Book Review : Meandering With a Garden Guide That Grows on You

Farther Afield: A Gardener’s Excursions by Allen Lacy (Farrar Straus Giroux: $16.95)

The beauty of Allen Lacy’s writing is that it sneaks up on you. He meanders everywhere: through his own “magpie” garden, through some of the great botanical Disneylands around, through growers’ fields and greenhouses from Costa Rica to Connecticut, through writings of other gardeners, through fields and flowers, diverse and threatened. He lures you into his far-flung excursions much as an exotic orchid traps an unsuspecting bee. The approach works.

If the first sentence is any measure, this is a book of garden writings so far afield as to be hurled into the nearest compost bin: “The seed that brought me here was planted in my mind a year ago . . .” At 45 words, it violates seemingly inviolate rules of good writing. But pay no heed. If you can get by that wordy lead-in, you will find yourself in a deceptively simple collection of essays that, taken together, enlarge and enrich an already weighted-down garden bookshelf. Some of these essays, varying in length from as few as one to a dozen-plus pages, betray their origin, which assiduous devotees of garden literature may readily recognize. No matter that the “majority of the chapters in this book first appeared, in slightly different form” in the Wall Street Journal and other more gardenlike journals (American Horticulture, Horticulture, Organic Gardening and the like). The breeziness of the prose and the brevity of most of the chapters invite browsing and re-reading. You can pick up this volume anywhere, but, surprisingly, it is not easy to put down.

Part of the power of Lacy’s visions lies in their not being pictured for us in photo or drawing. At first, the absence of illustration is missed, then appreciated. From initial rambling discourse to pure, simple conclusion, this is an excursion that well complements other serious attempts to put gardening within a literary framework, from Christopher Lloyd’s “The Adventurous Gardener” to Katharine S. White’s “Onward and Upward in the Garden” to Gertrude Jekyll’s “On Gardening” to Russell Page’s “The Education of a Gardener” to Eleanor Perenyi’s “Green Thoughts: A Writer in the Garden.”

Duly noting the principles of gardening from all those wonderful “solemn garden books” that fill a true reading gardener’s bookshelf, Lacy, delightfully, dispenses with them even as he pays them homage. “But knowing the good,” he writes, “doesn’t necessarily lead to doing it . . . that if considered according to its overall design, my garden’s a mess. . . . I have a friend who has described my style of gardening as the ongoing attempt to cram yet one more plant into my limited patch of earth.” So, Lacy advises, “I don’t believe that there’s any place for guilt in a gardener’s life.” At least one other gardener who has nurtured and crammed and tossed and started all over again appreciates his admonition that, “Perfection in anything, is unsettling.”