If you got some gift cards for the holidays, or even if you just got a library card, here are some great winter reads:

I’ve mentioned Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition by Robert Pogue Harrison in an earlier blog. I can’t tell you how much I enjoyed this book. It’s so rich in history and thought. For example, Harrison, who teaches at Stanford, muses on the Stanford campus, and from there he thinks about campuses in general, the tradition of siting learning in a kind of garden. This takes him back to the Greeks, to Plato and Epicurus, for whom the garden was the best place for learning. For Plato, the garden is a sanctuary from the political and business worlds. There, students and teachers can indulge in serious and extended conversations, since he believed that people learn not from reading, but from reflecting with trusted and admired others on ideas and experiences. As I read this chapter, I thought about the ideas I hold most dear, the ones that have steered my life, and all of them I learned not (or not just) from books, but from talk, bouncing ideas off friends and colleagues, testing the ideas, revising, retesting, all in contexts that felt safe, like a garden. For Epicurus, the garden is more than a sanctuary: it is a place where students learn to garden. In gardening, students have the experience of cultivating, and the central lesson of the school was the cultivation of values and virtues, such as friendship, consideration, gratitude, patience, and hope. I love the idea that we can cultivate ourselves as we cultivate the soil, and it makes sense to me as I practice being a better person than I am.

In the same vein, The Enchantment of Gardens: A Psychological Approach by Ruth Ammann . A psychotherapist, Ammann meditates on the garden as the intermediate place between the built environment – the home – and nature. In that respect, it is an image of the human soul: part nature and part culture. Inverting this relationship, she also considers the ‘soul garden’, the interior landscape that constitute our identity. Here’s a characteristic passage: “Gardens stage a continuous back-and-forth between the devising, building, ordering, fantasizing, loving, or hating individual and nature, which responds to the range of human activity in its distinct manner, subject to its own rules and antics. The more affectionately we feel our way into nature’s unknown essence, the more harmonious our garden becomes. Its totality is a microcosm and thus affords the individual an opportunity to take part in the greatness of creation on a small human scale.” What I like in this passage are the words, “and hating,” and “antics.” Ammann isn’t sentimental about people: she knows that we have pesky, irritating, sabotaging, snarky sides as well as our loving, creative, and clever sides. And nature isn’t romantic either: it’s often violent, unruly, and disruptive. In many ways, nature and humans are mirrors – and of course, humans are part of nature, animals with big brains. The book has lots of great photos, but it’s a small paperback, not a coffee table book.

Two more books are hard-bound and full of photos, but also psychological in many ways. The Pattern Garden, by Valerie Easton, approaches garden design from the point of view of patterns of instincts and experiences; “I believe that the garden calls up our deepest instincts, and it is from these instincts that good design is born, “ she writes in the introduction. These instincts she calls “archetypal ideas and longings.” Chapters of the book take up elements of gardens that fall into different patterns: issues of scale, journey (paths, gates, etc), enclosure, destination, water, art, and material patterns. The pictures are terrific, and so is the writing: “The way a garden is experienced doesn’t depend on the width of a border or the height of an arbor. It is the atmosphere, the emotional experience, an individual’s comfort and response that make a garden memorable. You know how in every recipe there are certain elements vital to the success of what you’re making? You can play around with the amount of cinnamon, or even substitute one egg for two when you make gingerbread, but if you leave out the molasses or the baking soda (let alone the flour and sugar) you‘ve got a mess. The essential elements in a “recipe” for planning a new garden, or rejuvenating an older one, might well be enticing destinations.” She goes on in this chapter to write about and illustrate garden destinations: patios, benches, focal points, and sheds. She’ll get you thinking about your garden, the way you feel in it, the ways you want to change it.

The Inward Garden by Julie Moir Messervy, like The Pattern Garden, is richly illustrated – every gardener needs some wonderful picture books to get through winter. Also, Messervy is concerned with ‘the archetypal landscape,’ which may be like caves, mountains, harbors, islands. “The archetypes also link our feelings, memories, and associations to a particular spatial form. You may experience the same surge of joy looking out from your skyscraper office window that you felt in your tree house.” Flowing from this, Messervy sets out to encourage the reader to analyze the inward and outward sites of her garden. This is a book that’s written just for you: it helps you think and dream about your garden - and your life. It includes chapters on children’s gardens, and it prompts you to remember the gardens of your childhood.

Finally, Gardens in the Dunes, by Leslie Marmon Silko. This is a novel which explores a number of different worlds of gardening. Silko herself is part Laguna Pueblo, and the central characters here are members of the Sand Lizard people, a fictional group living in the southwest of the United States. The voice we hear most often is that of Indigo, a young girl, and her understanding of events shapes the story. The gardens in the novel include the garden of the title, a desert garden watered by rain and guarded by a rattlesnake. It is the home of the narrator, and her thoughts and heart keep returning there. There’s a garden in southern California, another very elaborate garden in Connecticut, and two in Europe, one in England and the other in Italy. Only the Connecticut garden is seen as imposed on the land; all the others, to one degree or another, respect the local traditions and spirits. The novel is set around the time of the Ghost Dance at the end of the nineteenth century, and much of what happens in it will be shocking to readers who are unfamiliar with the history of American Indians: children are kidnapped and forced into boarding schools where they are taught to disown their traditional cultures; people are herded into reservations, far from the traditional lands; others form shantytowns along the edges of railway and irrigation projects. But the garden episodes are truly wonderful: the title garden is lovingly detailed, and the European gardens are rich with European traditions of the genius loci, the spirit of the place.

I hope you’ll take a minute to visit my remodeled website in the next couple of weeks. It’s not up yet, but it will be soon. If you bookmark it now, you’ll be able to find it when the updates come online. It’s at view link