Gardening in Eden: Seasons in a Suburban Garden [Paperback]

Though an old man, Thomas Jefferson wrote at Monticello, I am but a young gardener. Every gardener is.

InGardening in Eden,we enter Arthur Vanderbilt's small enchanted world of the garden, where the old wooden trestle tables of a roadside nursery are covered in crazy quilts of spring color, where a catbird comes to eat raisins from one's hand, and a chipmunk demands a daily ration of salted cocktail nuts. We feel the oppressiveness of endless winter days, the magic of an old-fashioned snow day, the heady, healing qualities of wandering through a greenhouse on a frozen February afternoon, the restlessness of a gardener waiting for spring.

With a sense of wonder and humor on each page, Arthur Vanderbilt takes us along with him to discover that for those who wait, watch, and labor in the garden, it's all happening right outside our windows.Attorney, author, avid gardener,Arthur T. Vanderbilt IIpractices law in New Jersey and is the author of many works of nonfiction, includingFortune's Children, Golden Days,andThe Making of a Bestseller.He lives in northern New Jersey.Chapter One: Waiting Weather

I
Dark.

Dreary.

January days.

Days of leaden skies, of sleet and snow flurries, day after day, depressing days of winter. Layers of heavy woolen clouds blanket days without sunlight, murky gray days from morning until late afternoon when the gray gets darker.

As the days grow longer, my grandmother used to say, the cold grows stronger. And so it does. Cold gray January days, on and on without end, bleak days, one after another, when juncos seek shelter deep in the old rhododendron outside my kitchen window, huddling among its leaves curled tight as a child's cold fingers inside a mitten, and squirrels stay snuggled in their tree-trunk nests, their tails wrapped around them like winter scarves.

II

My house is perched on the side of what geologists call the Slc.