You could think of the three years he spent on this project as penance.

Lowenfels has cranked out weekly garden columns for the Anchorage Daily News for 30 years, never missing a week. As far as the national Garden Writers Association is concerned, that makes him the longest-running garden columnist in America. For most of those years, he was a poster boy for Miracle-Gro, his water-soluble fertilizer of choice. He even had Miracle-Gro commercials filmed at his house.

This led to spirited debates with the strictly organic crowd at GWA conventions. No one could persuade Lowenfels to change his ways

 

LOWENFELS' CONVERSION

Then one day an e-mail arrived from Tom Alexander of Growing Edge magazine. Attached was a photograph taken through a microscope of a fungus attacking a nematode, a soil-dwelling microworm. "Soil food web. You lose," the message said.

This rocked his world.

The research frenzy that followed led him to Ingham, who helped adjust his vision from macroscopic to microscopic. He saw the light. And when he did, he felt awful. He had to fess up to his readers that he'd been giving them bad advice for years.

"Alaska gardeners trust me and do things on my word (that) they would not normally do without checking up. So when I realized for the first time that my system of gardening resulted in more work, more diseases, more failure, I was despondent that I had betrayed my readership. Clearly, it called for an explanation, an apology and corrective action ... sort of like a drunk deciding he's had his last drink and will now make it up to his friends and family."

Lowenfels also introduced the soil food web to other garden writers around the country by arranging for Ingham to speak at a Garden Writers Association conference in Seattle a few years ago. David Ellis of the American Horticulture Society, based in Alexandria, Va., remembers it clearly.

"I was there at the meeting where he basically said, with near-religious fervor, ... everyone was going to leave the room a changed person, that we would never look at gardening in the same way. In my case, it was true. It really opened my eyes to what was going on underground."

"He doesn't go off chasing windmills," said Robert LaGasse, executive director of the association. "You've got to prove it to him. But once you've proven it to him, you can't shut him up because he's very passionate about what he does."

Lowenfels, who carries that life-altering fungus-vs.-nematode photo around in his wallet, has already started work on the second edition of "Teaming With Microbes."

"We found one little mistake, and that's just driving me nuts," he said. (The definition of "pH" on Page 41 somehow got goofed up.) "And there have been new discoveries made. There's a whole kingdom of creatures that were not even included."

Lately, Lowenfels has been doing a lot of speaking about the soil food web around the country -- at universities, at garden meetings, at tomato festivals.

He's just a little possessed. You can tell by the way he and Lewis sign their book:

"May the microbes be with you," he writes.

"And, believe me, they are," Lewis adds.

Get the book today, click here

See Page 1, Garden Writers Go Underground

Reporter Debra McKinney can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

Lowenfels and Hoersting first came to Alaska on their honeymoon in 1974 and soon returned, planning to stay five years.

"It was a different mind-set than we have now," Lowenfels said of the gardening scene. "People came up over the highway in their Volkswagen vans with all their records and hi-fi equipment and five or six plants they either had at their college dorm room or that were cuttings from their grandmother, and those plants were their family, their connection to the Outside. To lose one of those plants was a serious, serious problem."

So in the beginning, indoor plants it was. Their first year up here, Lowenfels actually had a little cultivation business going in his law office, growing coleus plants and selling them to Woolworth's.

The chance to do some serious outdoor gardening soon came, though, when a client at the firm where he worked said she was looking for "someone with a gardener's touch." Her husband had died, she'd moved away and she needed someone to care for their house.

That's how Lowenfels and Hoersting came to be the last to live in what's believed to be the first house built in Anchorage: the historic Oscar Anderson House, now a tourist attraction, on the edge of Cook Inlet.

They moved in and soon realized they weren't alone. As Lowenfels tells it, "We are the young couple referred to on the marker outside the building as having said it was haunted.

"All sorts of strange things happened. Lights would go on. Shades go up and down. Windows opened. Footsteps on stairs. Furniture would be blocking doors. Nothing serious. All friendly ghost stuff."

Lowenfels was thrilled to get his hands back into dirt. The gardening column came about a year later.

Back then, The Anchorage Times had the big circulation and the Daily News was the underdog, a seriously struggling one, while lawsuits over a joint-operating agreement gone bad got hammered out.

Lowenfels, an assistant attorney general at the time, became co-chairman of a group trying to keep Anchorage a two-newspaper town. He even sold Daily News subscriptions during his lunch break -- a couple thousand of them.

The Daily News' editor and publisher, the late Kay Fanning, was floored.

"She looked at me, she sat down, she said, 'What else can you do?' And like an idiot, I said, 'You know, I can write a garden column.' "

His column debuted Nov. 13, 1976. It was about Christmas cactus and poinsettias, and it was called "Petal Power."

To him, that sounded like a bicycling column. But he didn't complain. It wasn't like he was getting paid or anything. Not yet, anyway.

Week after week he'd bring in his columns, first handwritten, then typed on yellow legal paper. Suzan Nightingale ended up giving him one of the paper's office chairs as thanks for helping out.

"Some people frame their first paycheck. I sit on mine.

"So anyway, I wrote the column, and I figured, what the hell, you know? I mean, a couple, six months of this stuff and the Daily News will get back on its feet, everything will be hunky-dory and I'll go back to just practicing law and that will be the end of that. Next thing I know it's been a full year. Wooo. OK, so we celebrate."

As a way of thanking readers, Lowenfels arranged a special deal through an East Coast garden supply company for people to buy 100 tulip and daffodil bulbs.

"If we could get 100 people to buy these things, they'd give us this discount," he said. "And 1,700 people bought these packages.

The Lowenfels bulb deal turned into an annual plant-a-tulip program that brought 150,000 bulbs to Anchorage one year alone, winning him an Urban Beautification Award.

That was 1980, and he was just getting warmed up. That was before he discovered the Garden Writers Association and the Garden Writers Association discovered him.

Lowenfels went to his first meeting in 1982 and found himself sitting next to the garden writer for The New York Times. That's when he realized there was a lot more to this garden column thing.

He got on the board and eventually became president. For years he tried to talk the group into having its national convention here. But some felt Alaska was too far removed from the mainstream gardening community.

Wrong thing to say to Lowenfels. They came in 1994.

"He sells Alaska," said the association's LeGasse. "How do you know if Jeff Lowenfels is selling Alaska? He's talking. If he's talking, he's either talking about gardening or Alaska or gardening in Alaska.

"I'm surprised you haven't elected him to office."

Lowenfels arranged garden tours all over the city and up and down the highways. By all accounts, the event was a whopping success.

"Having done meetings for 30 years, when they're over, I'm ready to leave," LeGasse said. "When these meetings were over, I stayed another week. When that week was over, I still wasn't ready to leave."

 

Lowenfels helped create the Garden Writers Foundation, a scholarship program. And he's founder of another program on the verge of going international, one to help feed the hungry.

"It was below zero," Lowenfels said, recalling its beginnings. "I was coming back from dinner at The Red Sage, a very fancy, very expensive restaurant around the corner from the White House. I was coming back and going to my very fancy, very expensive hotel, and I had my hand in my pocket around some loose change. A guy came up to me and said, 'Do you have any money? I'd really like to get some food.'

"Now in D.C. they tell you -- like they do here -- don't give money to panhandlers; agencies are supposed to take care of them. So I didn't. I had my hand AROUND the money! I went back to my room, and there was a bowl of fruit and a bottle of wine. I really felt bad and had trouble sleeping -- because the guy had said, 'Come with me; watch me eat.' "

On his way home, somewhere over Seattle, he got the idea of asking readers to plant an extra row in their gardens and donate the harvest to Bean's Cafe. That became the Plant a Row for Beans project. And that grew into Plant a Row for the Hungry.

"The program is now in every state of the union. We've got inquiries from Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Latin America. I mean, it's just a phenomenal little program."

Last year, gardeners across the country donated more than 1.2 million pounds of produce to food banks and soup kitchens.

"Again, something good comes from something bad. I will never forget walking by that guy."