First, a recommendation of AbeBooks, one of the many alternatives you might consider for buying this or other books. Second, I recommend Rebecca Mead‘s riff on the book, The Therapeutic Power of Gardening in the current issue of the New Yorker.  When I last read her work there it was a stretch of the culinary imagination. This time, the opposite, with the subtitle of the essay asking “Can anxious minds find solace working with plants? A therapist and her husband, a garden designer, say yes.” We are in the middle of a perfect case study for the core thesis of the book and of Mead’s essay.

In the last six days we planted nearly 100 trees, like those pictured here, which will fix nitrogen in the soil, provide shade for the coffee, and beckon birds for both food–parrots in particular mob these trees when the flowers are in bloom–and nesting. There is an obvious connection between the concept of biophilia and what is discussed in this book and essay, but this quote captures a nuanced point differentiating cultivated versus wild nature:

“When we sow a seed, we plant a narrative of future possibility,” Sue Stuart-Smith, a British psychiatrist and psychotherapist, writes in her new book, Continue reading →