Digging Deep

Unearthing Your Creative Roots Through Gardening
by Fran Sorin

This was a lovely book. I'm glad the Random Reading Challenge put it in my hands this week! It's about the creative process and gardening. It's been a long time since I read such a clearly-explained, inspirational book about creativity. Even though the focus is gardening, the author also draws examples from people she knows who are creative in many other ways: writing, composing music, cooking, knitting, solving problems at work, etc. It's written in a very friendly, encouraging style. And unlike other books about gardening, which feature how to grow healthy plants, or control pests, or improve soil, this book only touches lightly on those things. It's mostly about how to make your garden a reflection of yourself. How to discover what reflects the innermost you, and put it into living practice in the garden. There are sections on finding your style, experimenting with design, following your instincts, inviting helpful input, redoing things and also continual working and simply enjoying what you've made. I have to say, if a garden was a true living embodiment of what I liked best in plant life, color, scent, etc it would be a joy to just be out in it. Not that I don't enjoy my garden, but it could be so much more! The book inspired me (among other things) to make a list of plants I dearly want to have growing in my yard, in spite of not knowing yet where to put them, or how they'll do there: ferns, geraniums, roses, fuschia, coneflowers, forsythia, butterfly bush, lilacs, snapdragons... well, I've already got the hosta!

I got my copy of this book free, at the Book Thing.

Rating: 4/5 ........ 200 pages, 2004

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Anne McAllister