Product Description

"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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1149977 in Books
• Published on: 2007-03-13
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 208 pages

From Booklist
For Vanderbilt, paradise exists in a well-placed perennial bed and rapture explodes on the garden center's opening day. In this lyrical, lovely paean to the delights and disappointments of a lifetime spent tending his garden, an Eden he has created in a suburban New Jersey backyard, Vanderbilt waxes nostalgic for bygone days of epic snowfalls and visits to green-thumbed grandparents, all the while anxiously anticipating next year's garden projects and zealously contemplating new plant purchases. Winsomely, wistfully, with acerbic wit and accumulated wisdom, Vanderbilt shares a jump-the-gun garden enthusiasm that eagerly spurs him to plant flats of annuals in defiance of May's last frost date, taking readers season by season through his garden reveries and activities until the day when he must stoically rip out the sodden foliage the year's first frost has inflicted on those very same plants. Gardeners have an almost preternatural sensitivity to the natural world around them, and Vanderbilt charmingly imparts his with a rhapsodic exuberance and poetic reverence for things keenly seen and deeply felt. Carol Haggas
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review
Susie Coelho author of Susie Coelho's Everyday Styling and host of HGTV's Surprise Gardener Gardening in Eden is a must-read for any gardener, especially those just starting out, as it provides wonderful, poetic inspiration, as well as practical advice. This is a "curl up in a chair" read, and then you'll want to get out into the garden and get your hands dirty! -- Review

Review
"This sensual, literate story of a small New Jersey garden in four seasons over two decades is as vivid as spring tulips, as comic as the frogs in midsummer, and as bright as the stars of Orion on a winter's night."

-- Susan Cheever

"With contagious enthusiasm, Vanderbilt captures the beauty of impatiens and marigolds, the wonder of snowy skies and sprinklers in the sunshine, the satisfaction of a bed well tended, and all the other things that get us out of bed at the crack of dawn to hit the ground digging."

-- Dominique Browning, author of Around the House and in the Garden and Editor-in-Chief, House & Garden

"Here it is -- the armchair gardening book of the season. This is as delightful a book about gardening as I've read."

-- BookPage

Susie Coelho

author of Susie Coelho's Everyday Styling and host of HGTV's Surprise Gardener

Gardening in Eden is a must-read for any gardener, especially those just starting out, as it provides wonderful, poetic inspiration, as well as practical advice. This is a "curl up in a chair" read, and then you'll want to get out into the garden and get your hands dirty!

Customer Reviews

Quiet Wisdom and Lyrical Beauty
Did you every really look at the New York Times Best Sellers List, the Nonfiction List? The 16 books on it are almost all always by celebrities, about celebrities, people or events in today's headlines, books that come and go in a flash. Books like Gardening in Eden by Arthur Vanderbilt will never make it onto the List. They don't stand a chance. And that's a shame, for in this small book I got for Christmas (its just 189 pages long) is so much quiet wisdom, such humor, such lyrical beauty and fine writing that I wish more people knew about it. In the simple setting of a garden the author finds the world and shares that exuberant joy on every page. I would highly recommend this book. My guess is that when today's current crop of bestsellers are forgotten, Gardening in Eden will still be a perennial classic.

A Gem of a Book for the Gardener in Everyone!
As an amateur gardener myself, Mr. Vanderbilt's book hit home with me. From going to the local nursery to the smell of freshly mowed grass to the lonliness of winter this book expresses the multitude of emotions gardeners experience throughout the year. A very delightful book! This is one book that will be reread by.

Great Reading After a Long Day in Garden
I love to garden. I can't get enough. But when there's too much sun or too much rain, I usually pass my time reading a good book. Recently, I came upon "Gardening in Eden" by this young author from my own home state. What a pleasure. Get a copy and read it after a long day in your garden. You'll find yourself appreciating your garden 10 times more!