Where I Go: The Garden Library I Grow
Before I Plant, I Curl up With My Favorite Ecologists, Journalists, and Victorian Naturalists
My gardening habit was born on the day my mother died. Grief-stricken beyond belief, and thinking that her boundless spirit might linger still in the sun-loving plants she had long nurtured, I dug dozens of them up and brought them all back to my place.
That summer, I planted my mother’s salvias, coneflowers, black-eyed Susans, coreopsis, yarrows, sedums, verbenas, and asters where they were never meant to be—in the shade. Over that first year as I treaded, unskilled but earnestly, into gardening, those vibrant creatures (probably endowed with just enough of …
