Ackerman, Diane. Cultivating Delight: A Natural History of My Garden. Harper Collins, 2001. This is the 4th Ackerman book I’ve read, preceded by A Natural History of the Senses (one of the most interesting and informative books I’ve ever read, particularly on the subject of smell), The Moon by Whale Light (a book I often assigned for incoming college students in a course entitled Directed Summer Reading), and A Natural History of Love. Several years ago I purchased a copy of her garden book, wedged it on a book shelf between two other unread Ackerman books, and forgot about it. This summer I came across a short and rather negative commentary on the book, which reminded me that I owned the book and should check it out. I pulled my copy off the shelf, and Ackerman became my bedtime reading for the next week. I was not disappointed. While I can understand why some readers are not attracted to Ackerman’s writing style, I love the vitality of her limber prose, her unmatched skill at devising unexpected metaphors, her willingness to pursue tangents and follow her curiosity in investigating dozens of diverse subjects.
As is the case with many other garden books, Cultivating Delight is organized according to the progression of the four seasons–though Ackerman complains that we need an expanded menu of more carefully defined seasonal distinctions. In the book’s appendix she lists over 225 flower and shrub species in her garden–though this does not account for the multiple cultivars, including over 125 different varieties of roses. Ackerman emphasizes that she is not a professional gardener. She seeks to enjoy the pleasures of gardening and is not intent on producing a beautifully designed gardens for others to enjoy. Her book does occasionally talk about specific gardening techniques or practices, but she is primarily a garden ruminator, thinking about the “nature” of gardens, how we define gardens, what delights and benefits we gain from them. While portraying her deeply personal investment in her garden, she also introduces a multitude of related topics, offering us her observations on Robert Fortune (legendary collector of exotic plants), reptile sleep patterns, cardinals’ feeding habits, John Whipple’s observations of the moon in the 1850s, the migration of birds, the design of bird houses, the death of Edgar Allan Poe, the connections between rainbows and hummingbirds. Cultivating Delights was the most enjoyable gardening book I read this year and will be my primary source of quotes that I include in this year’s four Kalendar blog postings (using excerpts from my 2020 garden journal). The Kalendar blog posts will provide a full sampling of Ackerman’s analogies, but here are a couple of my personal favorites:
• “Most plants are pimps and thugs. Because they can’t walk, flowers will do anything, no matter how lethal, extreme, or bizarre to get other life-forms to perform sex for them.”
• “. . . summer days unfold like Charles Ives symphonies, full of the sprightly cacophony we cherish.”
• “The more the merrier is my motto, let my beds be an Ellis Island of natives and immigrants whose cultures blend into a beautiful mix. But the road to excess leads to the castle of indolence, and hodgepodge beds take a lot of upkeep.”
Link to pdf with the remaining book annotations.