Garden Stories
What does a garden look like through the eyes of a snail? Virginia Woolf has thoughts on that, as does Katherine Mansfield, whose sheltered young protagonist surveys the social theatre of a garden party with fresh, uncertain eyes. This anthology, curated by Diana Secker Tesdell, gathers an impressively varied group of writers around a single, fertile subject, and the results are quietly surprising. Doris Lessing's characters wrench vivid vegetables and fruit from generous African earth, while Colette drowns happily in an excess of blossoming colour. It's sensory writing at its most unapologetic. Children get their own peculiar edens here too. Sandra Cisneros and Italo Calvino each conjure small, strange paradises that feel half-remembered and half-invented, the kind of places you almost recognise. William Maxwell and Jamaica Kincaid turn to the adult gardener, finding in that quiet, repetitive labour something that lingers and unsettles long after the last page. The anthology's second half tips into stranger territory altogether. Nathaniel Hawthorne offers a garden of lethal beauty, J. G. Ballard grows crystal buds at the edge of time, and John Collier's orchids are frankly carnivorous. Most quietly affecting of all is Aoko Matsuda's contribution, in which a young woman plants whatever she receives each day, be it roses, broken crockery, love, or grief. Gardens, this collection suggests, are never simply gardens. They carry everything we put into them.
- Author: Diana Secker-Tesdell
- Publisher: Everyman
- Genre: Gardening & Horticulture
- ISBN: 978-1841596327
- Pages: 400 pages