Customer Reviews

A Garden by the Sea

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This was a very informative read. I have gotten so many great ideas and will be using many of them in my own coastal garden. This is much more than a typical gardening how-to book. There is so much wisdom here and also some interesting facts. Organic gardening is my first love and I was pleased to see Ms. Hadley insist on it in her own garden. A Garden by the Sea reads like a story as well as a great resource for gardening information. I agree with the other reviews here, it is like talking with a friend. This book has become a treasured addition to my library.

I was given a copy of "A Garden by the Sea" as a gift from one gardener to another. This book reads like a journal of experiences, successes and disappointments, not at all like a "how to" or instructional manual that does little more than induce sleep.
Instead, one gets the feeling they are a cherished guest, being given a tour of Leila Hadley's beautiful home and garden while sipping some refreshing iced tea. Each area of her garden has a story, from beginning to end so you know how much love and work went into creating such a place of beauty.
There is wonderful information on organic gardening, attracting birds and fending off the unwanted creatures in your garden.
I especially enjoyed knowing mistakes are common to all of us and there is always another season to make things right again.
You will learn how to invite beautiful butterflies to your garden and how to keep them there by avoiding harmful sprays and chemicals. The book is full of information and recipes for natural foods and tonics to keep your garden safe and beautiful as well as references to locate many of the items you may want to buy.
Leila Hadley's love for the beauty of nature, her appreciation for all living things and her desire to share this beauty was evident on every page.
I give this book five stars because it was entertaining, informative and left me feeling like I just spent a relaxed afternoon with a friend.

It is always so satisfying to discover a book that treats its subject in a way to make it interesting to any and all readers: Simon Winchester's book The Professor and the Madman about the birth of the Oxford English Dictionary; Dava Sobel's book on Longitude; Andrew Solomon's The Noonday Demon on depression - the list is long and always growing. Happily, Leila Hadley's book, A Garden by the Sea, easily secures a place on my short list of nonfiction books that stretch well beyond their topics, captivating the general reader and gardener alike.

I have two black thumbs, yet continue to use them to turn the pages of A Garden by the Sea, marveling at Ms. Hadley's descriptions of her beloved garden, her unusual life and travels, and the changing seasons as viewed from the shores of the Northeastern seacoast.

There is plenty of practical knowledge about how to cultivate an organic seaside garden: climate maps, Latin names of plants, planting depths, garden pests, seasonal considerations, etc., but it is her ruminations away from the hardcore information that make me want to take trowel and hoe in hand.

My favorite chapter is about her Dream Garden, which encompasses a white garden and a moonlit garden: "The attraction of a white garden is that it gleams in the evening. . . lovely by day, pale-petaled scented flowers become magical by starlight, especially with a birdbath to reflect moonbeams, and the light of pierced brass Moroccan lanterns. "

I have become inspired to green my thumbs and find a patch of soil, even if it's just off my Manhattan apartment's fire escape, and grow my "jungle of blue morning glories in terracotta pots on a New York trelllised balcony . . . no larger than a bath mat." And eventually, as Hadley cheerfully prophesizes, create my own "thing of beauty that's a job forever."

I LOVE this book and I agree with the following starred review in Publishers Weekly from February 28th.
"All my life, I've known gardens, grown gardens," writes Hadley at the start of this captivating chronicle and guide. The author of the travel memoirs Give Me the World and A Journey with Elsa Cloud grew up believing that cultivating plants and flowers was an indispensable part of any good life (her grandmother was a friend of the great British garden designer Gertrude Jekyll). Hadley was steeped in the notion that truly beautiful gardens were composed with restraint and harmony. Size and extravagance was never the point. She has cultivated gardens all over the world, from South Africa to California, but one of her favorites remains a "jungle of blue morning glories in terracotta pots" on a Manhattan balcony "no larger than a bathmat." In 1990, her husband, the philanthropist Henry Luce III, presented her with a cliff-top house and five acres of beach-front property on Fishers Island, off the shore of Connecticut, and Hadley learned to expand her sense of what it means to be harmonious and restrained in the dramatic conditions of the sea. Combining a wealth of practical information with the eye and the verve of a born explorer, observer and artist, following the seasons and the passsing years, Hadley details how to create a garden that is organic on every level--matching and enchancing the environment and all its inhabitants. "The way Hank works a room at cocktail parties, chatting with everyone he knows, exchanging remembrances, catching up on what's going on at the moment, is the way I walk about the garden in the early morning in June." In this gorgeously written and photographed book, Hadley reveals what it is about gardening that is exquisitely temporal and timeless, down to earth and divine. This book will make everyone want to pick up a trowel. 200 color photos.

Very helpful guide which includes many ideas on how to create and maintain a garden on the sea or exposed to a lot of wind. I like the fact that it suggests all non-pesticide solutions for pests, fertilizing, etc.

Like all the best gardening books, Hadley's blooms with the personality of its author. A visual writer with an uncommon ability to recreate personal vistas of beauty in the mind's eye of her reader, Hadley has lived and gardened all over the world.

Her current garden, on five acres of secluded beachfront property at her home on Fisher's Island, off the Connecticut coast, includes nature walks and is strictly organic. "I thought a seaside garden should look and be simple, easy, harmonious with sea and sky, serene, tranquil....It hadn't occurred to me that this might not always be as simple nor as easy a project as I imagined."

Luckily for Hadley, who grew up with gardeners and governesses, help is affordable. But even if you don't have someone to pick up the slack on weeding, planting, pruning and deadheading, there's much to enjoy in this lovely, well-organized and practical book. Hadley offers advice on salt and drought tolerant plants, on coping with pests like rabbits and deer, learning from mistakes, and attracting birds and butterflies.

Roughly organized by season, she discusses her favorite plants in detail, including sources for plants, bulbs and seeds. There are entire chapters devoted to daffodils and tulips, irises, hydrangeas, geraniums and pelargonium, pinks, marsh mallows, passionflower and other vines, annuals and fruits.

Other chapters discuss "The Cutting Garden," "The Autumn Garden," "The Winter Scene," houseplants and volunteers.

Hadley opens her flower chapters with exuberant descriptions of what she likes about these favorites. "the daffodils, like a waving river of flowers along the western edge of the driveway, look as though they had just been painted. Their clean, shining brightness, the scent of young leaves and damp spring earth, everything glowing and blowing, hint at the bliss of May and the hope and magic of summer ahead."

She goes on to describe the work in loving detail, from how many bulbs to buy ("Think wheelbarrowsful.") when and how to plant them (clumps of odd numbers in a diamond shape work best for her) to choosing colors, height, extending flowering and interplanting with astilbe or day lilies to hide bedraggled post-bloom foliage.

Although her chapter on pests neglects the bane of my existence, woodchucks, she does offer numerous non-toxic ideas for ridding the garden of rabbits ("Best of all solutions to the rabbit problem, I've found, is to focus on plants rabbits dislike."), raccoons, rats and mice, ants, slugs, aphids, mosquitoes, crab grass and poison ivy (full strength vinegar poured over the whole plant) and more. While many solutions will be familiar, others may not. I'd never heard of cornmeal for combating fungus, for instance, or Mosquito Magnets, which trap mosquitoes by mimicking human breath.

You won't always agree with her, of course. She has banished daisies from her garden as "killers and dangerously invasive," but I've found that these problems are (mostly) solved by yanking them out before they are quite done flowering. And masses of daisies definitely offer the "incandescent radiance" she so values in her dream garden.

"My dream garden is both a white garden and a moon garden, a garden of annuals and perennials the color of snow, cream, ivory, and milk, with flower textures delicate as tissue paper, soft as velvet, smooth as silk, sleek as satin. Consider beds of creamy white roses, clusters of lilies, carpets of white violets, clematis blossoms."

The crisp, brilliant photographs are nearly as elegant as the prose, offering atmospheric views of rambling hillsides at dawn, bordered walkways, glimpses of house between masses of blooms, architectural line and ornamental accents, and close ups of her favorite varieties.

Hadley, author of the memorable travel memoirs, "Give Me the World," and "A Journey with Elsa Cloud," in addition to the series, "Fieldings Guide to Traveling with Children in Europe," has produced a joyful, intense and elegant garden book, which will be enjoyed again and again and all through the winter.

Between sand on the one hand and clay on the other, there's the world of workable dirt. Lifelong gardener Leila Hadley has worked them all. But the soil that's the most challenging is the type she's working around her and her husband's island home off the coast of Connecticut.

The author knew she was in trouble when she saw all the purple clover and Queen Anne's Lace on Fisher's Island. For both grow well in poor soil. What was even more troublesome were all the acquaintances, experts and garden help who said "No way!" to all her gardening plans. If she listened to them, how could she ever hope for A GARDEN BY THE SEA?

For example, she was told she wouldn't be able to grow roses. She was also told she couldn't win against burning windswept salt spray, fog, noon heat, rabbits, rocky sandy soil, and wind. She was told too nothing would grow along an ugly concrete boulder and seawall or on south-facing rocky bluffs. And she was told to leave things as they were in areas overgrown with poison ivy and oak; and with wild blackberry, bramble, raspberry, and rose.

But Hadley says gardening is part wishful thinking: "Projects one would like to do if one had more time or more help or more money or more space or more energy." It's also part courageous "convictions."

Time, space, money, help and energy aren't problems for Hadley. Neither is sticking to her beliefs. Ever since she was little, she always had a garden. She was raised on good gardening guidelines set out by English experts Gertrude Jekyll and Vita Sackville-West. So by experience and training, she knew she had a winning plan.

First, start small and simple, with a soil test. Set up a compost pile. Be sure to mulch. Plant creeping juniper to keep the area weed-free, along with lavender to improve the soil. First work with vines, shrubs, lettuce and herbs. Then go for whatever color, feel, look and smell fits with your house and grounds. For her, outdoors these would be daffodils, hydrangea, iris, marsh mallows, passionflower vines, pelargoniums and pinks. Indoors, these would be bamboo, chrysanthemums, daisies, Dieffenbachia, English ivy, ficus, palms, peace lilies, philodendron and Schefflera. Throughout, stay true to organic, non-toxic, healthy, environmentally friendly gardening without chemical sprays, herbicides or pesticides.

The book is well written and nicely organized, with many beautiful photos. It clearly shows how worthwhile it is to follow the three r's of advanced master gardening. Good land care use means reduced use of pesticides and hazardous materials. They're unhealthy for all of us. They're hard to get rid of. Good land care use also means reusing and recycling. For example, compost and mulch of grass cuttings and leaves make better-quality soil with enough water in it for thirsty roots.