In the Garden: Thoughts on Changing Seasons

Pleasance Crawford is a Canadian landscape and garden-history researcher
and writer and the co-author of Garden Voices: Two Centuries of Canadian
Garden Writing.

Marjorie Harris, one of Canada’s finest garden writers (as evidenced
by her numerous books and regular column in The Globe and Mail), is
known for her environmentally friendly approach, a down-to-earth style,
and a fascination with plants for their form, foliage, and flower. She
writes frequently of sharing gardening know-how with friends and
neighbors, whom she calls her “hort-buddies.”

The same characteristics and themes emerge in this latest book, but in
a more personal and reflective way. In the Garden is a collection to be
savored: 120 short essays (none longer than a page) are arranged
according to season, beginning with autumn, when Harris began her own
garden in 1967. The pieces are timeless. But timeless too are the
William Morris motifs repeated on the dust jacket, title page, and
sectional dividers, and the dark-green ink used for the text. This
unpaginated, hand-size fruit of Harris’s experience appears to have
been designed and priced as a gift book, but gardeners not fortunate
enough to be given a copy should read it anyway.