Most garden books are polarities: they're either packed with details and technical information, or they're artsy and informationless, inspirational but without content. A Growing Gardener is one of the few I've come across that's both, which makes it uniquely desirable.

Abbie Zabar's day job is being a horticultural artist. She whips out the Conte crayons and documents plant life in vivid scribbles, and it's won her, if the "about the author" text is to be believed, a fair amount of recognition. A Growing Gardener is what happned when Zabar decided to turn the roof of her Manhattan apartment building into a garden paradise, fourteen stories above the asphalt below. It is filled with handwritten garden quotes, drawings and sketches, and a running personal narrative that makes it seem like you're talking to gardener friend, rather than reading a book on what can sometimes be a dry subject. (No pun intended.)

One of the things I like best about this particular book, though, is that Zabar has bound in smaller leaves, one for each season, with sidebar-type information. It's like a smaller book within a book, of sorts. She gives us her recipe for Owl And Pussycat Preserves in autumn, for instance. Or her garden plan in winter. It takes a book that was already personal narrative and accessible, and makes it feel like you're peeking inside her journal or diary.

And that's the thing -- you follow Zabar through a year's worth of essays, separated into season, and it feels like a garden journal. You're entertained with that guilty sort of jolt when you see a memory or an experience that's intensely personal, but she's also imparting wisdom. You learn small things about plants that you may not have known about before, or the history of a fruit ... but you get it almost by osmosis. The entertainment comes first.

If you're a gardener, this is a book that you're sure to enjoy. If not, but you like personal narrative or naturalistic topics, you'll still like it. And if you're an artist, you'll never want to put it down.

[ by Elizabeth Badurina ]
Rambles: 28 April 2002