Embroidered Ground: Revisiting The Garden

Description

In "Embroidered Ground: Revisiting the Garden," the acclaimed author and garden designer Page Dickey writes of the pitfalls, challenges, successes, and myriad pleasures of the twenty-nine year process of creating her own remarkable garden, Duck Hill, in upstate New York. This winning book details the evolution of one especially loved and cared-for space: its failed schemes and realized dreams, and the wisdom gained in contending with an ever-evolving work of art. The author shares her very personal views on what contributes to a garden's success--structure, fragrance, the play of light and shadow, patterns and textures, multiseasonal plants. She writes of gardening with a husband, with wildlife, with dogs and chickens. And she grapples with how to adapt her garden--as we can adapt ours--to change in the years ahead.

Reviews

Praise for "Breaking Ground" "The work here is playful, undaunted by the classical tradition and far more concerned with sensory experience than academic correctness . . . The excellent text and pictures . . . manage to extract from these gardens valuable lessons." --MICHAEL POLLAN, "The New York Times Book Review""" Praise for "Embroidered Ground" ""Embroidered Ground" is a real delight, conveying Page Dickey's passion for gardening as well as the hard graft and blossoming progress of the garden at Duck Hill. A true inspiration, and a beautifully written book." --Jenny Uglow, author of "A Little History of British Gardening" "Page Dickey is part of the very best tradition of garden writing: her voice is literary and informed, but also personal and unpretentious. It's a delight to read this book about Duck Hill revisited, and about how gardens, and gardening, change over the years. Reading "Embroidered Ground" is like strolling through a favorite garden with a favorite friend." --Roxana Robinson, author of "Cost""[Dickey] cast[s] a spell . . . "Embroidered Ground" is a sweet, tender love story about how gardens and gardeners age and adapt, each to the other." --Dominique Browning, "The New York Times" "["Embroidered Ground"] is divided into a series of short essays on a wide range of subjects, each building on the others until a full picture of the garden, and the gardener's life, emerges. Dickey writes about learning to share the garden with a new plant-loving husband and their ideas for simplifying the garden as they grow older. In her view, a garden, at its best, is like the embroidery of the book's title: 'the results of a passion, our joyous individual efforts of expression in color, pattern, and texture, woven with leaves and flowers, in partnership with nature.'" --"Country Gardens" "Page Dickey [is a] legendary writer and gardener . . . In "Embroidered Ground" she offers tips . . . and wisdom: how to share your garden with a new partner who might have a different style, the beauty of the unmown, the long view (planting for decades) . . . It's a book to read, dreaming of spring." --Susan Salter Reynolds, "Los Angeles Times" "Dickey employs a range of voices, often ethereal . . . But she is razory-wicked when facing enemies: bindweed, barberry, Norway maple, "Ailanthus," bittersweet . . . There is much sage advice, on sightlines, garden bones, and hedges to frame and enclose . . . And she loves her garden as if it were a child--with joy, distress, responsibility, guilt--which is the most beautiful thing of all." --Peter Lewis, "The Barnes and Noble Review"

Author description

Page Dickey is a garden writer, lecturer, and designer. She is the author of "Duck Hill Journal: A Year in a Country Garden "and "Breaking Ground." She has written on garden design for "House & Garden," "House Beautiful," and "Elle Decor."