This is a memoir of how I learned to garden as a young child in England, and grew up believing I had a brown thumb and couldn't grow anything. To developing a greenhouse business with my husband Mike in Vermont; introducing and promoting the English style gardens, baskets and containers for all to enjoy. Bringing many seeds plants and products new to America. There are over 100 color photographs for the readers to enjoy and develop ideas for their own gardens Our personal final experience was sad, but we still treasure the memories and time we had doing it.
One of our finest writers on one of her greatest loves. Jamaica Kincaid's first garden in Vermont was a plot in the middle of her front lawn. There, to the consternation of more experienced friends, she planted only seeds of the flowers she liked best. In My Garden (Book) she gathers all she loves about gardening and plants, and examines it generously, passionately, and with sharp, idiosyncratic discrimination. Kincaid's affections are matched in intensity only by her dislikes. She loves spring and summer but cannot bring herself to love winter, for it hides the garden. She adores the rhododendron Jane Grant, and appreciates ordinary Blue Lake string beans, but abhors the Asiatic lily. The sources of her inspiration -- seed catalogues, the gardener Gertrude Jekyll, gardens like Monet's at Giverny -- are subjected to intense scrutiny. She also examines the idea of the garden on Antigua, where she grew up. My Garden (Book) is an intimate, playful, and penetrating book on gardens, the plants that fill them, and the persons who tend them.
Embark on a gardener's personal journey that begins and ends in Vermont, with settings as varied as the Adirondacks, a New York suburb, coastal Florida, and Oxfordshire, England. With detailed, monochrome drawings by botanical illustrator Bobbi Angell, The Last Garden delineates the practical aspects of gardens and plants as we face the perils of climate change, food scarcity, and pollinator decline; the healing power of gardens; and the importance of mentors in a gardening life.Writer Liza Ketchum profiles the gardeners whose techniques and wisdom influenced her life and helped shape her life and the gardens she created. She shares the myriad ways that gardens have provided beauty, comfort, and inspiration during periods of change, loss, and renewal, and offers inspiration for readers to create their own garden, whether on a city balcony, a suburban yard, or a larger country plot.
Autobiography of a Garden follows Patterson Webster’s twenty-five-year journey as she transforms a beautiful but conventional country property into a 750-acre landscape that challenges what a garden is, or can be. A unique, personal memoir, this book details how a neophyte gardener moved from copying the ideas of other people to learning from them, and finally to striking out on her own. Combining traditions from French and English eighteenth-century gardens with contemporary perspectives, Webster communicates concepts and ideas that underpin the garden’s design, sharing a process that evolved over seasons and years. She explores the meaning of creating a garden and the meaning that a garden can create, linking ideas about aging and the passage of time to the reality of growth and death in the landscape and thinking through how art in a garden can reframe questions of memory and our relationship to nature. Using the history of the property as a framework, Webster considers the impact made by those who lived on the land before her: the Abenaki, the early settlers, the cottagers, the farmers, the US southerners who came to Quebec to avoid the summer heat, and the northerners who defeated them in the Civil War. With engaging personal anecdotes, she describes the thinking behind each part of the garden and the examples that guided her, the mishaps and successes she encountered, and her plans for the future. Beautifully photographed and full of inspirational ways of thinking about gardens and gardening, Autobiography of a Garden blends history, horticulture, and art, encouraging readers to make their own surroundings more beautiful and more meaningful.
In this "passionate, reflective, inspiring, endlessly quotable" (Allen Lacy, New York Times Book Review) book, two acclaimed landscape designers offer a month-by-month chronicle of their magnificent Vermont garden. "A gold mine of practical advice".--Anne Raver, The New York Times.
