The author not only recounts delightful anecdotes, but also offers abstract ideas with precision clarity, utilizing graceful and wonderfully chosen vocabulary. Her metaphors and similes sometimes make you gasp, they are so fresh and original. They are also beautifully couched within the overall garden theme.
This book puts the reader in touch with the richness, depth, and beauty of life. It is true writing by a gifted writer.
Joy! Today is Book Club day, and Joyce McGreevy, the author of "Gardening by Heart" is coming to talk to/with our group. We just finished her book and I loved it. It isn't a novel. It is not a self-help book. It isn't a gardening book. It isn't a poetry book. It is a poetic story about nurturing our hearts, our gardens. Hmm, is it a story? No, actually. There is no story-story, just a string of anecdotes and remembrances involving the author's mother and siblings and friends and jobs.
Her writing is the thing.
She writes like a poet, but it isn't poetry per se. Well, I'll go upstairs and get the book and excerpt it for you...hold on...
Without looking, I just opened the book to this page:
Strawberries at Dawn
"The first pale amber rays of sun have backlit the somber mountains. A coastal live oak rustles. The birds are stirring. In my garden, the poppies are rolled up tightly like saffron scrolls. I'm on my knees, coffee within easy reach, as I set a blue salvia into the ground the way a parent might ease a sleepy child back into bed."
Dawn is the best time of day to do almost anything. The phone holds its tongue and there are no appointments. One's mind is fertile with dreams whose meanings flower best in a hushed world."
[Isn't that wonderful?] more...
"In the garden, time itself seems to expand. Later in the day I may fret about getting to this appointment or achieving that task "on time", but early in the morning I seem to have all the time in the world. The killing frost of anxiety is held at bay, letting ideas and insights establish strong roots."
She starts each chapter with a quote from another author or poet.
"Everything that slows us down and forces patience, everything that sets us back into the slow circles of nature, is a help. Gardening is an instrument of grace."--May Sarton, Journals
She advocates keeping a nature journal...at the office.
"...it consisted of a burgeoning collection of index cards, each of which bore a hastily penciled sentence or two about something I had observed, whether on the way to work, from my window, or during a lunch break....The French say of good gardeners not that they have a green thumb but that they have un main vert, a green hand. With every entry I penciled in I was keeping my hand green and subsequently nurturing the heart, even in the midst of computers, stark white partitions, and fluorescent lighting."
Don't you just love her? I can't wait to meet our new best friend.
Love,Your sister
