thesoftpath

Luke Lea is a retired landscape gardener and part-time writer. He was born in Chattanooga, Tennessee in 1942 and grew up in Ferger Place, a planned neighborhood development not unlike the ones proposed in these pages. He attended Johns Hopkins University and the University of Tubingen before graduating from Reed College with a liberal arts degree in 1966. By then he had already begun researching some of the ideas described in this book, working on assembly lines both here and abroad, as a professional carpenter building houses, and as a professional gardener in partnership with his wife Pat, a garden designer. They have two grown children and live in Walden, Tennessee, a small town on Signal Mountain near Chattanooga. The Soft Path is his first book.