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The Garden of Reading
THE GARDEN OF READING: AN ANTHOLOGY OF TWENTIETH-CENTURY SHORT FICTION ABOUT GARDENS AND GARDENING, edited by Michelle Slung (New York: Overlook Press, 2005), $25.95
Writers and gardeners have much in common. Writers shape the experiences they write about; gardeners shape the land, determining what plant goes where, what looks good with what, how to grow delicate flowers that prefer a warmer or sunnier clime. It is no surprise then that writers are often also gardeners: William Wordsworth, Emily Dickinson, Vita Sackville-West and many more. Thus it is that our oldest story is about a garden - a fruitful garden with everything to make us happy as long as we punctiliously obey the rules. One infraction and we're out. Here's a truth about gardens: they can be delightful, but not forgiving.
Literature offers many other truths about gardens. Andrew Marvell imagined a blissful garden "Annihilating all that's made, To a green thought in a green shade." To sentimentalists, gardens can be lovesome things. To romantics they can be either divine or dangerous; they may even be poisonous as the lover in Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Rapaccini's Daughter" was to discover.
"Rapaccini's Daughter" is not included in "The Garden of Reading," Michelle Slung's anthology of short stories featuring gardens and the plants that grow in them. Instead of such workhorses of short story collections, she has gathered twentieth-century garden tales, and perhaps because that century was so blighted by war and mayhem, many show gardens as less than benign.
For example, John Collier's "Green Thoughts" features a mysterious carnivorous orchid that battens on the human world. Then there's Stephen King's "The Lawnmower Man," in which a householder who ran over the family cat with the lawnmower decides to sell the offending mower and call on Pastoral Greenery and Outdoor Services to take future care of his lawn. The results are alarming.
Writers and gardeners have much in common. Writers shape the experiences they write about; gardeners shape the land, determining what plant goes where, what looks good with what, how to grow delicate flowers that prefer a warmer or sunnier clime. It is no surprise then that writers are often also gardeners: William Wordsworth, Emily Dickinson, Vita Sackville-West and many more. Thus it is that our oldest story is about a garden - a fruitful garden with everything to make us happy as long as we punctiliously obey the rules. One infraction and we're out. Here's a truth about gardens: they can be delightful, but not forgiving.
Literature offers many other truths about gardens. Andrew Marvell imagined a blissful garden "Annihilating all that's made, To a green thought in a green shade." To sentimentalists, gardens can be lovesome things. To romantics they can be either divine or dangerous; they may even be poisonous as the lover in Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Rapaccini's Daughter" was to discover.
"Rapaccini's Daughter" is not included in "The Garden of Reading," Michelle Slung's anthology of short stories featuring gardens and the plants that grow in them. Instead of such workhorses of short story collections, she has gathered twentieth-century garden tales, and perhaps because that century was so blighted by war and mayhem, many show gardens as less than benign.
For example, John Collier's "Green Thoughts" features a mysterious carnivorous orchid that battens on the human world. Then there's Stephen King's "The Lawnmower Man," in which a householder who ran over the family cat with the lawnmower decides to sell the offending mower and call on Pastoral Greenery and Outdoor Services to take future care of his lawn. The results are alarming.