Customer Reviews

The Inviting Garden : Gardening for the Senses, Mind, and Spirit

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The Inviting Garden did just what it set out to do: invite me to explore all my senses as a gardener. It isn't a picture book of perfect gardens, although the photographs are very nice. Rather, Mr. Lacy uses the same techniques to construct his book as he might use to design his garden. He balances his own personal stories with bits of plant history and botanical reference and every word begs to be read. This is a delightful book and deserves to be on the bedside table of every dedicated or aspiring gardener.

I own and have read all Allen Lacy's books and recommend them to anyone who wants to be better acquainted with the how-to aspect of gardening. I also recommend Lacy's books to those who seek a deeper experience with the natural world. Allen taught philosopy for years, and although his books mainly focus on horticulture, he includes relevant historical antecedents and existential angles in his writing that may help one better understand why humans imagine paradise is a garden.

I read THE INVITING GARDEN when it was first published a few years ago, but it is as timely and relevant today as it was when it was first published--why it has been reprinted. Compared with his other books, TIG contains many more photographs and much less text, but the photographs are some of the most beautiful I have seen in a garden book, and I am a garden book junkie.

Because many of his garden shots include children, the book is a real pick-me-up. Lacy shows his own granddaughter on his deck in New Jersey, a little boy poking branches into the soft bottom of a creek bed, and children here and there in various gardens in the U.S. and Europe. I especially like the shot of a very little girl with her arms around a huge tree at Versailles. With her feet placed on a protuding root, she is poised as if she is about to climb the tree, which is at least five feet across at the base. The imagination of children is a wonderous thing, but it also opens up my imagination and helps me appreciate why trees figure so prominently in human mythology and religion. Lacy has written elsewhere that he thinks trees are sentient beings and I do to.

Lacy has organized his book according to the five human senses. Chapters cover the garden and the sense of sight (there are many beautiful shots of gardens around the country and in England and France); smell (shots show flower examples from Roses to Nicotiana (flowering tobacco), shrubs like Winter Jasmine, and herbs (one photo shows a box garden in Charleston with Rosemary accents); touch; taste; and hearing.

Hearing?? What can one hear in the garden? Well to start with of course one can hear bird calls, buzzing bees, and wind chimes. But one can also hear the breeze blowing through high trees and grasses, as well as the burbling of water in a creek or manmade pond. Photos from a garden in California show a clay face mask lying underwater on the floor of a pond. Moss grows over the mask and bubbles of air pass through mouth to make lovely gurgling sounds (according to Lacy). In another shot, a clay mask is positioned among grasses so that the wind passing through emits a whispering sound.

Whether you garden or not, this wonderful book can help you push away the blues.

Inviting Garden indeed invites one into the wonderful world of gardening with the whole person. Approach the garden - or any outdoor environment - with all five senses alert. Discover the hidden histories plants quietly carry into one's yard. Ponder the connection between the good earth and the good soul within. Lacey opens a lattice gate to a world of wonder right before us and invites us to walk through.

I just returned from my first foray at my local garden center. The scents of plants in full fragrant bloom almost overwhelmed me. Indeed there is the moment before becoming captured by the garden and the everlasting moments thereafter. I love Lacy's Gardener's Eye and this most recent book. Both come to me after that first flicker of what a garden can be.-Linda Fry Kenzle, author of Gathering