Oh Garden of Fresh Possibilities!: Notes from a Gloucester Garden

A Beautiful Garden, and a book that successfully conveys the process of how to create one, rely on a gardener's capacity to discover how things grow and a writer's ability to explain it. A love of plants, along with an understanding of their needs, peculiarities, and idiosyncrasies, provide the foundation on which all memorable gardens are built and upon which truly useful gardening books depend.

Kim Smith's passion is her garden, a small and densely-packed quarter acre beside her family's seaside home in Gloucester, brimming with every species imaginable and some (including apricots) a few might consider unimaginable. Here she has created the framework, a living tapestry of fragrance, foliage, flower and fruit, that establishes the soul of her garden. She is sensistive to the plant's forms, hues, and horticultural demands, and has, by design, established a succession of blooms and a selection of plant materials that reduce the needs for pesticides and herbicides. Any gardener wrestling with the challenges of blight, bugs, poor soil, limited light, and the vagaries of weather will find in these pages both sound advice and practical solutions - in spades.

But this is, quite deliberately, intended as more than another (and predictable) how-to book. The author is especially and equally interested in the intangibles a garden provides: the moods and ambiance, the butterflies attracted, the harmonious patterns of color, light, and texture. This is as much about how to visualize a garden, as about particular trees, shrubs, vines, perennials, and annuals. Eclectic in its approach, citing poetry and quotations from Eastern and Western sources, it challenges us with an artist's eye while drawing from down-to-earth practical experience.

Illustrated in full color with the author's own exquisite drawings, containing twenty-two chapters that illuminate every aspect of garden planning and planting, this book recommends itself to gardeners seeking both sensible guidance and design inspiration.