You are invited!
On Thursday, I’m launching Autobiography of a Garden from 5-7 at the Visual Arts Centre, 350 Victoria Ave, Westmount, Quebec. Wine and cheese will be served!
Autobiography of a Garden tells the story of my 25-year journey, as a conventional country property became a landscape that challenges what a garden is or can be. Using the history of the property as a framework, I explore the meaning of creating a garden and the meaning that a garden can create, linking ideas about aging and the passage of time to the reality of growth and death in the landscape.
As well as telling the story of the creation and development of the garden, the book weaves my life into the story of the landscape and offers an inside look at how designing the garden unleashed a level of creativity I didn’t know I had. At the same time, it gives full weight to the impact made by those who lived on the land before me: the Abenaki, the early settlers, the cottagers, the farmers, the US southerners who came to Quebec to avoid summer heat, and the northerners who defeated them in the American Civil War.
Autobiography of a Garden is richly illustrated with 249 full colour photos spread over almost 300 pages. It describes the thinking behind each part of the garden and the examples that guided me, the mishaps and successes I encountered. Full of ideas and inspirational ways of thinking about gardens and gardening, the book encourages readers to make their own surroundings more beautiful and much more meaningful.
I hope to see you on Thursday, to talk gardens and to share ideas over a glass of wine.
If you can’t join me for the launch, you can order the book directly from McGill-Queens University Press (https;//www.mqup.ca/), online through Amazon and other online distributors, or from fine bookstores everywhere.
Congratulations on the book! I can’t wait to get a copy in my hands! I wish I could attend your author’s launch gathering, but distance makes that impossible.