The Garden Awakening

May 2, 2016
Reynolds, a longtime garden designer, awoke one day to the realization that she could not go on as she had, creating “dead zones” by constraining nature to her will. This treatise-cum-storybook explores her spiritual awakening and reconnection of gardens with nature. She designed her book as a guide to give gardeners “a gentle nudge in the right direction”: that is, back to nature, toward truth. Headnotes in both English and Gaelic emphasize Reynolds’s connection to her native Ireland, which she depicts as a land of sacred places, geometry, symbols, curses, and magic. Her directions take a holistic approach, going beyond practical advice to spiritual guidance; she claims that gardening can show the gardener what needs working on in life itself. Reynolds offers alternative methods of land management beyond chemical therapy. She alternates stories of her family and culture with organized layouts, how-tos, and recipes (for example: natural fungi-, herbi- and insecticides). She encourages adding fauna to flora along with imagination, dreams, charms, and memory. Ruth Evans’s illustrations add resonance. Color illus.

August 1, 2016

Many gardening books describe how gardeners create outdoor spaces; this one begins with healing the partnership between the underlying land and the gardener. For award-winning garden designer Reynolds, walking and knowing the environment precedes any planning or planting. Her gardens are more terrain, textured hillocks, and paths, incorporating symbols that are heavy with meaning (spirals, circles, squares), to create places for wishing, praying, and releasing. Trees are anchors, and every plant has a purpose that is useful and spiritual. Sketched plans for small, medium, and large gardens show both layout and how mature plantings may look. The second half discusses the growth of a forest garden, a sustainable evolution taking three to ten years. Plant suggestions based on function (canopy, shrubs, vines, etc.) provide soil preferences and edible parts. Well-known alternative methods of mulching, managing pests, and controlling diseases are the practical yin to the magical yang of this book. Biodynamic and permaculture gardening practices permeate this work, and Monty Waldin's Biodynamic Gardening would be a straightforward introduction to these biodynamic theories. VERDICT This unusual and beautifully illustrated volume, complete with a ribbon bookmark, reflects "outside-the-box" thinking from a singularly talented landscape designer. Recommended for most collections.--Jeanette McVeigh, Univ. of the Sciences, Philadelphia

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