Another writer from Newfoundland brings us the useful and wonderful field guide Edible Plants of Atlantic Canada. Peter J. Scott highlights more than sixty edible plant species found in woods, meadows, and other wildernesses throughout our region. The book is divided into generalized habitats (seaside, disturbed areas, peatlands, forest floor) to help novice collectors know what plants to look for according to the local ecology. Each plant entry includes one or two good photos of the species as well as notes about the edible portions, and there’s a modest recipe section included too. The book is bound in a durable, water-resistant cover, making it ideal to slip into a pack when going on an afternoon’s nature walk.
Lest someone think I’m biased against growing food plants, Incredible Edibles is a great book for the city-dweller with an itching to grow some fresh foods. Sonia Day, a well-known Canadian gardening writer and all around garden enthusiast, follows up on her highly entertaining Middle Aged Spread with this concise, easy-to-follow handbook of growing advice for “43 fun things to grow in the city.” From asparagus peas to zucchini, Day provides recommendations on how to grow vegetables, herbs, and small fruits, whether in containers or in small urban plots, indoors or out. Ideal for the beginner gardener with limited space and time, and also a great way to introduce children to the joys of growing food, the book also includes recipes for using that home-grown produce.
For sheer, soul-drenching colour and escapism, Exotic Gardens of the Eastern Caribbean isn’t quite as good as a trip down south, but it’s a nice alternative. The authors have visited many gardens on selected Caribbean islands—St. Lucia, St. Vincent, Barbados and Grenada—and have profiled a gorgeous range of plantings, from magnificent private residences with garden creations by landscape architects to lush public gardens. Written in both French and English, this coffee-table delight brims with dazzling photographs of the gardens but also includes intriguing tidbits about the inhabitants, gardeners or otherwise, that populate these tranquil island paradises. If you’ve ever visited one of these islands, this is a wonderful keepsake—if you’ve never been, it’s a temptation to go.
One of the most popular types of gardening in recent years has been gardening with succulents, whether hardy varieties for outside gardens or more tender species used in container plantings. Debra Lee Baldwin’s Succulent Container Gardens is a follow-up to her well-received Designing with Succulents, and is useful for gardeners of all experience levels. I have several dish gardens of succulents in my office, and pots of succulents brightening other rooms, so reading this new volume merely further whetted my appetite for the unusual, intriguing world of succulent plants. There’s no weeding to do with containerized plants, and much less work than tending an outdoor garden, so what’s not to like? It leaves us with more time to spend reading more books about plants.
Anyone who is a plant enthusiast knows that they don’t just sit there and grow—there are complicated chemical processes going on behind flowers and foliage. Some plants have truly odd characteristics, and these are highlighted in the delightfully named Bizarre Botanicals. You’ll find no humdrum hostas or proper petunias within these pages—here are carnivorous plants that “catch” insects for food, plants with spores that burst into flame, plants that smell like decomposing flesh so as to lure in pollinators. Some are stunningly beautiful, others very strange in appearance, but all are fascinating. The authors, both botanists and horticulturists, profile more than 75 unique plants, all of which can be grown as houseplants under the right conditions.
For something a little more practical for most of us, check out Bloom’s Best Perennials and Grasses. Adrian Bloom is a plantsman extraordinaire who has both the connoisseur’s eye and the ability to encourage any gardener of any expertise level. He profiles nearly 400 perennials and ornamental grasses, showing how they can be used in the landscape, and reveals his top twelve plants, most recommended for great performance in the widest range of gardening conditions.
My personal “across-the-pond” horticultural hero is the late Christopher Lloyd, an inspiration to countless gardeners around the world. In The View from Great Dixter, dozens of Lloyd’s friends, students, and colleagues, including his gardener Fergus Garrett, recount anecdotes from lessons learned during their time visiting or working at Lloyd’s family estate of Great Dixter, in southest England. They paint a loving tribute of a gardener, and a garden, the likes of which we will not soon see again. Christo, as his friends called him, had an acerbic and quick wit, and suggested a most excellent way of dealing with forgotten plant names when visiting another’s garden. “Kick it gently with your foot, and then casually ask “What are you calling this nowadays?”
Generally I flinch away from books in the “For Dummies” or “Complete Idiot’s” series, but I really like The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Year-Round Gardening. The authors don’t presume their readers are idiots, but rather fellow gardeners who just need a little extra in the way of advice and suggestions on how to engage in their favourite avocation all year long. Maybe we can’t grow vegetables outside in January in Nova Scotia, but there are certainly garden-related activities for the entire year.
I’m quite clear that I am unlikely to ever visit the Chelsea Flower Show, the epitome of garden shows held in London, England every year since 1912. But with Best Garden Design by Chris Young, any gardener can receive practical inspiration on bringing a fresh, exciting look to one’s own garden. Young presents tips from the expert designers who showcase at Chelsea, as well as case studies on particular designs showing why they work and how to achieve something similar. Nova Scotian gardeners will have to adapt somewhat for plant hardiness, but there are enough delightful variations in design, from post-modern to classical, that any reader should take away something from this book.
You don’t have to be an entomologist to enjoy the wonderfully readable Bees, Wasps and Ants. In fact, the author stresses that his lively volume is not a field guide for identifying these insects, of which there are an estimated mere 150,000 or so species. What he does with this volume is bring us into the world of these important insects, which are variously “cows, police, wolves, pollinators and recyclers.” Along the way, he focuses on the importance that bees, wasps and ants have for gardeners, and shows us how to make better gardeners by encouraging and embracing biodiversity rather than running for the insecticide the first time an ant marches past us on the walkway.
My apologies for being silent the past few days. As many people know, I'm going to have a new book coming out in late winter or early spring next year through Nimbus Publishing. We're into the latter stages of editing before it goes to press, and combining that with my regular work that pays the bills...I'm a wee bit swamped. Or feeling windblown and defoliated, like this tree at my alma mater, the Nova Scotia Agricultural College. Please bear with me, and I'll be back to my normal chatty self as soon as possible, which includes visiting plenty of other blogs. 
It's been a good couple of weeks for Nova Scotian writers, although not without its controversies. However, I'm very proud of our writers and want to celebrate them, so I'm departing from my usual garden-speak (sort of) to talk about these victories. The Sentimentalists by Johanna Skibsrud. Gaspereau Press, 2009, 27.95
Reading a book in preparation for reviewing it can sometimes be compared to making bread. Once the sponge has been kneaded, the bread is left to “rest” for a period of time before it is completed. When I finished reading The Sentimentalists, Johanna Skibsrud’s first novel, I initially was at a loss regarding how to review it, so left it alone for over a week before revisiting it.
The novel’s premise seems straightforward. The narrator’s father, a US Army veteran with the somewhat incongruous name of Napoleon, is declining in health, which coincides with an implosion in her own life. She moves him from his “palace,” a trailer in Fargo, North Dakota, to share a house in a lakeside town with Henry, the son of Napoleon’s friend Owen, who was killed in action during the chaos that was the Vietnam War.
The town, Casablanca, is a replacement for a town that was flooded to make way for a dam and that still remains beneath the lake, deeply submerged and viewed only through memory. In much the same way, personalities, emotions and stories of the main characters are only seen murkily, as if peered at through waters churned up by currents or storms. Gradually we see more of the characters and discover the haunting story that so affected Napoleon and coloured his whole life.
Skibsrud has said in interviews that the story evolved from conversations with her father, a Vietnam veteran, a year or so after the invasion of Iraq began following the events of September 11, 2001. During that earlier war, her father, then a young soldier, had witnessed the murder of a civilian woman by an army officer. He was so outraged by this event that he spoke out to his superiors, which resulted in an inquiry being held. Although the novel is inspired by this facet of Skibsrud’s family history, she stresses it is a work of fiction.
“‘Remember me when I am dead, and simplify me when I’m dead,’” Napoleon says, quoting a well-known verse by the British soldier-poet Keith Douglas, who was killed in the Normandy invasion of June 1944. Napoleon and his daughter agree that these are the words of “a rank sentimentalist” but also, the narrator writes, “like maybe everything was not such a big mystery after all.”
Before writing The Sentimentalists, Skibsrud authored of a book of poetry, Late Nights with Wild Cowboys, and her skill with word pictures shows nicely in some of the passages. However, at times the novel suffers from a lack of firmer editing. Long, meandering sentences might work well in presenting ephemeral thoughts and ideas in poetry. In this novel they’re used to such an extent that too often they serve to distract and even annoy the reader.
Gaspereau Press is well known for publishing books using quality paper and distinctive covers, creating books that are as much a pleasure to hold, as they are to read. It always puzzles me, however, that this press and others will often include long screeds at the end of a book about the typeface in which the book is set, yet say little or nothing about the artwork used in creating the cover. I particularly like the cover of The Sentimentalists, with its khaki-green illustration of a soldier sliding sideways off into the jacket flap and echoing on the back, much as the events of Napoleon’s life “have been…somewhat sideways to himself.”
As a bildungsroman, or coming-of-age novel, The Sentimentalists succeeds nicely in presenting a journey of growth and possible enlightenment in its narrator character. Where it falters a little, however, is in taking too twisted a road on the voyage in which to tell its tale. That criticism aside, it will be interesting to see what direction Skibsrud’s work takes in the future.
“I still won’t review a book I don’t like, although to do so would doubtless be amusing for the Ms. Hyde side of me and entertaining for the more malicious class of reader,” Ms. Atwood wrote in the introduction to her essay collection, Moving Targets: Writing with Intent, 1982-2004. She goes on to say that if a book is really bad, it ought not be reviewed at all, or if it’s good but not to her taste, someone else should review it.
This isn’t a bad book, but it’s not a particularly good one. I will stress that it’s mostly not to my taste, which runs the gamut from science fiction to thrillers to hardcore literature, so maybe I'm just being a grump. However though not entranced by it, I see some flashes of delightful ability in the author, enough that I will be quite willing to read a future work by Berwin even though I won’t re-read this particular one.
If you’ve been following the virtual book tour set up for Hothouse Flower, you may have already read the book, or at least know its premise: Lila, the narrator/lead character is newly divorced, lives in New York City, works a sort of dull job in an ad agency, has a bright but dull apartment. She has no commitments—no relationship, no pets, no plants, no real life outside of her McJob—until she buys a tropical plant from a smooth-talking street vendor. She then meets an odd but somewhat intriguing man who has a Laundromat filled with exotic and wonderful plants, and through her own errors in judgment, she causes this man to lose his plants. Her ensuing quest to replace his plant collection leads her to the rainforests of Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula.
The premise is intriguing, and the book blurb sounded promising. And while Berwin writes quite well at times and has a quirkily fun sense of humour, her characters simply don’t work for me. My amusement at some of the dialogue, events and descriptions in the book was completely overshadowed by the characters, none of whom make me care about them even a little bit, and several of whom are reprehensible for no apparent reason related to the storyline. When the little bits profiling each of the plants at the beginning of chapters are the most entertaining parts of the novel, there’s a problem with the work.
At times, there’s a bit of a magic realism feel to events in Hothouse Flower. But unlike Gabriel Garcia Marquez with his One Hundred Years of Solitude or Jack Hodgins’ brilliant romp The Invention of the World, there’s not enough mystery between the covers of Berwin’s novel to make me really wonder about the odd things that do take place here and there. Rather than be fetchingly mysterious and ineffable, they come across as jarringly annoying and contrived, as if the author was trying overly hard to be clever.
Normally, when reviewing a book I avoid any reviews done by others, lest my opinion be in some way coloured by the comments of more learned heads than mine. Because I was completely unfamiliar with Berwin prior to reading Hothouse Flower, I did seek out more information about her. She has said that while this is her first published novel, it’s her third work, and does draw on some aspects of her own experience. Although it spans mere months as opposed to years, Hothouse Flower could be considered a bildungsroman, a coming-of-age novel of self-development, by an author still fledging her wings. With this in mind, I do genuinely look forward to reading future work by Berwin when she has had a few more years of honing her skills.
Here's an example of what happens when I go to most of those using embedded comments. I write the comment, hit 'post comment', and get this "please try again" from Blogger. 
So we hit "Post Comment" again, and this time we get this funny word verification box. This is how some bloggers prevent spam comments, and the Captcha words can actually be very amusing. But sometimes they can also be hard to decipher. And wonder of wonders, if you don't get back to the window within a certain span of time, that word won't work and you'll get ANOTHER refresh. Then there's often some assorted colourful language out of the person trying to leave the comment. What? I didn't say I swear at my computer. Well, maybe once in a while. 
Well, sloppy darn and shuck the chickens, it FINALLY worked! In this case, the comment gets published. In some cases, you'll get another note telling you "Your comment will be published upon blog owner's approval". So unless you come back the next day or sometime later to see if your comment went through, you don't really know. A lot of us have written comments only to have them go into the place where safety pins and odd socks go, never to be seen again. 
Whew. I feel like I'm teaching a writing class, and we've just done a marathon of discussing the challenges of getting work published. I hope this is some help to others, because it's not meant as a criticism in any way. Take a tour around the blogosphere, and check out bloggers that have 20, 30, 40 or more comments. I'm willing to bet some of those odd socks that most of them don't use embedded comments. Anyway, that's enough out of me for today, and as a reward to all who slogged through this, here's a photo of that amazing orchid cactus bud, which opened on Saturday, much to my delight. There would be many more buds but for a certain very naughty little cat...
