Customer Reviews

Why We Garden: Cultivating a Sense of Place

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This is a great book. Not about gardening, but about living on this Earth. Nollman uses his very individual garden to highlight his universal points about organic farming and local ecology. He makes me think about my own plot of land and what it could possibly mean to me. He isn't a perfect human preaching about the perfect way to grow a garden. He shares his process of understanding his own garden as well as the development of his ethics about gardening and tries to tie down some very big ideas about this planet we call home. A worthy read for anyone, not just gardeners, who are up to facing the reality of caring for the planet and ourselves.

I am reviewing this book because I read it and it's one of my all time favorites. I'm a fairly successful gardener. People stop on my street and admire my flowers. Many friends and acquaintances ask for advice. I wish I had written this book, it says what I want to say. Learning to garden is a process of bringing forth what already exists inside you. One learns to garden through trial and error, and what works in one garden may not work in another. Cookie cutter directions simply don't work, and when one follows them and fails, one feels like a failure. Nollman writes about gardening in his part of the world, which is not like your part of the world or my part of the world, but the thoughts he shares transcend these differences. There are two major approaches to gardening: one organic--spiritual and esthetic; the other nonorganic and ugly. To be content, Nollman says, all you need is love and an organic garden. Nothing works if you work against nature (probably the reason our forebears were thrown out of Eden). WHY WE GARDEN helped me maintain the link between the inner gardener I was born to be and Gaia.

Zen of Watering Your Garden

Of all the books I've read this book comes closest to saying what I try to convey in my own book the Zen of Watering Your garden. The author talks about his garden from month to month but what he really tries to convey is the concept of the garden as a sanctuary. This book is entirely prose. I attempt the same thing with photographs accompanied by aphorisms, poetry and other prose. Matt cohen

Why We Garden by Jim Nollman is a great book for inspiration and philosophical enrichment. He is both utterly quixotic and academically astute as he writes creative essays based loosely around the twelve months of the year and the experiences (and plants) he's accumulated in his garden(s) in the Pacific Northwest. His essays address issues of connectedness to place and how we as individuals and as a society can rethink gardening to make our experiences more about learning from nature and less about dominating or controlling nature. But he isn't didactic or dry and always seems to be able to bring his most way-out ideas back down to earth before the end of the chapter. I highly recommend it for people like me who can't help but think about why we do the things we do and how we can give them more meaning.

Why We Garden: Cultivating A Sense Of Place by artist, essayist, and environmental activist Jim Nollman offers an inspired and inspiring perspective as he writes about the art and ideals of gardening, including cogent observations with respect to psychological and personal reasons for gardening. Uniquely guiding the reader through an intimate respect of "green thumb" activities, Why We Garden addresses the popular and wide spread hobby of gardening with an able grasp and understanding of its therapeutic and consoling attributes, as well as its aesthetic connection developed between gardener and garden. Why We Garden is to be given high praise, and very strong recommendation reading for anyone contemplating or engaged in gardening as a recreational hobby or as a personal lifestyle.

Rebeccasreads highly recommends WHY WE GARDEN as an almanac of helpful tips from a Pacific Northwest gardener's decades of experience, along with musings on the "Zen of gardening", & yet it is much, much more -- it is the story of how to take inspiration from the history of the written word, & epiphanies from global cultures.

Come walk with this gardener (who, by the way, talks to whales) as he plants a treeling that will live a thousand years, & get a glimpse of TIME as you've not known it.

Come sit a while in his gardens while he shows us the "temporal charisma" of the PLACE wherein we finds ourselves.

Come wander in this gardener's wonderings as he unearths the roots of our ancient yearnings about paradise to our more recent ideals of utopia.

Month by month, Jim Nollman takes us out where the wild things grow, where spirit, mind & body come together in the most enduring of our "pastimes" -- digging up healing, planting hope & harvesting contentment.

WHY WE GARDEN is a mystery -- no matter where we do it -- atop highrises, in window boxes, on city blocks, or where the trees outnumber the houses -- wherever we garden, that is where we dig up our souls & nurture our own unfurling.

Much to learn, relish, think on -- all year long, for the rest of our lives. WHY WE GARDEN is the perfect gift for your gardening friends.