Product Description

The life and career of the woman the new York Times has called The Green Goddeess of English Gardens?high priestess of historic garden design.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #262710 in Books
• Published on: 2007-11-25
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 224 pages

Hartford Courant
If all you do is look at the pictures, Lady Salisbury's "A Gardener's Life: The Dowager Marchioness of Salisbury" [Frances Lincoln, $65, 224 pages] is worth its weight in gold.

But if you pause to read the text, written with considerable modesty and charming self-effacement by the internationally renowned British garden designer, the pleasures of this keepsake multiply.

A gardener since childhood, Lady Salisbury regrets her lack of professional training even as Derry Moore's stunning photographs betray her brilliance. She chronicles "another of [her] failures" (a planting that led to a substitution) even as the glorious gardens she has created confirm her legendary success. In her 80s now, the author writes of some day looking down from the clouds to adjust this or that as her gardens mature and endure.

A biography told garden-by-garden, Lady Salisbury's book begins with recollections of the gardens of her childhood - the "terrifying" dandelions, the soothing sound of a scythe cutting the lawn, and a first packet of seeds. It follows the chronology of her experience and development -designing the garden at Hatfield House, the first home she shared with her husband, and on to her projects and commissions for family and friends - the Prince of Wales' Highgrove; the New York Botanical Garden; White Birch Farm in Greenwich, Conn.; and her own home in Provence, to name a few.

Moore's beautifully composed photos of each place are as inspiring as they are instructive. Many are accompanied by Lady Salisbury's sketches - carefully rendered drawings of flower gardens, scent gardens, parterres, fruit tree avenues, fountains and reflecting pools.

The magnificence here is on the grandest scale - the marchioness and her coterie live in chateaux and manor houses - but her garden principles can be applied anywhere, from a backyard garden to a window box.

This is a wonder of a book, great for all gardeners - including the armchair variety. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction or distribution is prohibited without permission.

Customer Reviews

FOR THOSE WHO LOVE GARDENS, NATURE, AND ALL THINGS BEAUTIFUL

Leafing the pages of this beautifully wrought gardener's diary is very much like drawing open curtains on a summer morning and finding your room filled with sunlight. The photographs by Derry Moore are incredibly beautiful from Jeff Koons' Puppy to the protective shadows and dappled greens of a terrace border on a cloudless afternoon. There are some 150 color photos in the 224 pages, and each is a feast for the eyes.

Lady Salisbury, we learn, has always been drawn to gardens. As a youngster she tended to small areas in her parents' gardens. From this initial interest grew an abiding love and enormous responsibility as she later became chatelaine of England's Cranborne Manor and Hatfield House, where she brought these great groundss to renewed life.

In a description of her childhood gardens she writes, "From my earliest consciousness, I have noticed plants..." She was, she says, awakened by her mother's roses and the instructions she received as to how to cut a rose for a vase and how to prune roses to encourage reflowering. Little did she dream then that she would become a professional garden designer with commissions from throughout the world and count among her clients the Prince of Wales and the New York Botanical Garden.

Lady Salisbury has spent her life doing what she loved, and to this writing actively continues although she is in her 80s. She is the woman the New York Times called "The Green Goddess of English Gardens," while others refer to her as the "greatest gardener of the twentieth century."

In photographs and words A Gardener's Life is her biography, and a joyous one it is. This volume serves not only as a chronicle of her work but as a guide for us, sure to be relished by those who love gardens, nature, and all things beautiful.

- Gail Cooke