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Becoming a Gardener: What Reading and Digging Taught Me about Living
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50
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
20/100Critics
81/100Scholars
Author:
Catie Marron
Publisher:
Harper
Date:
May 3, 2022
Filled with specially commissioned color photography, watercolors, and fine art, Becoming a Gardener is a first-hand account of what it means to become a gardener. Catie Marron details her experience over 18 months, documenting her studies, her triumphs, her mistakes, and everything in between while infusing it with the rich advice of a variety of writers over the yearsâeveryone from Eleanor Perâenyi and Karel Capek to Penelope Lively and Jamaica Kincaid. As she digs deeper into her readings and works in the garden itself, she not only discovers the essence of gardening but in the words of Michael Pollan, "the endlessly engrossing ways that cultivating a garden attaches a body to the earth."
What The Reviewers Say
Where do gardeners get their inspiration? What is the meaning of gardens in their lives? How will I know when I’m a gardener?' Answers and insights came from writers as diverse as Cicero and Rousseau; Vita Sackville-West and Gertrude Jekyll; Eleanor Perényi, Henry Mitchell, Penelope Lively and Jamaica Kincaid—all quoted here at length and to moving effect.
This elegant ode to gardening is filled with charming watercolors, photographs, and illustrations of all things green and goodly. Marron eschews traditional how-to-grow guides, instead concentrating on the somewhat ethereal process of figuring out how to use the land via one’s favorite spots and other inspirations and, then, by trial and error, designing a garden with a nod to seasonality and sustainability. In this very personal road map, Marron also traces her own evolution as a gardener, with homage to her late husband. Her narrative itself mesmerizes.
Impressive.
