Customer Reviews

The Zen Of Gardening In the High & Arid West: Tips, Tools, and Techniques

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This delightful and captivating book on gardening reads like a best-selling novel. The writing is creative and often uproariously funny. I often found myself laughing out loud, even on airplanes, as I turned the pages of this wonderful book.

Although highly entertaining -- and worth reading on that basis alone -- the book is also jam packed with good, practical information. I've learned an enormous amount about gardening in high and arid West -- and I've been gardening here for well over 15 years. This book will also inspire those who have become frustrated with gardening in this sometimes capricious region!
I can't wait to put many of Dave's ideas into practice.

In a world so filled with stress, poor health, and daily activities that lack meaning, it's great to have places of refuge, and David Wann's The Zen of Gardening is such a place. Filled with passion, "dry" humor, and hard-won gardening wisdom, the book makes even black thumbs like myself want to dig up a space in my backyard.

Not only does he draw on his own 25 years of gardening, but also taps the experience of some of "the fastest trowels in the west," which he estimates to be a collective 500 years of growing. The reader learns about the life teeming in a shovel full of organic soil, about the chemical signals transmitted between various species in a garden, and about the best varieties of vegetables, flowers, trees and shrubs to plant in a "meteorologically challenged" region.

I had a hard time putting the book down, because the writing is so lively, and I found myself absorbing information effortlessly, the way a plant soaks up water!

Although the title of the book includes "in the High and Arid West," this delightful book would amuse and impress any gardener. Although I live in the geographic region covered, many of the gardening tips and techniques simply don't apply to me since I live over 2,000 feet higher than does David Wann, plus his down home methods simply wouldn't fly with my homeowner's association. Nonetheless, I thouroughly enjoyed this book for its infectious attitude. I picked it up expecting to thumb through it and then read straight through. Quite a unique offering in the world of garden literature and highly recommended.

This book is the single best resource for gardners in Colorado, especially those who lean organic, as I do. It is a book with passion, integrity, and common sense. I had the pleasure of meeting David at a small speaking engagement last year, and he is everything one would expect. I am shocked that there aren't more reviews here for this masterpiece. Gardening here can be hard, especially if one doesn't want to enrich corporate giants who use synthetic chemicals to force things. This book got me through some very discouraging gardening frustrations -- it kept my passion alive and my fingernails dirty. Get this book!!!! If your heart is in the soil, this book will become a very good friend.

This book - with its overly ambitious (and presumptuous) title, is clearly a valiant effort to compile what has obviously been an long and extensive journey by Mr. Wann. Although I certainly do not begrudge him his clear sincerity and knowledge, I found the book badly organized with poorly delineated chapters and information that was hard to assimilate even though I have been extensively researching and experimenting growing in the high desert for the past few years.

Perhaps the most irritating aspect of the book for me was the writers trite, predictable, and oft-embarrassing attempts at homey humor and cutesy turns of a phrase. This book has a very high cringe-factor unless you are a lover of Reader's Digest tongue-in-cheek humor or "Chicken Soup for the whatever" sort of writing.

There is valuable information - but frankly, not worth wading through (cringing through) the innumerable regressions to quaint stories about growing up and yet another "aw heck" exultation every few lines. Elliot Coleman's books are immensely more readable, and intelligently presented and one can, with a bit of good sense and internet research, easily augment his information for one's own locality and particular climate. The basics of organic gardening are pretty universal once you "grok" them--

Incidentally - "Zen: A Buddhist doctrine that enlightenment can be attained through direct intuitive insight" Well, to each their own I guess...