Acclaimed landscape designers Joe Eck and Wayne Winterrowd offer a profusely illustrated month-by-month chronicle of their magnificent southern Vermont garden.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
Review
"Passionate, reflective, inspiring, endlessly quotable, and filled with good humor and humanity. It joins that tiny handful of fine gardening texts that are also literature. "-Allen Lacy, The New York Times Book Review
"In which poetry is perfectly at home with the eminently practical matters of gardening . . . a gold mine of practical advice. "-Anne Raver, The New York Times
"In which poetry is perfectly at home with the eminently practical matters of gardening . . . a gold mine of practical advice. "-Anne Raver, The New York Times
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18 of 18 people found the following review helpful
By A Customer
Format:Paperback
Never did I expect to be so conflicted about why I love a book. This one has it all. Such a beautifully written love story about a garden and the shared lives of two people who have a vision and the courage to create a truly great landscape. The sheer volume of information about specific plants and how they are used are invaluable to me. To have all this knowledge presented in such a beautifully written book is such a gift. I've already read it twice. I've had my copy of this book for two years now and it wouldn't surprise me if I picked it up for a fresh reading sometime this winter.
6 of 8 people found the following review helpful
By A Customer
Format:Paperback
I've worked for years in the extensive gardens of children's book author/illustrator Tomie dePaola (26 FAIRMOUNT AVENUE and other books). This book has helped me appreciate what I do and has helped me "see" the value and the beauty in plants and shrubs and colors, etc., that I never before saw or understood. It's a wonderful book.
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
Oh lovers of gardens, lovers of beautifully presented books, and lovers of love itself, you will find many delights in Joe Eck and Wayne Winterrowd's "A Year at North Hill: Four Seasons in a Vermont Garden."
The book gives even more than it promises. Instead of four chapters, Eck and Winterrowd give us 12 generous chapters, one for each of the months beginning, as a gardener should, not with sleep-like-unto-death January but with awakening: the month of April. What a difference it makes to start a book with what keeps us carrying bags of fertilizer up hills, on our knees weeding, and plotting the resurrection (E.B. White's lovely words about his wife's bulb-planting as her own death approached).
Eck and Winterrowd writes as landscape architects about the climate, terrain, and changes they have made to their almost 10 acre garden and the whole 23 acre land of which they are custodians. When they talk about the hundreds of species, types, and variants they have nudged into flourishing in as unlikely a climate as Vermont's, they have us enthralled with their horticultural chops. AThis is close to a how-to book for gardeners in their approach & principles. It helps, obviously, to be besotted with gardening, to organize one's life around your acres and spend to the edge of financial doom to bring vision to realization.
When we do reach the long sleep of Vermont gardens it is with a deep appreciation of how to every season there is indeed a purpose under heaven. The preparation of shelter for boxwoods, the ceremonies of moving potted plants even bananas into their winter garden, the anxious waiting for deep snows that insulate plants from the dessicating winds, the tranquility of seeing the sculptural beauty of their garden as they trudge uphill to feed the gentle beasts----all these prepare us to experience winter ---the winter-road perhaps---affirmatively.
The book is coffee-table size. It has been produced with artistry in the balance of text and margins, in the lavendar framing of each page like a medieval manuscript, in the heavy quality of the paper and the excellence of the binding. and in the superb photographs taken by Joe Eck. The care they have given to the design & evolution of their garden (maps are given and thank'ee), they also have lavished in the design of "A Year at North Hill." The photographs are worthy of Elliot Porter, and part of the gift that this book is to gardeners all.
Praise be also that Eck and Wayne are masters not only of mulch, seed, and meadows, but equally of English. Their felicities in phrasing, their wit and delight in words, shine here. One can read without flinching at miserable grammar, execrable style. "It isn't often (E. B. White again) one finds a good writer(s) who is also a good friend(s).
Which brings me to what I love most about this book. Eck and Winterrowd do not turn aside from the sorrows, slings, and arrows of gardener misfortunes or the human condition. What shine through this book is caritas and amitas---the dear love of their garden and home, of the marvels of plants (the rarer, obscurer, more challenging the better such as in their delight in growing Himalayan blue poppies), of their families and friends, and of each other.
Enjoy!
The book gives even more than it promises. Instead of four chapters, Eck and Winterrowd give us 12 generous chapters, one for each of the months beginning, as a gardener should, not with sleep-like-unto-death January but with awakening: the month of April. What a difference it makes to start a book with what keeps us carrying bags of fertilizer up hills, on our knees weeding, and plotting the resurrection (E.B. White's lovely words about his wife's bulb-planting as her own death approached).
Eck and Winterrowd writes as landscape architects about the climate, terrain, and changes they have made to their almost 10 acre garden and the whole 23 acre land of which they are custodians. When they talk about the hundreds of species, types, and variants they have nudged into flourishing in as unlikely a climate as Vermont's, they have us enthralled with their horticultural chops. AThis is close to a how-to book for gardeners in their approach & principles. It helps, obviously, to be besotted with gardening, to organize one's life around your acres and spend to the edge of financial doom to bring vision to realization.
When we do reach the long sleep of Vermont gardens it is with a deep appreciation of how to every season there is indeed a purpose under heaven. The preparation of shelter for boxwoods, the ceremonies of moving potted plants even bananas into their winter garden, the anxious waiting for deep snows that insulate plants from the dessicating winds, the tranquility of seeing the sculptural beauty of their garden as they trudge uphill to feed the gentle beasts----all these prepare us to experience winter ---the winter-road perhaps---affirmatively.
The book is coffee-table size. It has been produced with artistry in the balance of text and margins, in the lavendar framing of each page like a medieval manuscript, in the heavy quality of the paper and the excellence of the binding. and in the superb photographs taken by Joe Eck. The care they have given to the design & evolution of their garden (maps are given and thank'ee), they also have lavished in the design of "A Year at North Hill." The photographs are worthy of Elliot Porter, and part of the gift that this book is to gardeners all.
Praise be also that Eck and Wayne are masters not only of mulch, seed, and meadows, but equally of English. Their felicities in phrasing, their wit and delight in words, shine here. One can read without flinching at miserable grammar, execrable style. "It isn't often (E. B. White again) one finds a good writer(s) who is also a good friend(s).
Which brings me to what I love most about this book. Eck and Winterrowd do not turn aside from the sorrows, slings, and arrows of gardener misfortunes or the human condition. What shine through this book is caritas and amitas---the dear love of their garden and home, of the marvels of plants (the rarer, obscurer, more challenging the better such as in their delight in growing Himalayan blue poppies), of their families and friends, and of each other.
Enjoy!
Citations (learn more)
This book cites 5
books:
2
books
cite this book:
- Annuals for Connoisseurs by Wayne Winterrowd in Front Matter
- Onward and Upward in the Garden by Katherine S. White on page 171
- Rhododendrons of the World by David G. Leach on page 199
- Gardening By Mail: A Source Book, Fifth Edition by Barbara J. Barton on page 171
- Elements of Garden Design by Joe Eck in Front Matter
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