Bringing a Garden to Life

Carol Williams has written a gardening book that is as instructive as it is eloquent, as practical as it is spiritual. I found the book at the library, just after I (nervously) embarked on my first garden. I quickly realized it needed a permanent place in my home, and I bought my own copy. As a rookie, I savored its useful advice and encouraging tone, but with each year of experience, I return to it for so much more. Just a great book.

I've given this book as a gift to three people, each of whom raved about it. Carol Williams provides a comforting stroll through the pleasures of growing a garden that is a place of comfort and pleasurable change. She reminds us that the garden we build today will change as we change, and that the changes bring wonderful opportunities. She stresses that we should enjoy the process of planning, building and growing a garden, rather than rushing to a finished product.This book is more than a "how to" on growing and arranging veggies and flowers in your garden, although there are many great gardening tips and techniques included.

There are many things to be learned in the growing, the germinating, the flowering, the pruning, the harvesting, the compasting, the living, the dying, and most of all the watching. This book is filled not only with practicalities for the gardener and philosophies for the human being, but philosophies for the flowers and practicalities for life.

When Carol Williams sat down in her garden shed to write "Bringing a Garden to Life," she managed to mingle the philosophies of my two best friends -- one who thinks often about the reasons she gardens and the other, who simply gardens because "everyone needs a project to keep them busy, and the garden is mine." Both philosophies are fine with me, but even finer when Williams interweaves their tenets so graciously. Like gardening, Williams' style is a mix of practicality and prose. In her introduction, Williams gives the reader a telling glimpse of what is to come. "I think it is not the garden so much as the gardening that performs...miracles," she writes. Just so. And while the book's roots are in its how-to's -- digging the earth, composting, starting seeds, weeding and pruning -- the joy of it comes in unexpected musings and ocasional poems. In fact, Williams suggests that "writing brief garden poems is an aid to noticing what one notices." What follows in often haiku, but Shakespeare and Robert Frost get equal time as well. Garden readers who enjoy the mix might compare Williams' subject matter to Marilyn Barrett's "Creating Eden," and Jennifer Bennett's "Our Gardens, Ourselves," but the differences in style and content are distinct -- enough so that all three make valuable additions to a personal gardening library. Not only does Williams hand out down-to-earth advice, she also recommends plenty of useful texts and tells readers what she's learned from each author -- valuable information for avid garden readers. Just as "each gardener will have or will find their own reasons for growing what they do," each garden reader will come away with their own tidbits of wisdom in this easy-to-read book.

The real challenge of gardening is not whether you can grow giant cabbages or calendulas, but how deeply you can relax into the process of helping your garden grow. Ms. Williams is obviously a black-belt gardener, but the most surprising aspect of the book is that she can make you laugh and ponder miracles at the same time. The title has a double meaning, too. Apart from discovering how a green thumb can be cultivated, the reader also learns how to bring the lessons of gardening into daily life. With a deft and delicate sense of timing, Ms. Williams demonstrates that a garden's most important lesson is not just teaching us how to relax, but how to truly listen to the silent wisdom of plants. They neither toil nor do they spin; they just accept the free sunshine by opening themselves up. Read this book and do thou likewise.