Amazon.com's Best of 2001
Diane Ackerman relishes the world of her garden. As a poet, she finds within it an endless field of metaphors. As a naturalist, she notices each small, miraculous detail: the hummingbirds and their routines, the showy tulips, the crazy yellow forsythia. Of visiting deer she writes, "I love watching the deer, which always arrive like magic or a miracle or the answer to an unasked question."
In her popular book A Natural History of the Senses, Ackerman celebrates the human body; in A Natural History of My Garden, she turns her attention to the world outside the body, outside the human sphere. Structured by seasons, this is a book of subtle shifts, but the reader never feels lost. Her prose is so welcoming, at times it feels like she's talking directly to you, although her lush, poetic language is the opposite of speech.
Distracted urban readers craving a book that will transport them would do well to spend time immersed in these pages, as will gardeners who've lost appreciation for their plot. Ackerman is a generous writer--a teacher who will share treasured, obscure passages from Beckett or Hawthorne. She's emotional and highly charged, and her descriptions are so clear they're small marvels. She's remarkable for her ability to find mystery everywhere. --Emily White
From Publishers Weekly
In a generous and jauntily haphazard excursion through the four seasons of her Ithaca, N.Y., backyard landscape and the innumerable interests of her fertile mind, poet and naturalist Ackerman (A Natural History of the Senses; A Natural History of Love) reprises her role as an enchanting intellectual sensualist. Her extensive flower (and even weed) beds provide both subject matter and metaphor. More interested in what a great garden does for a person's spirit and soul than in how to make it grow, Ackerman buzzes productively from idea to revelation to insight, lighting on topics as diverse as how roses are reminiscent of dolls' faces; why we see faces in nature; how plants, animals and humans are alike; whether plants have motives and instincts; how flowers protect themselves from both heat, aridity and freezing cold; and why women are more prone to hypothermia than men in just five paragraphs. She celebrates the diversity of weeds, finds beauty in chaos and order, embraces trial and error as a way of learning and respects the inevitable cycle of birth, death and rebirth. (Oct.)Forecast: With the success of her earlier works preceding her, and an eight-city author tour and 15-city NPR campaign to come, Ackerman's breezy philosophical lyricism should flourish amoang both garden enthusiasts and fans of encyclopedic curiosity.Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Poet, essayist, and author of the popular A Natural History of the Senses and A Natural History of Love, Ackerman turns her inquisitiveness to the subject of gardens. Although her latest book is presented as a gardening journal, with sections on the four seasons, her musings know no bounds and verge on stream-of-consciousness. One typical chapter ranges over topics that include landscape architecture, lawns, fences, autumn colors, childhood memories, the difference between labyrinths and mazes, the history and definition of gardens, and compost, all peppered with quotations from a dozen authors. Depending on one's literary tastes, Ackerman's distinctive lyrical style can be intriguing or annoying; she offers no citations for her quotations and factual assertions. Her book will charm many readers who pick it up to absorb a few pages of observations at a time, but it is not for reading at long stretches. Nor does it have much in the way of practical gardening suggestions. Recommended for larger public libraries.- Daniel Starr, Metropolitan Museum of Art Lib., New York Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
*Starred Review* Renowned naturalist and poet Ackerman has greatly enriched the genre of natural history with her lyrical, knowledgeable, and imaginative inquiries into the dynamics of life on earth. She has studied animals in rain forests, on frozen tundras, and deep in the oceans, and she now turns her keen, often bemused attention to her large, exuberant New York State garden, charting its metamorphosis over the course of a year. She writes that she finds "exploring my garden world as replenishing as an expedition," and, indeed, her treatise is full of adventure and discovery. There's the shape-shifting of flowers and trees as they bud, leaf, flower, and go to seed; the purposefulness of birds and insects; the drama of weather; and all the emotions that deep attentiveness to nature arouses, from joy to remorse. Guided by curiosity and an unabashed ardor for beauty, Ackerman avoids the combative fanaticism of master gardeners, "Forget winning, cultivate delight." In love with color, form, scent, and nature's irrepressible profusion, she describes caring for 120 rosebushes and lavish plantings of daffodils, tulips, lilies, and asters; tells the stories behind plant names; and celebrates the achievements of eminent gardeners such as Thomas Jefferson and Gertrude Jekyll. Gardens always inspire thoughts about the human condition, and Ackerman segues gracefully from sprightly insights into the lives of roses, trees, beetles, squirrels, and hummingbirds to reflections on the nature of creativity and how delight in nature, the union of sensuality and reverence, engenders an ecstatic, nurturing spirituality. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
People
“A fascinating tour of plant mythology and fact …[Ackerman] plays both sleuth and poet.”
Los Angeles Times
“Diane Ackerman takes us down the garden path with a renewed sense of awe …[and] enlightened eyes.”
Nature
“Ackerman’s rich prose is a bridge to a world of discovery.”
Los Angeles Daily News
"Diane Ackerman takes us down the garden path with a renewed sense of awe …[and] enlightened eyes."
People
A fascinating tour of plant mythology and fact …[Ackerman] plays both sleuth and poet.
Book Description
In the mode of her esteemed bestseller A Natural History of the Senses, Diane Ackerman's new book, Cultivating Delight celebrates the sensory pleasures she discovers in her garden.
Ackerman delights in her garden through all the seasons. Whether she is deadheading flowers or glorying in the profusion of roses, offering sugar water to a hummingbird or studying the slug, she welcomes the unexpected drama and extravagance as well as the sanctuary her garden offers. She chronicles instances of violence in nature but also intuits loneliness and desire in the clamor of male crickets in the spring. And there is wonderment and marvel as she happens upon a tiny frog asleep inside the petals of a tulip. Visitors to her garden range from botanical explorers of earlier centuries to the nature mystic John Muir to the brilliant British garden writer Gertrude Jekyll.
The author's garden nourishes its creator, who imaginatively returns the favor and seizes privileged moments to leap from science and metaphor to meditation on the human condition. Written in sensuous, lyrical prose, Cultivating Delight is a hymn to nature and to the pleasure we take in it.
About the Author
Poet, essayist, and naturalist, Diane Ackerman is the author of many highly acclaimed works of nonfiction, including A Natural History of the Senses -- a book beloved by readers all over the worldand the volumes Deep Play, A Slender Thread, The Rarest of the Rare, A Natural History of Love, The Moon by Whale Light, and a memoir on flying, On Extended Wings. Her poetry has been collected into six volumes, among them Jaguar of Sweet Laughter: New and Selected Poems and, most recently, Praise My Destroyer. Ms. Ackerman has received many prizes and awards, including the John Burroughs Nature Award and the Lavan Poetry Prize. A Visiting Professor at the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University, she was the National Endowment for the Humanities Distinguished Professor at the University of Richmond. Ms. Ackerman also has the unusual distinction of having had a molecule named after her -- dianeackerone. She lives in upstate New York.
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