The Real Garden Road Trip

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.

Longtime friends Elspeth Bradbury and Judy Maddocks wrote their first
book, The Garden Letters, from opposite coasts. At the start of their
second, they meet in mid-May at Bradbury’s home in Vancouver to set
off on a cross-country search for real gardens—the kind not usually
featured in coffee-table books—and for owner–gardeners eager to talk
about the fruits of their labors. Bradbury navigates, seeks out gardens,
takes photographs, and writes a travelogue, while Maddocks drives, finds
inexpensive lodging, runs the tape-recorder, and keeps a journal. The
first garden they spot belongs to the lighthouse keeper at Point
Atkinson, West Vancouver; the next adorns a float beside a houseboat in
Horseshoe Bay.

As the travelers gradually move eastward, they discover gardens as
amazing and varied as the hardworking individuals who tend them. They
reach, then go beyond, Maddocks’s home in New Brunswick. When the trip
ends in late August at Cape Spear, Newfoundland, the two have met more
than 80 gardeners.

The narrative, illustrated with photos on nearly every page, has the
freshness of a tale told by two tourists who have just arrived home
bursting with stories and snapshots. However, Bradbury’s travelogue
and Maddocks’s journal are carefully written and then skilfully
blended, with no repe-titions to interrupt the energetic pace. The book
ends with a set of “postscripts” in which the returned travelers
relate further news of people and gardens encountered along the way.