garden essays

Apprentice to a Garden: A new urban gardener goes wild by Evelyn Hadden is a collection of essays chronicling the development of Hadden's garden and her growth as a gardener. Evelyn starts out as "the omnipotent landowner," but gradually discovers that she doesn't know enough to be a totalitarian dictator. She begins observing more, and [...]

Gardening teaches you about life, it's often been said, and Colleen Plimpton, in Mentors in the Garden of Life, makes this connection explicit. Each essay in her memoir pairs an influential person in her life with a plant. I always tried to guess how the plant and the person were tied together, and I was [...]

This is Pat Leuchtman. You may know her as the garden blogger Commonweeder. I first met Pat at a garden blogger's fling and chatted with her then and at other garden blogger gatherings. I thought she was a cheerful, conventional New Englander. When I started reading her book, The Roses at the End of the [...]

"A writer who gardens is sooner or later going to write a book about the subject," opined Eleanor Perenyi. Certainly there is a meditative aspect to many gardening chores that lends itself to interior dialogue. I have had conversations with myself, or with a faraway friend, as I was pulling weeds or raking leaves, "speaking" [...]

My first reaction upon opening Grow the Good Life: Why a Vegetable Garden Will Make You Happy, Healthy, Wealthy, and Wise by Michele Owens was, "Ah, a gardening book without pictures." I am more of an essay person myself, and it seems like it has been a long time since I have found a newly [...]

A Better Way to Plant Colchicums In May of 1999 I opened up my new issue of Horticulture and started reading "In Search of a Mowable Groundcover." Canadian author Brian Bixley described an ingenious planting scheme that involved interplanting colchicums with hardy geraniums. In the middle of August, he mowed down the geraniums. Two weeks [...]

Why do I garden? Why does an artist paint? Why does a pianist spend days practicing for an hour long concert? The truth is, I don't know why I garden. I don't know why I have an affinity for plants, a need to see them thrive, a hungering for their beauty. As a child, I [...]

I have been re-reading People with Dirty Hands: The Passion for Gardening by Robin Chotzinoff for the Garden Bloggers Book Club. Just like last time, I am amazed by her ability to ferret these eccentric gardeners out, and in awe of her willingness to drive hundreds of miles to talk to total strangers, some of [...]

If, as a cold climate gardener, you have a tendency towards envy, you would be better off not reading British gardening books. Take A Country Life: At Home in the English Countryside by Roy Strong, for example. A book of columns that he originally wrote for the British magazine Country Life, it is a pleasant [...]