A Gardener's Life
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. --Hartford CourantDespite her title, Mollie Salisbury is a dirt-gardener. She knows her plants, garden history and how to get down and dirty. Though she's known for the gardens she's created in places most of us can only dream of -- like those at her former home, Hatfield, or at Highgrove, the home of the Prince of Wales -- Salisbury has also designed many lesser known gardens in the U.S., the U.K. and France. And they're all beautifully captured here in Derry Moore's photos and Salisbury's text; an ideal book for serious Anglophiles.  --Madison.com