Embroidered Ground: Revisiting the Garden

by Page Dickey, William Atherton (Illustrator)

Overview

In Embroidered Ground: Revisiting the Garden, the acclaimed author and garden designer Page Dickey writes of the pitfalls, challenges, successes, and myriad pleasures of the twenty-nine year process of creating her own remarkable garden, Duck Hill, in upstate New York. This winning book details the evolution of one especially loved and cared-for space: its failed schemes and realized dreams, and the wisdom gained in contending with an ever-evolving work of art. The author shares her very personal views on what contributes to a garden's success—structure, fragrance, the play of light and shadow, patterns and textures, multiseasonal plants. She writes of gardening with a husband, with wildlife, with dogs and chickens. And she grapples with how to adapt her garden—as we can adapt ours—to change in the years ahead.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374533199
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	02/14/2012
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	5.39(w) x 8.02(h) x 0.61(d)

About the Author

Page Dickey is a garden writer, lecturer, and designer. She is the author of Duck Hill Journal: A Year in a Country Garden and Breaking Ground. She has written on garden design for House & Garden, House Beautiful, and Elle Decor.

William Atherton is an artist, specializing in watercolor painting, who illustrated Page Dickey's Embroidered Ground. He has also painted industrial scenes in Kent, England.

Editorial Reviews

Embroidered Ground is a real delight, conveying Page Dickey's passion for gardening as well as the hard graft and blossoming progress of the garden at Duck Hill. A true inspiration, and a beautifully written book.” —Jenny Uglow, author of A LITTLE HISTORY OF BRITISH GARDENING

“Page Dickey is part of the very best tradition of garden writing: her voice is literary and informed, but also personal and unpretentious. It's a delight to read this book about Duck Hill revisited, and about how gardens, and gardening, change over the years. Reading Embroidered Ground is like strolling through a favorite garden with a favorite friend.” —Roxana Robinson, author of COST

“[Dickey] cast[s] a spell . . . Embroidered Ground is a sweet, tender love story about how gardens and gardeners age and adapt, each to the other.” —Dominique Browning, The New York Times

“[Embroidered Ground] is divided into a series of short essays on a wide range of subjects, each building on the others until a full picture of the garden, and the gardener's life, emerges. Dickey writes about learning to share the garden with a new plant-loving husband and their ideas for simplifying the garden as they grow older. In her view, a garden, at its best, is like the embroidery of the book's title: ‘the results of a passion, our joyous individual efforts of expression in color, pattern, and texture, woven with leaves and flowers, in partnership with nature.'” —Country Gardens

“Page Dickey [is a] legendary writer and gardener . . . In Embroidered Ground she offers tips . . . and wisdom: how to share your garden with a new partner who might have a different style, the beauty of the unmown, the long view (planting for decades) . . . It's a book to read, dreaming of spring.” —Susan Salter Reynolds, Los Angeles Times

“Dickey employs a range of voices, often ethereal . . . But she is razory-wicked when facing enemies: bindweed, barberry, Norway maple, Ailanthus, bittersweet . . . There is much sage advice, on sightlines, garden bones, and hedges to frame and enclose . . . And she loves her garden as if it were a child—with joy, distress, responsibility, guilt—which is the most beautiful thing of all.” —Peter Lewis, The Barnes and Noble Review

From the Publisher

Embroidered Ground is a sweet, tender love story about how gardens and gardeners age and adapt, each to the other.
—The New York Times

Dominique Browning