From: LATimes (March 10, 2005.)
The dirt on alt gardening

by Alexandria Abramian-Mott

“Looking for an antidote to the gardening how-to book written by estate-owning bluebloods with eponymous tea roses? Gayla Trail, a bona fide alt chick with the cat glasses and obscure ’80s rock T-shirts to prove it, has the dirt. She has distilled the gardening process into a series of bite-sized, quirkily written sections for a new generation of land- and time-deprived DIY females (males, too, if you skip the parts about growing loofa sponges and making peppermint foot scrubs.) Don’t have a patch of dirt to call your own? A fire escape or a window sill will do, writes Trail, who devotes many pages to container gardening.

The book is high on practical advice and written for an instant-messaging generation looking for snapshots, not diatribes, of information. All you need to know about soil pH levels is distilled into one short paragraph while sewing a funky gardening apron is given two pages.

Blended in with the basics are Trail’s homegrown ideas, such as starting seeds in Jell-O, burying wine bottles upside down to border a path and planting a garden for pets (her cat is named — what else? — Volton). She even suggests scooping up droppings left from police horses for free manure and practicing guerrilla gardening — growing plants on public property — as a way of fostering a green thumb.

Bluebloods need not apply.”