I am a big fan of garden memoirs ( as evidencedhere , hereandhere ) because they grind deeply into why each of us gardens . Paige Dickey’snew volume , Uprooted : A Gardener Reflects on first Again(Timber Press , 2020 ) , is a beautiful example of the genre — beautifully envisage , beautifully write , beautifully photographed . It ’s one of the honest script about garden that I ’ve take in long time .
Dickey is a long - clip garden writer and for more than two decades owned a garden in Westchester County , New York , called Duck Hill . That garden was often photograph for article and record book , and included row of clip hedge and immense perennial perimeter . It was an intensely cultivated garden , and an expensive and exhaust one to keep up . In her mid-70s with a husband pushing 80 , Dickey moved — and not to a senior condominium . The couple eradicate themselves and went from three vivid acres to 17 Samuel Wilder Akka in rural Connecticut .
The Good Book details the sadness of allow for a garden you have raise for a long clock time and the fervor of building a new home and garden in a unexampled place . She walk readers through the sale of her old garden , purchasing the unexampled one , designing the business firm , and then joyfully she explores each of the gardens and wild field on the property . I will include that one reason I lovedUprootedso much is that Dickey and I are person sisters in footing of plants . She lovesserviceberries(in the East they call them shadblows because it is a unlike species ofAmelanchierthat we grow here . ) Her perennial borders are replete with preferred plant that grow well in the North , too : Amsonia , Baptisia , Siberian iris diaphragm , Russian salvia , Boltonia , paeony , asters . EvenHenry Eilers rudbeckia — my favored rudbeckia cultivar — is in her garden .
Embracing the Land
As she ’s gotten onetime and in an area with rare ecosystem on the property , she ’s grown to embrace native plants . She tamps down her desires to create more conventional gardens and instead rips trespassing plants out of the property and watches as the natives move in and flourish . You ’ll learn a mickle about how to rear aborigine in wild and semi - barbaric setting by read her tale . Dickey is good , too , about gardening as you get older . She grows a lot of hydrangeas in the gardens near the house because they are easy . She has lease help — a handyman who come once a week to dispense with the heavy lifting and a young cleaning woman who helps run her cutting garden .
If you are looking for a book to give to an experienced nurseryman or to one who savors plant and the environment , you ca n’t go incorrectly withUprooted .
