You Grow Girl™

Gardening in Eden: The Joys of Planning and Tending a Garden
by Arthur T. Vanderbilt II
©2003 Simon & Schuster 189 pp

Part memoir, part history, and part gardening tutorial, Arthur T. Vanderbilt's Gardening in Eden should delight passionate gardeners. Gently meandering passages divided into four seasonal chapters reflect on the author's gardening experiences, including childhood visits to his grandparents' gardens; his successes and failures at tending his own garden over the last twenty years; his delight at the first trip to the nursery every spring; and his observations of nature from his own yard.

Vanderbilt freely shares his reverence for gardening in general, and his own garden in particular. Working in the yard year in and year out, he shares his experiences learning what grows well where, and which plants make good neighbors. Gardening in Eden is more about being a gardener than the act of gardening. He approaches the topic with such seriousness and reflection, for Vanderbilt, gardening seems to be a true calling.

Reading Gardening in Eden is like talking to a neighbor over the back fence. Vanderbilt's writing style is conversational, yet still retains a hint of formality. His wandering asides into history, quoting freely from Thoreau, Dickens, and Thomas Jefferson, add an ageless quality to the book. Vanderbilt's prose is measured, cadenced. He takes pains to clearly describe winter's toll on the garden, spring's new blossoms, summer's draught, and autumn's fading garden glory. Like any gardener, the reader must have patience and persistence to realize the wisdom of the author's stories, memories, and observations. Without photographs though, gardeners unfamiliar with a wide variety of plants, shrubs and trees will have trouble visualizing Vanderbilt's gardens, empathizing with his setbacks, and celebrating his successes.

Gardening in Eden is an interesting read for beginning gardeners, not so much as a how-to book, but a peek into how you may find yourself evolving into the gardener who plunges impatiens into the newly thawed spring earth, at risk of losing the blooms to an early spring frost but unable to wait for gardening season any longer. But like reading a travelogue of Paris when you've never been, the some of the joys of Gardening in Eden might be lost on novices.

Experienced gardeners will find broad appeal in Vanderbilt's book, commiserating with him over rocky soil, pests, and of course, the dreaded dead-of-winter "plant pornography," those glossy catalogs of blooms erupting with color, testing the gardener's winter mettle. Reading about the author's first experiences with gardening, his keeping of a gardening notebook, and his evolving vision for his yard is sure to bring back memories for people who have been gardening in their yards for years, and even tempt some to record memories of their own. - amy brozio-andrews