Sleep, Creep, Leap: The First Three Years of a Nebraska Garden

Peeling off sheets of skin from a sunburned back. Visiting five nurseries and spending $1,000 in an afternoon. Raising 200 monarch butterflies. Hearing the wing beats of geese thirty feet overhead at sunset. How one piece of mulch can make all the difference. These are the stories of Benjamin Vogt’s 1,500 foot native prairie garden over the course of three years. After a small patio garden at his last home teases him into avid tinkering, the blank canvas of his new marriage and quarter acre lot prove to be a rich place full of delight, anguish, and rapture in all four seasons. Full of lyrical, humorous, and botanical short essays, SLEEP, CREEP, LEAP will leave you inspired to sit a while with your plants, noticing how the smallest events become the largest—and how the garden brings us down to earth so that we can come home to our lives.