Building My Zen Garden
This riotous narrative recounts how a middle-aged Irish Canadian transformed a weedy area of his backyard into a peaceful Zen garden, and how he struggled to tame his Western character along the way. Inspired by the miniature garden a friend built on her apartment balcony in Japan, Egan "set out in a rather indirect and rambling way to make a paradise" back home in Vancouver. With wry humor he details his efforts to outwit weeds "of supernatural and malevolent cunning" and to hack through primordial tangles of bindweed using his favorite new tool: the mattock. Reality lags behind dreams as Egan struggles to lay tons of stone, copes with a sagging new fence and conquers his timidity before the "real people" in the gardening business. (He quickly realizes, "It is hard for the middle-class type to get lumberyard chic just right.") Do-it-yourselfers will identity with Egan's anguish as he no sooner clears an area of unwanted vegetation than it creeps back, even stronger, in new spots. Even the water in his pool finds unwanted channels and outlets. Ultimately, however, his Japanese quince lives, the bamboo thrives and the water falls gracefully into the pond rather than thudding down in torrents. Egan admits that a few clever-fingered Japanese experts might have converted his garden far more efficiently than his "ham-fisted" self, but then readers, especially male garden-types, would have been denied the pleasure of this humorous and informative memoir. Many b&w; photos mark milestones in the transformation that is a "mixture of Eastern Zen and Western irony." (Nov. 10)Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.--This text refers to an alternateHardcoveredition.