Book Release. The Quiet Teacher: 5 Lessons From Garlic

I blame Pat Piper for hooking me more than a decade ago on the cultivation of garlic. 

Piper’s tutelage began back when we lived near one another along Chesapeake Bay and is responsible to my plantings today of strange-sounding varieties of garlic (i.e German Porcelain. Nootka Rose, Inchellium Red) and trying to convince neighbors to do the same.

Garlic has been labeled “the stinking rose,” blamed for bad breath and associated with witchcraft. Yet I came to understand after meeting Piper that there’s something alluring about growing a plant long believed to offer health benefits and spiritual protection. 

Now Piper, a retired producer who worked alongside broadcast great Larry King, has brilliantly and succinctly told us what I was sensing — that there is, indeed, more to garlic than meets the eye (and the nose).

In The Quiet Teacher: 5 Lessons from Garlic, a photo-packed book, released just in time for fall planting, Piper invites readers to view garlic as a window into nature, and nature as a protection from the cacophony and harsh disagreements of the day.

“What if we set aside the finger-pointing and verbal acrobatics long enough to really see, hear and learn,” Piper writes in the prologue. “Nature is always ready to teach, without needing ‘likes’ or applause.”

The Quiet Teacher enumerates lessons of garlic while offering an expert’s guide to its production, from soil to table. It includes a history of the bulb dating back more than a millennium, noting that cloves were found in King Tut’s tomb and were part of a French king’s baptism ceremony.

It includes snippets on smart living from the likes of Pete Seeger and Desmond Tutu. 

There’s everything a budding grower needs to know about soil testing and fertilization. It's especially encouraging to learn that growing garlic is relative easy. (Don't sow the cloves upside down and know that garlic grows through the winter without tending, presenting itself in June pretty and ready to party.)

About those lessons: Garden weeds are analogous to the anger, jealousy and riled emotions that impede positive human interaction, Piper writes. 

And good soil: Like garlic, each of us needs to be surrounded by the family, friends and teachers that lend stability and security.

There’s more to be learned from The Quiet Teacher, including how to turn all that garlic you've harvested into pesto. It is a book for just about everyone (except vampires).

The Quiet Teacher is available for $20.99 at online outlets. Piper's next book signing will take place on Tuesday, Nov. 10, 7PM at Mounts Bay Rec Center in Williamsburg, Va.