Embroidered Ground: Revisiting the Garden
Praise forBreaking Ground:“The work here is playful, undaunted by the classical tradition and far more concerned with sensory experience than academic correctness . . . The excellent text and pictures . . . manage to extract from these gardens valuable lessons.” —MICHAEL POLLAN,The New York Times Book Review Praise forEmbroidered Ground:“Embroidered Groundis a real delight, conveying Page Dickey’s passion for gardening as well as the hard graft and blossoming progress of the garden at Duck Hill. A true inspiration, and a beautifully written book.” —Jenny Uglow, author ofA Little History of British Gardening“Page Dickey is part of the very best tradition of garden writing: her voice is literary and informed, but also personal and unpretentious. It’s a delight to read this book about Duck Hill revisited, and about how gardens, and gardening, change over the years. ReadingEmbroidered Groundis like strolling through a favorite garden with a favorite friend.” —Roxana Robinson, author ofCost“[Dickey] cast[s] a spell . . .Embroidered Groundis a sweet, tender love story about how gardens and gardeners age and adapt, each to the other.” —Dominique Browning,The New York Times“[Embroidered Ground] is divided into a series of short essays on a wide range of subjects, each building on the others until a full picture of the garden, and the gardener’s life, emerges. Dickey writes about learning to share the garden with a new plant-loving husband and their ideas for simplifying the garden as they grow older. In her view, a garden, at its best, is like the embroidery of the book’s title: ‘the results of a passion, our joyous individual efforts of expression in color, pattern, and texture, woven with leaves and flowers, in partnership with nature.’” —Country Gardens“Page Dickey [is a] legendary writer and gardener . . . InEmbroidered Groundshe offers tips . . . and wisdom: how to share your garden with a new partner who might have a different style, the beauty of the unmown, the long view (planting for decades) . . . It’s a book to read, dreaming of spring.” —Susan Salter Reynolds,Los Angeles Times“Dickey employs a range of voices, often ethereal . . . But she is razory-wicked when facing enemies: bindweed, barberry, Norway maple,Ailanthus, bittersweet . . . There is much sage advice, on sightlines, garden bones, and hedges to frame and enclose . . . And she loves her garden as if it were a child—with joy, distress, responsibility, guilt—which is the most beautiful thing of all.” —Peter Lewis,The Barnes and Noble Review