JUNE 2022 - AudioFile
As the title suggests, this audiobook is designed for the listener who is new to gardening, rather than one with years of trial and error. Interspersed with personal narrative, the text offers a goodly supply of tips and advice useful at any level of gardening. Narrator Janina Edwards’s voice has a neighborly quality that always reaches a sympathetic ear. Confident, reassuring, confiding, she tells you what tools you need and makes you want to plant and till. If you already have spade (not shovel) in hand, she helps you focus on the value, the purpose, the esprit of gardening. Here is a short, pleasing choice for summer listening, indoors or out. D.A.W. © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine
Publishers Weekly
★ 08/02/2021
“Gardens have mattered deeply in people’s lives ever since Eve ate the apple from the tree,” writes Marron (City Squares), a contributing editor at Vogue, in this impressive meditation. When Marron moved to Connecticut, she realized that “to feel rooted,” she needed to “put down roots” and start a garden, so she gave herself 18 months to design and watch a full plant cycle. Along the way, she learned how to be a gardener by reading books by such writer-gardeners as Beverley Nichols, Eleanor Perényi, and Henry Mitchell, and also by good ol’ trial and error. Gardeners make mistakes all the time, Marron suggests—this is just one of the many lessons she lays out. Others include that to be a gardener, one must hang around other gardeners, that gardeners are witnesses to death, and that kitchen gardens are more work than other kinds. As she recounts the skills of “observation, planting techniques, and patience” she gained during her trial, she shares plenty of practical tips for others looking to get started—an “annual to-do list,” for example, breaks down seasonal tasks and what to plant when—and lush photographs compliment Marron’s musings. Aspiring and seasoned gardeners alike will want to have this on the shelf. Agent: Lynn Nesbit, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc. (Oct.)
From the Publisher
"Like so many others, especially during the awful times of the pandemic, [Marron] came to understand the peace and solace of working one’s own plot of soil: “As Alfred Austin, the poet laureate of Britain from 1896 to 1913, once wrote, ‘We come from the earth, we return to the earth, and in between we garden.’ ” — Wall Street Journal
Wall Street Journal
"Like so many others, especially during the awful times of the pandemic, [Marron] came to understand the peace and solace of working one’s own plot of soil: “As Alfred Austin, the poet laureate of Britain from 1896 to 1913, once wrote, ‘We come from the earth, we return to the earth, and in between we garden.’
Wall Street Journal
"Like so many others, especially during the awful times of the pandemic, [Marron] came to understand the peace and solace of working one’s own plot of soil: “As Alfred Austin, the poet laureate of Britain from 1896 to 1913, once wrote, ‘We come from the earth, we return to the earth, and in between we garden.’
