Like writing, gardening is an act of imagination and faith, and so it should be no surprise that many fine writers have turned their hand to the soil and brought their gardens back to the page. This anthology gathers together the best from around the world and across the centuries. The Roman essayist Pliny muses on “The Smell of Good Ground,” while Katharine S. White, garden columnist for The New Yorker, takes in the fragrance of roses. In Bloomsbury’s Britain, Vita Sackville-West singles out the Transvaal Daisy from her gardens at Sissinghurst, while medieval herbalist John Gerard extolls the potato as the “Marvel of the World” and Bertie Stephens reminisces about being a gardener for Thomas Hardy. The New World pioneer Catharine Parr Traill is here, as well as contemporary writers Germaine Greer, Jamaica Kincaid, and Patrick Lane. Rich with the protean observations, insights, and inspirations of more than twenty writers, the book gives the last word to Gertrude Jeckyll, the grande dame of British garden design, who shares her gardening credo: “The lesson I have thoroughly learnt, and wish to pass on to others, is to know the enduring happiness that the love of a garden gives.”

Co-published with the David Suzuki Foundation