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jpark's review against another edition
funny
informative
inspiring
lighthearted
relaxing
slow-paced
3.0
aoosterwyk's review against another edition
4.0
Short, thoughtful pieces on the history and meaning of gardening in our lives. I found myself researching the gardens, artists and flowers Lively mentions. A very rewarding and enriching book.
sausome's review
4.0
This was a wonderfully descriptive, emotional, nostalgic book about seemingly all aspects of gardening - from how they build our internal emotional lives, how they connect us to our ancestry and cultural heritage, to how they are portrayed through literary explorations and asides and depictions of painted landscapes. I loved the authors strong feelings about how gardening and time are so inextricably linked, as this is what my own garden-loving mother expresses when she talks about her garden. She is constantly battling weeds, natural pests, and the general elements, but something draws her to get her hands dirty, to respond with continued enthusiasm to new garden stores nearby (she can always buy new plants, needed or not). I feel like this book connected me to her even more, in understanding how she feels about the growing seasons and her beloved yard. Though I’m of the urban-situated, I still manage to have several pots of plants that I hope will manage to survive my not-so-green-thumb (I’m not so sure Lively’s assertion that gardening is genetic is true). Full of interesting information about the history of various planting trends, the economics of gardening, and the history of some plants and flowers.
I highlighted many sections, which follow:
(From Kindle locations)
19: “So this is a book in which fictional gardens act as prompts for a consideration of what gardens and gardening have been for us, over time. Why and how do people garden? Why and how have they gardened? I shall need to get personal.”
41: “You don’t discover your own gardening potential until you have gardenable space of your own, if only a humble windowbox.”
50: “Gardening, you are no longer stuck in the here and now; you think backward, and forward, you think of how this or that performed last year, you work out your hopes and plans for the next.”
176: “31st of May 1920, Virginia Woolf, “The first pure joy of the garden . . . weeding all day to finish the beds in a queer sort of enthusiasm which made me say this is happiness.””
196: (still discussing Woolf) “zinnias were still grown from seed on their watch, one of Leonard’s favorites. Hardly seen elsewhere, nowadays, out of fashion, like the red-hot pokers—kniphofia—that he had (and which flare up in To the Lighthouse, as we shall see): “. . . the garden is full of zinnias.””
214: (Woolf) ““Flower after flower is specked on the depths of green. The petals are harlequins. Stalks rise from the black hollows beneath. The flowers swim like fish made of light upon the dark, green waters. I hold a stalk in my hand. I am the stalk . . .” This is from The Waves,”
555: “The reality garden invites use as metaphor, for a novelist—to suggest mood, climate, personality—while for the painter intense study can influence and determine presentation, the discovery of a personal vision—the garden expressing the painter’s own perception. A metamorphosis, perhaps, rather than a metaphor, but in each case the real garden has undergone a sea-change, either as language or as paint on a canvas. And I found it particularly interesting to discover how many painters were applied gardeners. Chocolate earth under the fingernails for Virginia Woolf, but also for Monet, Bonnard, Matisse, Klee.”
579: “Those nettles; the ivy. Ivy is definitely the novelist’s plant of choice; as soon as ivy sneaks in you know it is there with possibly sinister intent.”
591: “Definitely one of those large-leafed leathery thugs that should not be on offer in garden centers without a health-and-safety warning. I know all about those; I have one, planted in all innocence, and now it swarms an extra three or four feet up a wall each year, and requires attack by a hired garden firm.”
594: “And this is reality ivy, rather than fictional, so I do not have to consider its implications.”
810: “I find myself not much caring for Walter. His taste was for large, showy stuff, with a passion for dahlias, and no interest in the winter or spring garden, just the display of high summer. Margery favored the less flamboyant, the more subtle—the euphorbias, the hellebores, the hardy geraniums, the astrantias, vincas, snowdrops, aquilegias, pulmonarias. And I’m right behind her, remembering the garden as I have seen it in spring and early summer. Walter used to trample all over “her” plants when planting out his precious dahlias (the loudest and flashiest possible), and where his gardening manners were concerned he sounds exasperating—never picking up his prunings or dead-heads but leaving them for her to clear away. Like some men in the kitchen—cooking without doing their washing-up.”
854: “she admits to a weakness for dahlias—“and not the discreet little singles either.” Hers are “as blowzy as half-dressed Renoir girls; others are like spiky sea creatures, water-lilies, or the spirals in a crystal paperweight.””
1236: “The great defiance of time is our capacity to remember—the power of memory. Time streams away behind us, and beyond, but individual memory shapes, for each of us, a known place. We own a particular piece of time; I was there, then, I did this, saw that, felt thus. And gardening, in its small way, performs a memory feat: it corrals time, pinning it to the seasons, to the gardening year, by summoning up the garden in the past, the garden to come. A garden is never justnow ; it suggests yesterday, and tomorrow; it does not allow time its steady progress.”
1251: “climate ... ever-rolling stream, sequential, cyclical, and meaning that there is never time to get tired of anything in the garden because it is always a temporary pleasure, and would we feel the same about the roses if they blazed on and on, in relentless flower, all of them hurtling through Christmas, instead of that one defiant unseasonal bloom?”
1266: “The garden reorders time. And to garden is to impose order.”
1312: “Gardening, you escape the tether of time, you experience that elision of past, present and future.”
1322: “The rhododendron is apparently about as tenacious as anything, can live for hundreds of years, and is so invasive that it will smother all other growth and create a rhododendron wilderness which can only be eradicated with heavy machinery. ... a triffid-like quality.”
1455: “An excerpt from Ursula Fanthorpe’s poem “Seven Types of Shadow” ‘No haunting. No rattle of chains. They just lie there In their rigid truthfulness, the ghosts of things.’”
1519: “It is claimed that gardeners can live for up to fourteen years longer. Why? Because of all that vitamin D, and the exercise, but also because of getting the hands into the soil—exposure to natural bacteria boosts the immune system. On the exercise side, two hours of energetic gardening apparently uses up the same energy as a half-marathon of thirteen miles. And even the pottering kind of gardening done by the likes of me is strongly recommended; for older people, activity on a daily basis reduces the risk of stroke or heart attack by 27 percent, according to one study.”
1593: “All novelists move on to dangerous territory when they devise a character with a background unfamiliar to them. Most do it and have to rely on research and inquiry, knowing that any slip-up will provoke comment from some sharp-eyed reader. But sometimes what looks to be natural accuracy is a giveaway too: I feel sure that Angus Wilson gardened.”
1656: “The rose came into the garden from the wild; there are around 150 species of wild rose, native only to the northern hemisphere, and particularly favoring China—hence the arrival in the West of what were called China roses in the eighteenth century.”
2051: “A murky January day, and the green nubs of bulbs are poking up all over the place when I go out into the garden: snowdrops, narcissi, even the early tulips. Aha! Spring is not just a calendar promise, it is fact. It will happen.”
2056: “And to know a little about something is also to be able to recognize the depth and complexity of the subject; my own limited experience has fostered my admiration for the great gardeners, the garden writers, the botanists.”
I highlighted many sections, which follow:
(From Kindle locations)
19: “So this is a book in which fictional gardens act as prompts for a consideration of what gardens and gardening have been for us, over time. Why and how do people garden? Why and how have they gardened? I shall need to get personal.”
41: “You don’t discover your own gardening potential until you have gardenable space of your own, if only a humble windowbox.”
50: “Gardening, you are no longer stuck in the here and now; you think backward, and forward, you think of how this or that performed last year, you work out your hopes and plans for the next.”
176: “31st of May 1920, Virginia Woolf, “The first pure joy of the garden . . . weeding all day to finish the beds in a queer sort of enthusiasm which made me say this is happiness.””
196: (still discussing Woolf) “zinnias were still grown from seed on their watch, one of Leonard’s favorites. Hardly seen elsewhere, nowadays, out of fashion, like the red-hot pokers—kniphofia—that he had (and which flare up in To the Lighthouse, as we shall see): “. . . the garden is full of zinnias.””
214: (Woolf) ““Flower after flower is specked on the depths of green. The petals are harlequins. Stalks rise from the black hollows beneath. The flowers swim like fish made of light upon the dark, green waters. I hold a stalk in my hand. I am the stalk . . .” This is from The Waves,”
555: “The reality garden invites use as metaphor, for a novelist—to suggest mood, climate, personality—while for the painter intense study can influence and determine presentation, the discovery of a personal vision—the garden expressing the painter’s own perception. A metamorphosis, perhaps, rather than a metaphor, but in each case the real garden has undergone a sea-change, either as language or as paint on a canvas. And I found it particularly interesting to discover how many painters were applied gardeners. Chocolate earth under the fingernails for Virginia Woolf, but also for Monet, Bonnard, Matisse, Klee.”
579: “Those nettles; the ivy. Ivy is definitely the novelist’s plant of choice; as soon as ivy sneaks in you know it is there with possibly sinister intent.”
591: “Definitely one of those large-leafed leathery thugs that should not be on offer in garden centers without a health-and-safety warning. I know all about those; I have one, planted in all innocence, and now it swarms an extra three or four feet up a wall each year, and requires attack by a hired garden firm.”
594: “And this is reality ivy, rather than fictional, so I do not have to consider its implications.”
810: “I find myself not much caring for Walter. His taste was for large, showy stuff, with a passion for dahlias, and no interest in the winter or spring garden, just the display of high summer. Margery favored the less flamboyant, the more subtle—the euphorbias, the hellebores, the hardy geraniums, the astrantias, vincas, snowdrops, aquilegias, pulmonarias. And I’m right behind her, remembering the garden as I have seen it in spring and early summer. Walter used to trample all over “her” plants when planting out his precious dahlias (the loudest and flashiest possible), and where his gardening manners were concerned he sounds exasperating—never picking up his prunings or dead-heads but leaving them for her to clear away. Like some men in the kitchen—cooking without doing their washing-up.”
854: “she admits to a weakness for dahlias—“and not the discreet little singles either.” Hers are “as blowzy as half-dressed Renoir girls; others are like spiky sea creatures, water-lilies, or the spirals in a crystal paperweight.””
1236: “The great defiance of time is our capacity to remember—the power of memory. Time streams away behind us, and beyond, but individual memory shapes, for each of us, a known place. We own a particular piece of time; I was there, then, I did this, saw that, felt thus. And gardening, in its small way, performs a memory feat: it corrals time, pinning it to the seasons, to the gardening year, by summoning up the garden in the past, the garden to come. A garden is never justnow ; it suggests yesterday, and tomorrow; it does not allow time its steady progress.”
1251: “climate ... ever-rolling stream, sequential, cyclical, and meaning that there is never time to get tired of anything in the garden because it is always a temporary pleasure, and would we feel the same about the roses if they blazed on and on, in relentless flower, all of them hurtling through Christmas, instead of that one defiant unseasonal bloom?”
1266: “The garden reorders time. And to garden is to impose order.”
1312: “Gardening, you escape the tether of time, you experience that elision of past, present and future.”
1322: “The rhododendron is apparently about as tenacious as anything, can live for hundreds of years, and is so invasive that it will smother all other growth and create a rhododendron wilderness which can only be eradicated with heavy machinery. ... a triffid-like quality.”
1455: “An excerpt from Ursula Fanthorpe’s poem “Seven Types of Shadow” ‘No haunting. No rattle of chains. They just lie there In their rigid truthfulness, the ghosts of things.’”
1519: “It is claimed that gardeners can live for up to fourteen years longer. Why? Because of all that vitamin D, and the exercise, but also because of getting the hands into the soil—exposure to natural bacteria boosts the immune system. On the exercise side, two hours of energetic gardening apparently uses up the same energy as a half-marathon of thirteen miles. And even the pottering kind of gardening done by the likes of me is strongly recommended; for older people, activity on a daily basis reduces the risk of stroke or heart attack by 27 percent, according to one study.”
1593: “All novelists move on to dangerous territory when they devise a character with a background unfamiliar to them. Most do it and have to rely on research and inquiry, knowing that any slip-up will provoke comment from some sharp-eyed reader. But sometimes what looks to be natural accuracy is a giveaway too: I feel sure that Angus Wilson gardened.”
1656: “The rose came into the garden from the wild; there are around 150 species of wild rose, native only to the northern hemisphere, and particularly favoring China—hence the arrival in the West of what were called China roses in the eighteenth century.”
2051: “A murky January day, and the green nubs of bulbs are poking up all over the place when I go out into the garden: snowdrops, narcissi, even the early tulips. Aha! Spring is not just a calendar promise, it is fact. It will happen.”
2056: “And to know a little about something is also to be able to recognize the depth and complexity of the subject; my own limited experience has fostered my admiration for the great gardeners, the garden writers, the botanists.”
ellie_outdoors's review against another edition
4.0
Imagine sitting down comfortably with a seasoned eighty-three year old English woman and absorbing all her thoughts related to gardening. And I mean ALL of her thoughts.
When beginning this journey, it's helpful to have a slight understanding of: English gardening, British culture, Egyptian history, impressionistic painters of the 21st century, story books related to gardening, and Latin flower names. Yeah, random.
Penelope Lively comfortably whizzed around ideas like a hummingbird from one author or painter to another. She talks about Monet, Matisse and Renoir like local art teachers. And she name drops legendary gardeners, Eleanor Perenyi and Gertrude Jekyll like next door neighbors. SO if any of that sounds interesting to you then I'd recommend it!
Lively has a hoard of beautiful quotes regarding what it means to be a gardener. The one theme she touched on at least a half a dozen times is how gardening makes you a time traveler. (Gardening happens in the present moment, but your mind is constantly thinking back to past summers or dreaming ahead to how you want to plant things differently next spring).
This is a DELIGHTFUL read for the person I am today. However, this collection would have been a horrifically boring read for myself even five years ago. Honestly, there were spots that I sped read through due to her rambling.
Overall, an informative and enjoyable read...for a gardener!
When beginning this journey, it's helpful to have a slight understanding of: English gardening, British culture, Egyptian history, impressionistic painters of the 21st century, story books related to gardening, and Latin flower names. Yeah, random.
Penelope Lively comfortably whizzed around ideas like a hummingbird from one author or painter to another. She talks about Monet, Matisse and Renoir like local art teachers. And she name drops legendary gardeners, Eleanor Perenyi and Gertrude Jekyll like next door neighbors. SO if any of that sounds interesting to you then I'd recommend it!
Lively has a hoard of beautiful quotes regarding what it means to be a gardener. The one theme she touched on at least a half a dozen times is how gardening makes you a time traveler. (Gardening happens in the present moment, but your mind is constantly thinking back to past summers or dreaming ahead to how you want to plant things differently next spring).
This is a DELIGHTFUL read for the person I am today. However, this collection would have been a horrifically boring read for myself even five years ago. Honestly, there were spots that I sped read through due to her rambling.
Overall, an informative and enjoyable read...for a gardener!