The Writer in the Garden is a collection of essays and poems on gardening. Jane Garmey edited this amazing book, and the collection is wonderfully varied and interesting. There are so many different takes on gardens and gardening, from observations by Charles Kuralt to personal anecdotes by E.B. White, and seasonal descriptions of gardens by Carol Bishop Hipps and Jamaica Kincaid, and excerpts from classic garden books by Vita Sackville-West, Gertrude Jekyll, and Celia Thaxter.

One of my favorite quotes from this book was a description by E.B. White about his gardening wife, Katharine S. White, toward the end of her life. The excerpt was taken from his introduction to her wonderful gardening book, Onward and Upward in the Garden, and it is a poignant glimpse of her planning her Spring garden knowing that she would not be there to see the garden bloom in early spring.

“As the years went by and age overtook her, there was something comical yet touching in her bedraggled appearance on this awesome occasion—the small, hunched-over figure, her studied absorption in the implausible notion that there would be yet another spring, oblivious to the ending of her own days, which she knew perfectly well was near at hand, sitting there with her detailed chart under those dark skies in the dying October, calmly plotting the resurrection. —E. B. White”

…Mademoiselle Gachet in the Garden, by Vincent Van Gogh