Synopses & Reviews
With the same warmth, wisdom, wit, and accessibility that readers have come to love and trust in her monthly column,
House & Garden editor in chief Dominique Browning offers this lively, charming, and instructive story of restoring a neglected suburban garden.
When a retaining wall in Browning's New York suburban garden collapsed, she was forced into action. Paths of Desire is the enchanting, amusing, and moving account of making a garden -- and confronting the essence of suburban gardening, with its idiosyncratic ecosystem. This meant struggling with depraved skunks and raccoons, marauding teenagers, plastic jungle gyms, toppling garbage cans, uncontrollable eyesores, potholed drives, and all the grinding, honking, and buzzing of the neighborhood.
Browning's delightfully frank prose conveys the very sense of being deep in a garden, with all its organic smells and textures, and the myriad joys of deciding what to plant and watching as the vision is realized. It contains a rich store of advice and illustrative anecdotes for enthusiasts and novices alike, as Browning amusingly documents the missteps she took in the planning of her garden and the satisfactions of finally getting it right. In Paths of Desire she teaches us how to embrace our plots of land -- no matter their size, beauty, or proximity to the city -- and make them our own. But she also reminds us that the life of a garden can never be separated from the people who wander in and out of it: characters like the charming but useless children; the philosophical tree doctor and the band of Helpful Men; the neighbors -- legalistic on one side, aesthetically challenged on the other -- and, best and worst of all, the True Love.
By the end of the book, Browning has transformed her garden -- and her life -- and has created a place of enchantment, which is most of all what a garden should be.
Review
"Just as her garden must be, Browning's intimately personal chronicle is filled with lines of breathtaking beauty, simple in their understated elegance yet profound in their impact on the human psyche." Booklist
Review
"[A] tale of few illusions and many delights, unerringly wise about two afflictions to which most of us, at one time or another, aspire." The New York Times
Review
"Entertaining, insightful, and highly recommended." Library Journal
Review
"The author has cut a smart niche for herself in garden writing: unceremonious, except when ceremony is in order." Kirkus Reviews
Synopsis
From the editor in chief of House & Garden magazine and the acclaimed author of Around the House and in the Garden comes a charming and prescriptive story of restoring a neglected suburban garden. Line drawings throughout.
About the Author
Dominique Browning has been the editor in chief of
House & Garden since 1995. She was previously the editor of
Mirabella, an assistant managing editor of
Newsweek, and the executive editor of
Texas Monthly. She lives in New York with her two teenage sons.
Table of Contents
ContentsPrologue My Kind of Garden
One The Wall Falls Down
Two Grounds for Renovation
Three Helpful Men
Four The Little White Bird
Five Sitting Around
Six The Neighbors
Seven The Varmints
Eight Death of the Hemlocks
Nine In the Hole
Ten The Threshold of Safety
Eleven Children Are Useless
Twelve My Hedge Fund
Thirteen A New Driveway
Fourteen The Long and Winding Path
Fifteen Fountain of Tears
Sixteen Why Prune?
Seventeen Teenagers in the Hosta
Eighteen One Enchanted Evening
Afterword