Becoming a Gardener

To make her new house in Connecticut truly feel like home, Catie Marron decided to create a garden. But while she was familiar with landscape design, she had never grown anything. Marron's quest to become a gardener, however, was about more than learning the basics about mulch or which plants work best in the shade. She sought something far more elusive: to identify the core qualities and characteristics that make a person a gardener and an understanding of what a garden could mean to her as it had to multitudes of other gardeners over the centuries. In this book, Catie Marron chronicles her transformation into a gardener over the course of 18 months, seeding the details of her experience with rich advice from writers as diverse as Eleanor Perényi and Karel Capek, Penelope Lively and Jamaica Kincaid.