A memorable book about making a renowned garden work
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-nineyear-long 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.
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“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
“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
“[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
About the Author
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.
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Diana Harding
