Journeys Through the Garden: Inspiration for Gardeners in BC and the Pacific Northwest

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.

Paddy Wales is a photographer and writer raised in Ontario and
transplanted to British Columbia. Although her words and images have
already appeared in several major gardening publications, this is her
first book. It is a carefully conceived work that features a highly
readable text enhanced by beautiful color photos of her own gardens in
West Vancouver and Robert’s Creek as well as those of other private
Edens in the Pacific Northwest (especially in and around Vancouver and
Victoria). Wales firmly believes in visiting and learning from fellow
gardeners, and throughout the book she shares vignettes and wisdom
gained through many such encounters.

Wales’s writing blends an understanding of the world of nature with a
sense of overall design, a feeling for plant combinations, and a
knowledge of horticultural principles. Her final chapter, a
philosophical essay titled “Garden Journeys,” so effectively
expresses the joys of gardening that it could easily stand on its own.
The book’s subtitle notwithstanding, readers anywhere in temperate
North America could find inspiration in these pages.