finished the revisions to her book, Growing Older: A Chronicle of Death, Life and Vegetables, due out in November. And for the first time in her long writing life she was about to get an advance.

The morning after, finding herself blocked by the debris of what used to be raised beds and the boardwalk, she went inside to call Dave Avdoyan, the landscaper who had built the boxes for those beds, as well as a low stone wall on the north side of the garden, which in recent years had blocked river water rising in a storm. Now it, too, was submerged.

She thought her plants, including her beloved fruit trees and azaleas, were a total loss. But Avdoyan surveyed the wreckage, looked over the fence at the empty house lot next door, which had better drainage and wasn't as flooded, and proposed a radical solution: using the space as a staging area and trucking in enough fill to raise her bathtub of a garden 2ft.

Now, looking about at her ebullient plants, many resurrected from the flood, Gussow said: "I'm not religious and I'm not superstitious, but I really feel that Mother Nature took care of me. This was the first time in 100 years this lot was open. The owner took down the house in January, and was not going to rebuild until April."

And she had the advance to pay what ended up costing about 6,400 for the materials and labour. "It feels like a gift to me," she said. "This amazing event occurred, and gave me the opportunity to do something I'd been wanting to do for years."

Over the next few weeks, friends from the city picked up wood, and a neighbour stacked bricks and paving stones from the paths on the boardwalk. Former students helped move hundreds of plants. Avdoyan and a helper rebuilt the boardwalk and friends replaced the filter cloth behind the rocks to stop soil from washing out with the river.

Then, on 30 March, a high tide flooded the garden again. Another week went by, and finally, Avdoyan set to work with his Caterpillar, forklifting plants out of the ground, and trundling them over to the empty lot, where they were set in mounds of donated soil and compost.

"It was a lot of work," she said, recalling how she singlehandedly repotted hundreds of plants and bulbs.

Other flood victims were thriving as well: the kiwi vines, lifted out of their root-bound urns by the flood, are now climbing their trellis. The peach tree, relocated in a sunnier spot, bore 75 peaches in late June.

Every year, she tries to prepare her students for the despair they inevitably feel as they consume the readings she has compiled on the world's population, poverty, hunger, pollution, disease, loss of habitat and farmland, melting ice caps, oil spills and the like.

"All you can do is say: 'You can't be optimistic about the state of the world - what you can be is open-minded. You're going to look for solutions, and you're going to make your own life mean something. You can no longer think that accumulating money or the biggest house is the answer,'" she said.

Gussow figures she has a good 20 years, at least, to garden in this watery paradise. But time is finite.

She is already at work on her next book. It's called Starting Over at 81.

This article was first published in The Scotsman on 2 October, 2010