Cultivating Delight: A Natural History of My Garden [Hardcover]

Diane Ackerman (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 2, 2001

In the mode of her esteemed bestseller A Natural History of the Senses, Diane Ackerman's new book, Cultivating Delight celebrates the sensory pleasures she discovers in her garden.

Ackerman delights in her garden through all the seasons. Whether she is deadheading flowers or glorying in the profusion of roses, offering sugar water to a hummingbird or studying the slug, she welcomes the unexpected drama and extravagance as well as the sanctuary her garden offers. She chronicles instances of violence in nature but also intuits loneliness and desire in the clamor of male crickets in the spring. And there is wonderment and marvel as she happens upon a tiny frog asleep inside the petals of a tulip. Visitors to her garden range from botanical explorers of earlier centuries to the nature mystic John Muir to the brilliant British garden writer Gertrude Jekyll.

The author's garden nourishes its creator, who imaginatively returns the favor and seizes privileged moments to leap from science and metaphor to meditation on the human condition. Written in sensuous, lyrical prose, Cultivating Delight is a hymn to nature and to the pleasure we take in it.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Diane Ackerman relishes the world of her garden. As a poet, she finds within it an endless field of metaphors. As a naturalist, she notices each small, miraculous detail: the hummingbirds and their routines, the showy tulips, the crazy yellow forsythia. Of visiting deer she writes, "I love watching the deer, which always arrive like magic or a miracle or the answer to an unasked question."

In her popular book A Natural History of the Senses, Ackerman celebrates the human body; in A Natural History of My Garden, she turns her attention to the world outside the body, outside the human sphere. Structured by seasons, this is a book of subtle shifts, but the reader never feels lost. Her prose is so welcoming, at times it feels like she's talking directly to you, although her lush, poetic language is the opposite of speech.

Distracted urban readers craving a book that will transport them would do well to spend time immersed in these pages, as will gardeners who've lost appreciation for their plot. Ackerman is a generous writer--a teacher who will share treasured, obscure passages from Beckett or Hawthorne. She's emotional and highly charged, and her descriptions are so clear they're small marvels. She's remarkable for her ability to find mystery everywhere. --Emily White

From Publishers Weekly

In a generous and jauntily haphazard excursion through the four seasons of her Ithaca, N.Y., backyard landscape and the innumerable interests of her fertile mind, poet and naturalist Ackerman (A Natural History of the Senses; A Natural History of Love) reprises her role as an enchanting intellectual sensualist. Her extensive flower (and even weed) beds provide both subject matter and metaphor. More interested in what a great garden does for a person's spirit and soul than in how to make it grow, Ackerman buzzes productively from idea to revelation to insight, lighting on topics as diverse as how roses are reminiscent of dolls' faces; why we see faces in nature; how plants, animals and humans are alike; whether plants have motives and instincts; how flowers protect themselves from both heat, aridity and freezing cold; and why women are more prone to hypothermia than men in just five paragraphs. She celebrates the diversity of weeds, finds beauty in chaos and order, embraces trial and error as a way of learning and respects the inevitable cycle of birth, death and rebirth. (Oct.)Forecast: With the success of her earlier works preceding her, and an eight-city author tour and 15-city NPR campaign to come, Ackerman's breezy philosophical lyricism should flourish amoang both garden enthusiasts and fans of encyclopedic curiosity.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: Harper; 1 edition (October 2, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060199865
• ISBN-13: 978-0060199869
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 6.5 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (26 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,384,697 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Diane Ackerman is the acclaimed author of "A Natural History of the Senses," the bestselling "The Zookeeper's Wife," "Dawn Light," and many other books. She lives in Ithaca, New York, and Palm Beach, Florida

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

64 of 73 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars A Natural History of Diane Ackerman, October 21, 2002

By A Customer

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Cultivating Delight: A Natural History of My Garden (Paperback)

Well this is going to make me feel like a curmudgeon, since I can see that Diane Ackerman has a devoted following. However, having just tried and failed to get through my second Diane Ackerman book, I have to tell you that I find them boring and unreadable. She doesn't write much about natural history; she writes poetic meditations on natural history. There is a big difference. Her books are about her responses to the natural world, and she can be quite self-absorbed.

For example, in one essay she begins by describing her feelings upon seeing a sick raccoon stagger across her yard in broad daylight. She calls the local animal welfare people to look into it. Then she turns to describing her feelings and reactions to the other elements of her garden. I was left wondering what happened to the raccoon. She never told me.

If you are looking for Diane Ackerman's personal reactions to nature, this may be for you. But I was looking for some good winter reading about nature itself, for when I miss my garden. At the same time I ordered this book, I also ordered a book by Sy Montgomery called "The Curious Naturalist: Nature's Everyday Mysteries". I just chose it by searching for such books on Amazon[.com]. It turns out that Sy Montgomery was the nature columnist for the Boston Globe, and her essays are delightful, concise, amazing and informative. I didn't learn much about the interior life of the author, but I learned the most amazing things about the nature all around me. I read about the messages that singing insects send in the autumn evenings and how they create their songs; the messages in spider webs; the peculiar life-giving structure of water; the way sound travels over snow in winter. Most delightful of all, the author describes ways of interacting with our animal brothers and sisters. I learned how easy it is to teach wild birds to eat from your hand, and how to use a flashlight in the grass to flirt with fireflies and get them to hit on you. This is the book I was really looking for when I bought Ackerman's book. Once I started The Curious Naturalist, I couldn't put it down. If you are looking for the same type of reading that I was, you will like the Montgomery book.

19 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A uniquely fascinating book,a literary treasure., April 15, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: Cultivating Delight: A Natural History of My Garden (Hardcover)

Smart, witty, informed, observant, funny, practical, and powerfully moving-- Ackerman combines all of these qualities in a book that's both superb natural history and stylish literature. As a scientist, I'm continually amazed by Ackerman's scrupulousness. As a gardener, I'm impressed by her inventiveness (I'm going to try some of her strategies this season). As a lover of literature, I find myself rereading poetic passages of unbelievable beauty. This is one of my favorite books on any subject, because it's brimming with her trademark-- a fascinating sensibility, who loves and is endlessly curious about the natural world, while keeping an equally fascinated eye on the human condition. All that combined with the soul of a poet. In short, a literary treasure.

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars I loved it, and Im not even remotely a gardener, February 24, 2004

By 

Peggy Vincent "author and reader" (Oakland, CA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Cultivating Delight: A Natural History of My Garden (Paperback)

Gardens. They're great, and I have a lovely one in my front yard. But I can claim exactly none of the credit. My style of gardening is to sit on the front steps chatting with Teri, my gardener, while she prunes the shrubs and tucks primroses and lobelia and cyclamen into the little bare spots.
But I love reading about people who DO enjoy gardening, and Diane Ackerman is a consummate writer on the subject. I've read The Moon by Whale Light and A Natural History of the Senses, two others of her several books, and find myself equally charmed by this one. It's a casual tour through the four seasons of her upstate backyard garden. But, as she's a naturalist, a poet, and a philosopher, she doesn't stop with just the plants; she uses the plants and their interdependent roles as metaphors to browse mentally through a wide variety of topics, including what gardens can do for people more than how people can tend a garden. It's like a role reversal of sorts. Some of the subjects that her free- and far-ranging mind roams over include: how we are like plants, plant's self-defense mechanisms, why we see faces in nature, etc. Her lyrical writing and vast, encyclopedic curiosity sometimes remind me of Annie Dillard's nature writing, a comparison that should be considered a compliment to both authors.