Becoming a Gardener
What Reading and Digging Taught Me About Living
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- 33,99 €
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- 33,99 €
Description de l’éditeur
A beautifully designed, full-color personal account of what it means to become a gardener, filled with specially commissioned color photography, watercolors, and fine art.
To make her new house in Connecticut truly feel like home, Catie Marron decided to create a garden. But while she was familiar with landscape design, she had never grown anything. A dedicated reader with a lifelong passion for literature, Marron turned to the library of gardening books she’d collected to glean advice from a variety of writers on gardening and horticultural topics both grand and small.
Marron’s quest to become a gardener, however, was about more than learning the basics about mulch or which plants work best in the shade. She sought something far more elusive: to identify the core qualities and characteristics that make a person a gardener and an understanding of what a garden could mean to her as it had to multitudes of other gardeners over the centuries.
In Becoming a Gardener, Catie Marron chronicles her transformation into a gardener over the course of eighteen months, seeding the details of her experience with rich advice from writers as diverse as Eleanor Perényi and Karel Capek, Penelope Lively, and Jamaica Kincaid. As she digs deeper into her readings and works in the garden itself, Marron 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.”
A delightful blend of informed opinion, personal reflection, and practical advice, Becoming a Gardener explores topics as varied as the composition of dirt, the agricultural wisdom of avid kitchen gardeners George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, the healing power of digging in the soil, and the beauty of finding solitude in nature. Throughout, Marron carefully plants special illustrated features, such as musings on the merits (and detriments) of the rose, essential tools, moonlight gardening, children’s books which feature gardens, and her favorite gardens around the world. Also included is an annotated list of recommended writers, books, and films related to gardens and gardening, and a monthly to-do calendar.
Featuring specially commissioned illustrations by the Danish team All the Way to Paris, and stunning photographs by acclaimed photographer William Abranowicz that capture the pastoral beauty of Marron’s Connecticut garden, Becoming a Gardener is a very special and moving portrait of life and the enduring power of literature and nature that is sure to become an instant classic.
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"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.
