She sees the world as a garden, and finds everywhere in nature the patterns for organizing space. In her hands, garden theory becomes a road map for exploration of the soul, and gardens places of enchantment and personal transformation. Messervy's latest offering, The Magic Land, is more than a simple recycling of Messervy's earlier work in less expensive, more portable packaging. She is an alchemist breaking down and reforming her message for both gardener and non-gardener so that it is a kind of everyday guide to creating magic in the personal landscape and meaning wherever we find ourselves. She draws on experiences as a mother, teacher, student, traveler, designer, and gardener to invent exercises like those that help develop skills in journal writing or meditation.
Flowers get one page.
Practical and Spiritual For more on flowers, vegetables, herbs, and trees, with equal measures of the practical and the spiritual, turn to Carol Williams' Bringing the Garden to Life. But she describes the process of building one as precisely as if she were writing a recipe. I am a casual composter, and have never built a pile all at once. Now I suspect I am missing something important. Presidential Pen Pal Katharine White's garden essays for The New Yorker began with assessments of garden catalogs, not only for their offerings, but also for their prose style.