CULTIVATING DELIGHT
Cultivating Delight is a poetic book about gardens, growth, our relationship with nature, the intimate lives of animal neighbors, the zaniness of some famous gardeners; questions of mortality, garden etiquette, curiosity and wonder; how a garden becomes an extension of the self and can give an important shape to one’s life.
REVIEWS AND COMMENTS
"Understated elegance, lush language, historical and scientific nuggets, artful digressions and apt quotations.... an enchanting book. If flowers could choose their keepers, I bet there’d be a queue for the spacious yard in Ithaca, N.Y., of which Cultivating Delight offers a tour. Ackerman’s attention to detail is as delicious as her voluptuous joy in contemplating the wax-candle luminosity of a magnolia’s petals. {She is} excellent company on every page, wearing her knowledge with enviable insouciance. Life, according to many religions, begins and ends in a garden. Reading Ackerman’s book reminds us that we too can make our paradise here and that tranquility can be achieved contemplating the petals of a rose." — The New York Times Book Review
"Combining a poet's sensibility with a scientist's love of fact, Diane Ackerman offers us An Alchemy of Mind, a brilliant distillation of the mysterious intersection of metaphysics, and the physical world, all delivered in miraculously readable prose." —
Elle Magazine