Overview

"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. ""DelightfulThere is an irresistible charm about her forthright revelations of eager expectations, disappointments and frustrations and occasional triumphs, known to gardeners ever since Adam first tilled the ground east of Eden.""-Lee Pennock Huntington, Vermont Sunday Magazine""Few commune so keenly with their landscape as Sucher, whose sense of place is bona fide and imaginative.""-Kirkus Reviews""Sucher is a consummate storyteller whose lively essays burst with love of the land and delighted wonder at the resilient bonds between plants and folks, making this a most inviting collection.""-Publishers WeeklyWith vividness and humor, 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 neighbor's flowerbeds. Like Under the Tuscan Sun and Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, The Invisible Garden is a narrative celebrating the sublimity of nature and the soul's inner reach."

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9781582431277

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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 earth - laying out a looping pathway, putting in a pond, encouraging a wildflower meadow - started 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 ate 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 forest - prized, 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 test of the writing is so civilized. Few commune so keenly with their landscape as Sucher, whose sense of place is bona fide and imaginative. (Kirkus Reviews)

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