“Flowers are blooming all over the place… “ the character Lydia Grace, in The Gardener,
by Sarah Stewart with illustrations by David Small, 1997
“… It is that rarity, a pictorial delight that in 20 double pages gives more and more of itself each time it’s read, and whose silent complexities reveal themselves with continuing pleasure.” Edward Koren/The New York Times Book Review
My gardening pal Ann gifted me with The Gardener ages ago & it’s now part of my late summer ritual, to pull it down from the shelf near my Frost poetry books & enjoy Frost the farmer & then, the character Lydia Grace’s gardening skills in David Small’s artwork & Sarah Stewart’s inventive series of letters. Late summer is the time when I give my vest-pocket patch an imaginary rainbow-ribbon, for its color mix.
The flowers here, shrimp plant, brown-eyed Susan & blue something that I have to ask Ann about the name, grow in my September garden in the back yard, a flutter of petals and juicy dirt lined with fallen live oak tree limbs that bear the otherwise aboreal resurrection fern…
I like to write outdoors by the garden with a pencil & pad. Then take inside what has taken off on paper & get that into the computer.
