The author is a former corporate writer and has a very very intelligent and personable voice. Her style and observations and general philosophy remind me a lot of Sue Hubbell who was another one of my favorite gardening writers. There is a prodigious amount of information here to digest and incorporate, but I never found it overwhelming. She blends the how-to (how deep to plant a tulip bulb, how to store garlic after harvesting, how and why to exploit biomass in the garden) with an understanding of the underlying principles of why (she herself refers to instinctual knowing as "woo woo").
This book is much less of a tutorial guide than (again this word) philosophy of gardening. It could be the Tao of gardening (though that's apparently marketed somewhere else). The sections are arranged in bimonthly time periods which the author relates to a human lifetime: conception, birth, youth, adulthood, senescence, and death and afterlife. Her writing style is conversational and encouraging but also very erudite and reality based. She is a gifted wordsmith. She specifically states throughout that the gardening topics she writes about aren't THE way to garden, but A way of gardening.
The photography is spectacular and really lifts this book into a special class. It's so well done that I intend to buy a physical copy of the hardcover book just to have it on hand as a coffee table art book.
Beautifully written and spectacularly photographed, this is a really worthwhile book.
Five stars.
Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes.
No comments:
Post a Comment