The Garden: A Year at Home Garden

In 1987, Dan Pearson was commissioned to design and create a four-acre garden -- a private jewel in the English countryside. The resulting gardens, both naturalistic and pioneering in their design and content, ranged from a Woodland Garden to a Thyme Lawn to a Vegetable Garden -- a microcosm, in short, that reflected the issues, pleasures, and problems encountered by any gardener in any garden.Pearson takes us through the months as he worked in this dynamic environment, sharing his gardening philosophy and exploring the seasons both practically and aesthetically. Here are lessons learned about pruning, sowing, and maintenance -- and quiet discoveries about color, perfume, light, and balance.Throughout, "A Year of Splendor" offers that rare thing: an enchanting tale of the dance between a person and a place, extraordinarily told.