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Zusatztext "Here it is -- the armchair gardening book of the season. This is as delightful a book about gardening as I've read." -- BookPage Informationen zum Autor Attorney, author, avid gardener, Arthur T. Vanderbilt II practices law in New Jersey and is the author of many works of nonfiction, including Fortune's Children, Golden Days, and The Making of a Bestseller. He lives in northern New Jersey. Klappentext "Though an old man!" Thomas Jefferson wrote at Monticello! "I am but a young gardener." Every gardener is. In "Gardening in Eden! " we enter Arthur Vanderbilt's small enchanted world of the garden! where the old wooden trestle tables of a roadside nursery are covered in crazy quilts of spring color! where a catbird comes to eat raisins from one's hand! and a chipmunk demands a daily ration of salted cocktail nuts. We feel the oppressiveness of endless winter days! the magic of an old-fashioned snow day! the heady! healing qualities of wandering through a greenhouse on a frozen February afternoon! the restlessness of a gardener waiting for spring. With a sense of wonder and humor on each page! Arthur Vanderbilt takes us along with him to discover that for those who wait! watch! and labor in the garden! it's all happening right outside our windows. Leseprobe Chapter One: Waiting Weather I Dark. Dreary. January days. Days of leaden skies, of sleet and snow flurries, day after day, depressing days of winter. Layers of heavy woolen clouds blanket days without sunlight, murky gray days from morning until late afternoon when the gray gets darker. "As the days grow longer," my grandmother used to say, "the cold grows stronger." And so it does. Cold gray January days, on and on without end, bleak days, one after another, when juncos seek shelter deep in the old rhododendron outside my kitchen window, huddling among its leaves curled tight as a child's cold fingers inside a mitten, and squirrels stay snuggled in their tree-trunk nests, their tails wrapped around them like winter scarves. II My house is perched on the side of what geologists call the Second Watchung Mountain, though with its five-hundred-foot elevation, it's more a ridge than a mountain. From the front door, you can look far off to the east and, on a winter day, see the skyline of New York City and pick out the tallest buildings, then look southeast across the valley all the way to the ridge of the First Watchung Mountain and, to the left and right, along the horizon, follow the curve of the earth. Most of the year, though, you see trees, the tangle across the road at an edge of the two-thousand-acre Watchung Reservation, which stretches out between the ridges, and the canopy of treetops over the neighborhood below. From the woods across the road, a deer emerges on this bleak January afternoon etched in shades of gray; like a ghost it materializes from the tangle of trees and wanders up my driveway. Something is wrong. It can't put any weight on its front left leg without it buckling all the way to the ground. The deer hobbles up into the bushes, looking, looking, taking a painful step, then another, always looking. Was it injured by a car, a fall, a mistimed jump? It seems to be seeking shelter in the lee of my house, shelter from the dangers of the woods, from the coming snow. Despite years of deer wars, I feel no hatred toward this enemy straggler, who, without the use of a leg, has lost the very essence of what he is, of what makes him a deer, who has come here, to my yard, seeking refuge. Could I set out some apples? Would he know I was trying to help or would that frighten him? What if he took up camp in my yard, what would I do? If he died here? I think of him as the snow arrives with the dark, another freezing wintry night to get through, to survive, wet, cold, s...
