{"id":264,"date":"2011-07-25T07:22:51","date_gmt":"2011-07-25T15:22:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/garden\/?p=264"},"modified":"2015-11-24T07:32:34","modified_gmt":"2015-11-24T15:32:34","slug":"book-review-embroidered-ground","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/book-review-embroidered-ground\/","title":{"rendered":"Book Review: Embroidered Ground"},"content":{"rendered":"

BOOK REVIEW–EMBROIDERED GROUND<\/em><\/font><\/font><\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 If I were to name my property–as many Brits and some Americans do–I would probably call it something like “Untrimmed Hedges”\u009d or “Perennial Chaos,”\u009d in honor of the garden’s defining features.\u00a0 However, I have never really felt the urge to bestow a name on my little slice of suburbia.\u00a0 Author and gardener Page Dickey gave in to that urge years ago when she named her Salem, New York house and property “Duck Hill.”\u009d \u00a0She first wrote about her extensive gardens in her 1991 book, Duck Hill Journal: A Year in a Country Garden.\u00a0 <\/em>The book was a big hit and Dickey has gone on to write six more, including her most recent, Embroidered Ground.<\/em>
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Page Dickey’s books, most of which have lovely illustrations, are the work of a gifted writer and gardener, but ever since that first book, I have felt that she was easier to admire than to like.\u00a0 The gardens at Duck Hill always sounded wonderful, but it was also quite clear that they were fertilized with quantities of well aged money and maintained to a standard of perfection unattainable for most people.\u00a0 Call it professional and personal jealousy, but from my vantage point, perpetually dwarfed by the rampant privet and cowed by the crabgrass, I found it hard to relate to Page Dickey.\u00a0
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 All that has changed with Embroidered Ground<\/em>, which is smaller than some of Dickey’s earlier efforts and illustrated only with line drawings.\u00a0 Time and circumstances have changed Dickey and the tone of the book is occasionally elegiac.\u00a0 Since first writing about Duck Hill, she has experienced great success, expanding the gardens and making a notable career as a garden writer and lecturer.\u00a0 She has made many friends among the horticultural elite.\u00a0 On the other hand, she has also seen her family grow up and her first marriage end.\u00a0 There are hints that money considerations have affected her life and garden.\u00a0 While still clearly better off than most people, Dickey now has to do what we all do–taming grand ideas to match available resources and making concessions to age and to some amount of diminished vigor.\u00a0 She admits that the outlines of her garden have softened and many of her attitudes have done so as well.\u00a0 The Page Dickey of Embroidered Ground<\/em> seems to have grown more likeable and approachable.\u00a0
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 This is at least partly due to the advent of Bosco, her second husband, a widowed Hungarian-born garden lover who livens up the pages of the book whenever he appears.\u00a0 Dickey admits that during her first marriage, the garden was her domain.\u00a0 When Bosco came into the picture, she was forced to share the gardens with someone whose philosophy was radically different.\u00a0 Where Dickey is all about planning and precision, Bosco is about serendipity–impulse plant buying, lots of color, abundance everywhere and a bit of artful chaos.\u00a0 Dickey makes it clear that both she and Bosco had to compromise to make garden and married life successful.\u00a0 As the result the gardens have changed and expanded.\u00a0 Bosco spends some of the daylight hours in his own retreat on the property, away from the main house, but the two seem to live and garden in harmony
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Parts of the book read like stand-alone articles or essays and were probably originally written for various home and garden periodicals.\u00a0 These include chapters on “multiseasonal plants”\u009d and fragrant shrubs.\u00a0 As always with Dickey, the advice is sound and the plant selections useful and interesting.\u00a0 One of the best sections, “Prescriptions for the Aging Gardener,”\u009d deals with ways of adapting a large, mature garden to meet the needs and abilities of a gardener who is in the late summer or autumn of life.\u00a0 Last year, Connecticut garden writer Sydney Eddison covered this particular piece of horticultural and literary ground in her wonderful book, Gardening for a Lifetime: How to Garden Wiser as You Grow Older.\u00a0 <\/em>Dickey summarizes many of the same sound strategies used by Eddison–replacing demanding perennials with less demanding flowering shrubs and simplifying planting schemes that have become overblown.\u00a0 I get impatient with Dickey when she talks about being “a bit bored with perennial gardens,”\u009d or describes pulling out roses in favor of plants deemed to require less maintenance.\u00a0 These ideas may or may not relate to sensible garden changes, but they are extremely fashionable right now, and Dickey always has a finger on the pulse of horticultural fashion.\u00a0 Another example of this is that she follows in the modish garden footsteps of Martha Stewart and keeps chickens, a practice that appears somewhat at odds with Dickey’s desire to simplify things at Duck Hill.\u00a0 It seems strange to me that mucking out chicken droppings is considered less onerous than maintaining roses, but then, fashion is not always rational.
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The real gems hidden in this very readable book are the vignettes featuring Bosco and the last section, “Final Threads.”\u009d\u00a0 In the latter, Dickey admits that her gardens remain beautiful and satisfying, even as the realities of age and the compromises arising from a new relationship have made it less perfect.\u00a0 In the end, she even admits to foreseeing the day when she and Bosco will leave the great enterprise that is Duck Hill and create a simpler life and landscape elsewhere.\u00a0 I am sure that Page Dickey will write a book about that endeavor and it will be even more eloquent than the best parts of Embroidered Ground.<\/em>
\n\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

BOOK REVIEW–EMBROIDERED GROUND \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 If I were to name my property–as many Brits and some Americans do–I would probably call it something like “Untrimmed Hedges”\u009d or “Perennial Chaos,”\u009d in honor of the garden’s defining features.\u00a0 However, I have never really felt the urge to bestow a name on my little slice of suburbia.\u00a0 Author and … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-264","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general-interest"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/264","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=264"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/264\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1527,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/264\/revisions\/1527"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=264"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=264"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=264"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}