Garden Stories

A gorgeously jacketed hardcover anthology of short stories from around the world that celebrate gardens and gardeners

Gardens have been fruitful settings for stories ever since Adam and Eve were ejected from Paradise. This delightfully wide-ranging collection brings together all sorts of tales of the tilled earth, featuring secret gardens, enchanted gardens, gardens public and private, grand and humble.

Spectacular gardens are viewed from the unusual perspective of a snail in Virginia Woolf's "Kew Gardens" and from that of a sheltered teenage girl in Katherine Mansfield's "The Garden-Party." The family in Doris Lessing's "Flavors of Exile" hauls succulent vegetables and fruits from the rich African soil. Colette in "Bygone Spring" and D. H. Lawrence in "The Vicar's Garden" luxuriate in the lushness of extravagant flower beds. Children discover and lose their own peculiar paradises in Sandra Cisneros's "The Monkey Garden" and Italo Calvino's "The Enchanted Garden" while adult gardeners find things that move and haunt them in William Maxwell's "The French Scarecrow" and Jamaica Kincaid's "The Garden I Have in Mind."

Gardens of the imagination round out the anthology: the beautiful but fatal garden of Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Rappaccini's Daughter," the crystal buds of J. G. Ballard's "The Garden of Time," ravenous orchids in John Collier's "Green Thoughts," and Matsudo Aoko's "Planting," in which a young woman plants each day whatever she has been given--roses and violets, buttons and broken cups, love and fear and sorrow. Garden Stories is an abundant crop of entrancing stories and the perfect gift for gardeners of all kinds.