Any time a visitor strayed near this small flock of Sebastopol geese, Bill Blass, the resident gander, stuck his neck out and hissed.
That just-published volume, “A Year at Clove Brook Farm,” falls squarely within the parameters of a familiar folksy publishing genre: the how-to.
If you had been wondering how to celebrate peony time, Mr. Spitzmiller provides a formula for staging a “peony luncheon” with a table setting centered on a glass terrarium in which baby chicks you have hatched yourself are cozily nestled on shaved pine bedding.
When the rhubarb comes in, he is prepared with a recipe for putting up your own strawberry-and-rhubarb jam.
And if the fantasy occasionally threatens to collapse on itself, like those unrestrained paperwhites, there is a corrective.
“I drank with ferocity,” he said, noting that before joining a 12-step program in 2007, a typical evening might have begun with three or four cocktails, followed by a bottle or so of wine.
He stopped cold, he said, not because of any epiphany or because he had hit a dramatic rock bottom.
And, as much as “A Year at Clove Brook Farm” reads like a retrospective view of how one clever self-improver saved a farm and forged a life, it can also at times resemble, to an almost uncanny degree, a pitch document for the creation of a multimedia brand.
The swaths of scilla, snowdrops, camassia and summer snowflake underplanting an apple orchard originate in Ms. Stewart’s bold approach to gardening, as do the bosomy hydrangeas planted in hedges, peonies installed by the hundreds and the 30,000 daffodils carpeting the fields.
There is a singular collection of bronze or lead statues arrayed on bluestone plinths and that depict life-size stags.
If the overall effect is Stewartian in its maximalism, the work ethic behind it is as ironclad as hers.
In a foreword she contributed to “A Year at Clove Brook Farm,” Ms. Stewart notes the similarities between herself and Mr. Spitzmiller.
Reached by telephone, Ms. Stewart added that Mr. Spitzmiller, “is a lot like I was at his age — very, very curious about a lot of things.” Still, she scoffed at the notion that he may one day succeed her as what she termed “the OG” of lifestyle branding.
Undaunted by what he does not yet know, Mr. Spitzmiller portrays himself, in his book and in person, as the archetypal apprentice.