Synopses & Reviews
Perennials that behave like annuals, gone within a year or two. Lettuce that bolts right when you're in the mood for a salad. Deer, hedgehogs, slugs, and bugs. And then, all the know-it-alls who tell you how easy it is. Gardening may be America's most popular leisure activity, but it is also the most frustrating, aggravating, and time-consuming-by no means the simple idyll-with-dirt sold by gardening gurus. As lifelong gardener Abby Adams points out in her tongue-in-cheek book, you can't trust the experts, nothing looks like it does in magazines and catalogs, trends change more often than hemlines, and Mother Nature always wins. Literate, funny, studded with quotes and ironic observations, here is a series of honest takes on dozens of subjects that all gardeners will relate to.
Synopsis
A Maddening Endeavor
Perennials behaving like annuals, dead and gone after just one season. Neighbors' tomatoes that always come in a week earlier than yours. Fickleness, hard work, and ethical dilemmas (you've live-trapped the woodchuck-now what?). It's gardening, Abby Adams loves, it, and in a book as perceptive as it is funny she shares a lifetime's obsessions with its mysterious ways.
About the Author
Abby Adams is the author of An Uncommon Scold (1,000 quotes from women) and, with her husband, High Jinx and Transylvania Station. Born and raised in New York City, she has at various times lived in San Francisco, in London, in Woodstock, New York, and on Fire Island. She has always gardened.
Table of Contents
Introduction
What Is a Garden, Anyway?
Everything I Know About Gardening I Learned from My Houseplants
From Eve to Martha Stewart
Micro-Gardening
Gourmet Gardeners
To Mow or Not to Mow
Tree$
Rainy-Day Projects
Smell
Epiphanies in the Herbaceous Border
Vegetable Blues
The Good Earth, and the Not So Good
Consider the Onion
Enemies List
Mothballs and Snakes
The Wish Book
Afterword
Sources and Suggested Reading