Apprentice to a Garden
Evelyn J. Hadden
(Reviewer - Rebecca Brown)
2005 LessLawn Press/Booksurge
ISBN: 1419614169

A new urban gardener goes wild.

Desperate for privacy & winter scenery, a new homeowner creates a garden that enlivens her landscape & her thinking.

Minnesota is a state wherein city denizens have both hot summers & freezing winters, & when Evelyn Hadden buys, with her husband, her first home, she is faced with a dreary vista of unkempt lawn in front, at the side & out back, plus the realization that anyone along her street can see everything.

Another reason Evelyn Hadden wanted to change her horizons was to bring back the wildlife, as in butterflies & birds.

With meticulous attention to detail & little dashes of humor Evelyn Hadden offers her four year record of choosing trees & bushes, perennials & annuals, as well as reintroducing flowers that originally grew before the city was built.

Her chapters include:
A Garden Germinates(First Winter)
First Plants
Greed
Growing Dreams
Beauty Is an Opinion
Gardens Are Four-dimensional
Bare Ground Is Unnatural
Catalog Colonists
More and Fewer
Our Garden Rocks
Vermin Are Wildlife Too
Nature Includes Humans
Paradise Emerges(Fourth Summer) & finally How a Garden Grows

There are some neatly rendered diagrams, a full bibliography & an index of the plants she reintroduced to her landscape, although I found myself yearning for before & after photos.

An instructive & interesting record of a city gardener's journey. Did her neighbors take her lead & transform their lawns too?
(02/26/06)

Rebecca