The Garden in Autumn

Rating:
Summary: leave the drama and artsy prose for a novel!
Review: I was thrilled to get this book - autumn and winter are my favorite gardening seasons. I was hoping this would be a factual book, pumped with good horticultural information.

What I got was a sappy book full of romanticized gobbledygoock and poetic prose. If I wanted to read a fictional romance novel I would have done so.

If you want a "just the facts" let's get down to gardening type book, this is not for you. If you want a dreamy armchair book to read as you sip chablis in front of a crackling fire, whilst the snowflakes dance upon your frigid windowsill, then this may be for you.

Rating:
Summary: This book expands gardening into the "lost" season.
Review: This is a wonderful book, especially for the gardener who has dreaded the end of the glorious growing season. After years of consoling myself with platitudes (after all, fall is just the harbinger of a new growing season...) Allen Lacy enabled me to see past the arbitrary definition of northern gardening as something confined to spring and summer.

It's safe to say that since I first read The Garden in Autumn in hardcover seven years ago that my garden and gardening have been totally revolutionized. No longer is the first frost (mid-September here in western Maine) a death sentence in my borders...in fact, I have multitudinous plants which now don't even begin to bloom until well after that time; asters, hardy chrysanthemums, hardy cyclamen, fall crocus. Some years I even have the last fall crocus blooming gamely, an iridescent eery blue, through the first snow fall.

Anyone who gardens in the northern tier of the United States and Canada, especially, will do well to allow Lacy to inspire him or her with the great beauty and potential of this "season of flame and fire and incandescence". The specifics are accurate and informed, the photography gorgeous, and Mr. Lacy's prose, as always, is a delight