A Worm's World
For the earthworm, every day is Earth Day.
THE EARTH MOVED
ALGONQUIN BOOKS,
HARDCOVER, $23.95.
BY AMY STEWART.
CHAPEL HILL. 2004.
A
uthor Amy Stewart grew
up in Arlington, Tex.,
worlds away from any
inspiration of green-thumbed
gardeners or lush gardens. It
was, she says, only when she
moved as an adult to Santa
Cruz, Calif., that she discov-
ered gardening for herself.
“This is one of the best climates
in the country — well, next to
Eugene — where everything
grows,” she says. “Having a little land
and a little time made all the difference. This
is what got me into gardening.”
Stewart translated this discovery into her
first book, From the Ground Up: The Story of
a First Gardener (Algonquin Books, 2001).
And from within that first garden experience
comes her latest book, The Earth Moved: On
the
Remarkable
Achievements
of
Earthworms, where she explores the under-
ground reaches of the simple earthworm.
Stewart says, “The more I gardened, the
more I started to pay attention to the soil, as
much as if not more than to the plants. It
became really clear that earthworms were a
sign of soil fertility.” Her fascination with
earthworms grew when she moved from
Santa Cruz to Eureka, where she discovered
an entirely different kind of earthworm in the
soil.
In The Earth Moved Stewart
writes, “The first inhabitant of
the soil to capture my atten-
tion was an earthworm. I
am a gardener, after all; I
can’t miss the fact that gar-
deners and earthworms
work in tandem, tilling the
soil, feeding the plants. … I
Amy
thought they might have a
Stewart
few surprises in store for me,
so I began investigating their
habits. I soon realized that they held
the key to most of what was happening below
ground.”
Stewart begins her investigation with the
late-in-life, though characteristically meticu-
lous, study of worms by scientist Charles
Darwin. From this jumping off point, she
explores the worms in her own backyard
compost bin, the worms eating Minnesota
(non-indigenous European worms are eating
layers and layers of duff in Minnesota forests,
making it almost impossible for undergrowth
to take root), and even the legendary giant
worms — three feet and longer — of Oregon,
Washington and Australia. She explains that
worms are natural tillers of soil, that they are
“ruminators; they sift through whatever sur-
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rounds them, they turn it
over, explore it, move
through it.” She describes
how worms turn plant mat-
ter into rich soil by writing,
“Functionally, worms really
do one thing: they digest.”
The digested plant matter,
called castings, serves as
wonderful stuff for the gar-
den.
Stewart has a great voice
for this kind of natural histo-
ry writing. It is factual and
well informed, but in a back-
yard scientist kind of way.
We as readers follow along
easily, partly out of curiosity,
partly out of something like
neighborliness, as Stewart
discovers and shares the
microcosm of earthworms and bacteria and
fungi in their underground community.
This kind of writing, Stewart says, fits
into a bigger sense of environmentalism in
that it makes one really look at and think
about one’s surroundings. “When you realize
that soil is full of living creatures, billions of
living creatures,” she says, “when you think
about your soil as an ecosystem, you start to
think twice about what you put into it.”
In the end, Stewart helps us to see a thing
up close, a thing that all along has been right
under our nose, or rather right under our toes.
She says the most surprising thing she dis-
covered, and adopted as the book’s subtitle,
was “thinking of earthworms in terms of their
accomplishments.” In this book, Stewart dis-
covers not only the worm and its subter-
ranean world, but also a deep respect to
match her fascination for how these simple
creatures connect to our own sustenance and
well being.
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APRIL 22, 2004 13