Introduction
Planting the Seeds
Cultivating the Garden
The Cultivators
Reaping the Harvest
Harrowsmith
The New Experts
Their Own Gardens
The Garden in Literature
Gardening from Sea to Sea to Sea
All Kinds of Gardens in All Kinds
of Spaces
Bibliography
Photos by Beth Powning
Other Gardening Sites
Acknowledgements |
Reaping the Harvest: Gardening Today
Their Own Gardens
Some of the most charming garden books are those in which the gardeners write personally about their experiences. The books might convey a lot of information about gardening along the way, but the real pleasure lies in the stories, the personalities, and the passion for growing things that they convey.
| Acclaimed poet and novelist Elizabeth Smart tells how gardening madness struck her suddenly in 1967 "like a cold or an unsuitable love affair." "But to be a gardener," she says, "you just must take that brutal leap into power.... Chop chop. The worse must go. The better must be encouraged. Or chaos reigns." |
Van Wart, Alice, ed.
Elizabeth's Garden: Elizabeth Smart on the Art of Gardening.
Toronto: Coach House, 1989, p. 13. |
| Chambers's personal story of how he created the garden of his dreams on the 150-acre ancestral farm in Bruce County: "This addiction to gardening is ineradicable once it gets hold of you... it leads you to buy far too many seeds from the nurseries and to devise plans for summer that would employ a whole army of gardeners." |
|
Chambers, Douglas.
Stony Ground: The Making of a Canadian Garden.
Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf Canada, 1996, p. xi. |
| A delightful book to read, with "Notes for the Novice" which the author suggests the experienced gardener turn over to "those enthusiastic weekend guests who would love to help in the garden if they just knew how. (I recommend particularly dead-heading and the use of the shovel.)" |
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Keeble, Midge Ellis.
Tottering in my Garden: A Gardener's Memoir.
Camden East: Camden House, 1989, p. 3. |
| Two gardening friends (one in British Columbia, one in New Brunswick) correspond about the progress of their gardens, and reveal something of their personal lives along the way. |
| Bradbury, Elspeth and Judy Maddocks.
The Garden Letters.
Vancouver: Polestar, 1995. |
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Norris, John.
John's Garden.
New Denver, B.C.: Twa Corbies, 1997. |
| Francis Cabot's well-tended, 20-acre Quebec garden grew "step by step" to encompass terraces, steps, hedges, swaths of lawn, huge garden beds, pools, streams, rope bridges, and a lake. |
Eaton, Nicole and Hilary Weston, photographs by Freeman Patterson.
In a Canadian Garden.
Markham, Ont.: Viking, 1989, p. 134. |
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