The Garden Essays of Hortense Miller (Hardcover Edition)

Hortense Miller is one of the treasures of Laguna Beach, CA. She cannot be understood apart from the garden she has created and grown into, a dream disguised as a landscape, a lush and private world that is spread across 2 ½ acres of a canyon with an ocean view.

 

This volume contains a broad selection of her essays, written over twenty years. One could have no interest in gardening and still find pleasure in this spontaneous writing, permeated as it is with the charm of a remarkable personality. Hortense’s considerable charm is formed from equal parts of humor, intellectual curiosity and radiant calm, though she is firey on certain subjects – women’s rights, population control, superstition and cruelty of any sort.

 

The subjects, which range from Charlemagne to climbing vines, from Rimbaud to weasels, are treated with humor and a Midwestern directness. This is not a garden book in the usual sense, but rather a gardener’s book. The author’s angle of vision always reveals the unexpected: the ways in which fire can benefit a garden, how a cockatoo walks up a hill and why rats should be considered artists.

 

These essays illuminate what it means to live intimately with a garden’s ecosystem – not how to plant, but rather how to appreciate a plant, and ultimately how to think like one.

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The Garden Writings of Hortense Miller (Paperback Edition)

The essays in this book, gathered from eleven years of Hortense’s writings give one a glimpse into the mind of a truly original thinker and thoughtful gardener.