Inner Gardening
The Tao Of Personal Renewal
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- $6.99
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- $6.99
Publisher Description
Whether you're a first-time gardener or a veteran, you'll find something to inspire you in this beautifully written book that reveals the myriad ways in which working in a garden can enhance your life and deepen your connection to the world.
Season by season, Diane Dreher leads you through a journey of peace and renewal. A monthly set of gardening tasks helps you plan, design, and care for your garden, along with illuminating details of gardening history, lore, and tradition. But here you'll also find ways to tend your own inner garden: how to plant seeds of ideas and dreams, weed out bad habits, and design new challenges one step at a time.
Brimming with life-enhancing strategies and filled with words of wisdom that will invigorate your spirit, Inner Gardening is a book to treasure and use every day, indoors and out.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this resolutely optimistic, self-help-meets-how-to manual, Dreher, author of The Tao of Inner Peace and professor of Renaissance literature at Santa Clara University, offers a month-by-month guide to gardening as a spiritual pursuit, in which hands-on garden advice provides the grist for a metaphor-driven, checklist approach to "inner" growth and cultivation. (Notes on weeding the flowerbed meander into prescriptive musings on "weeding" the "unwelcome intruders" and "unproductive activities" from one's life.) Dreher neglects the ways in which gardening can itself be trying requiring the gardener to stare down rot and death on a daily basis, placing physical strain on body, wallet and even land. More irritatingly, she takes a finger-wagging tone toward much of contemporary culture and offers wistful (and ahistorical) glances at the medieval and early modern world, which she idealizes as having allowed the "natural" and "simple" to flourish. Still, this book offers some delights: a cache of agreeable quotations, charming historical and literary anecdotes (Adam's naming of plants in Milton's Paradise Lost), useful instructions on such tasks as double-digging and tips on how to make a compost heap more productive (toss in a box of energetic earthworms). More successful on the firm terrain of practical counsel for the gardener and as a pastiche of garden trivia, this book falters when striving to offer guidance on self-transformation.
