"American spirituality is discovering itself anew as people of faith reconnect with the land. But while the buy local, eat organic movement is increasingly in the public eye, the faith-based movement remains virtually unknown by the wider public," writes Fred Bahnson, a writer, permaculture gardener, and director of the Food, Faith, and Religious Leadership Initiative at Wake Forest University School of Divinity. After laboring four years as the director of Anathoth, a food garden for 60 members who worked the land in common and shared its bounty, the author decided to move back to North Carolina with his wife and children where he planted his own garden and orchards.

Several important questions loomed large in Bahnson's mind, and he yearned to take a quest to find some answers: What does it mean to follow God? How should I live my life? And what does all this have to do with the soil, my literal ground of existence? He decides to visit a different garden for each of the four seasons and opens his heart and mind to listening and learning as much as he can about food and faith, soil and sacrament.

At Memkin Abbey in South Carolina, Bahnson marvels at the movement of the Trappist monks from work to prayer and, at the same time, is much taken with their growing of mushrooms. Next stop is the Lord's Acre, a garden started by several churches with a mission of feeding the hungry. The manager is Susan Sides whom the author calls "a garden mystic." Her perspective is similar to that of a quotation she treasures from Antoine de Saint-Exupery: "If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea." Sides tells Bahnson that everyone comes to the garden hungering for something: food, community, the beauty of nature.

In Washington's Skagit Valley, the author is heralded as a bridge builder and responds with gratitude and love. Bahnson completes his journey with a visit to a Jewish organic farm in the Berkshires where he realizes again that "to grow and share food with others in a garden is to enter a holy country."