The Invisible Garden - Softcover

Sucher, Dorothy

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1582431272 ISBN 13: 9781582431277

Publisher: Counterpoint, 2001

Synopsis

A longtime city dweller and expert storyteller takes a fresh look at gardening in Vermont, tapping the connection between the mysteries of the earth and those of the human spirit. Dorothy Sucher explores both her corner of Vermont and the many aspects of gardening - the satisfaction of shaping a landscape, the spirit of generosity in a land-based community, and the individuality expressed in a neighbour's flowerbeds.

About this title

About the Author:

Dorothy Sucher is the author of two mystery novels. She and her husband live in suburban Washington and in Marchfield, Vermont.

From Kirkus Reviews:

Mystery writer Sucher (Dead Men Don't Marry, 1989, etc.) liked the blue farmhouse she bought in northern Vermont, but she really got her teeth into the landscape, and the landscape got its teeth into her, shaking loose fine stories of her efforts to shape the place. The farm Sucher bought was tumbledown, and the land looked the same. So nongardener Sucher stared slowly, tentatively, to make inroads into thicket and bramble. Her education in the landscape, in the earthlaying out a looping pathway, putting in a pond, encouraging a wildflower meadowstarted at ground zero: she often had to reinvent the wheel (she finally figured out what to do with the brush she cleared: start a brush pile!) or learn how water got to the tap. There are graceful passages about why it seemed natural to her to feel reverence toward giant granite foundation stones, and on the eerie sublimity of a century-old 19-acre white pine forestprized, pruned, and selectively culled for decades''that is blown down in a windstorm. And there are the private associations, the invisible garden, where ``we bring to bear our previous life experiences, our memories of childhood and travel, our family relations, our reading, our dreams and aspirations, our moral standards and character flaws, our sensuality and grandiosity and spirituality.'' Building the pond reminds her of her mother's last years, equal parts tender and melancholic, and the pathway sparks a terrific tale about her grandfather sharing with her the carpenter's trade secret, a 3-4-5 right triangle made out of string. It is startling to come across bromides like ``things that don't last forever can still be worthwhile'' and ``a path is like a life,'' but that is only because the rest of the writing is so civilized. Few commune so keenly with their landscape as Sucher, whose sense of place is bona fide and imaginative. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Counterpoint
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 1582431272
• ISBN 13: 9781582431277
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256