Customer Reviews

A Garden Story

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

 

 

The narrator of this book lives in Holllywood with a dried out, neglected yard. He is a writer and once he begins to think of his garden as the blank pages of a book, he becomes inspired to fill it and care for it. His choices of plants and ornamentation are his personal preference, not necessarily mine. Interspersed with the tale of "writing" a garden are bits of his past. Another element, which I found very interesting, were a couple of tidbits on California history. Much of his garden narrative was tedious. The last chapter was a just huge list of everything in his garden. If I were to rattle on to someone regarding the contents of my garden plantings, I'm sure their eyes would glaze over. However, I still found the book to be a worthwhile read and actually give it 3 1/2 stars.

In this memoir, Whiteson, who was new to me, relates his decision to create a garden in the yard of his Hollywood home. The book alternates between discussions of the garden and recollections from the author's life. In this sense, the novel serves much like Proust's madeleine, though many of the memories Whiteson recalls are deliberate, the results of calculated attempts to evoke memories through the combination of plants in the garden. We read of Africa, of the Watts Towers (see, e.g., The Watts Towers for more on the topic), the Garden of Eden, Death Valley, and a variety of other topics. Unlike the previous reviewer (there is only one as I write this), I did not find the final chapter to be a mere list of the plants in the garden and thus must respectfully disagree with her. Rather, the last chapter is an elaborate metaphor, bringing to its inevitable conclusion the garden's symbolic, nearly iconic, meaning.

"A Garden Story" is not a how-to book on gardening but instead is an intensely personal story about one particular garden, allowing us to catch glimpses of the author's past and the character of one neighborhood in Hollywood, California. Well written for the most part, the book kept me reading until the end and left me feeling richer for the experience.