The Ecology of Eden
Evan Eisenberg
(Picador, £9.99)
Buy it at BOL
A history of gardens, agriculture and wilderness despoiled: an understanding of why death and ego are always in Arcadia, even when Arcady has metamorphosed into a lawned suburb or a holiday villa on the Mediterranean shore. Synthesises biology, religion, music and paradise - that's paradise, from the ancient Persian, meaning a walled enclosure, to protect vestigial wilderness or to recreate it when lost. Rigorous thought expressed as poetry - Eisenberg sees the mandala of the Earth from above, like local deities, and from below, like the equally powerful nematode worm: like God, he was once a gardener, and his opening ode to soil, plain dirt, is divine.
The Orchard Thief
Susan Orleans
(Vintage, £6.99)
In the current monographic publishing fashion ( Longitude, Cod), a monody on the sensual, sexual, desirability of orchids, on the spongiform Floridan Fakahatchee swamp and the horticultural grifters and drifters that its half-immortal flora attracts. Writing self-conscious - bet Orleans flashes her New Yorker magazine credentials like an FBI badge - but gradually those southern wetlands and their slow-growing, moon-blooming, long-living orchids hypnotise her, calm in their permanent frailty, and very pure. Which the riff-raff besotted with the plants are not: orchids attract scam merchants and flimflam men like pollinating moths. Great greenhouse reading.
Book of Women Gardeners
ed. Deborah Kellaway
(Virago, £15)
Buy it at BOL
Ah, gardening as we now know it, at least outside of Leyhill Prison's patch of weeds-for-freedom: that is, snobberies of money: of learning and travel ("residents of Shiraz grow the rose Ispahan"); and of comparative aesthetics (Lady Seton recommends wearing a "short tweed skirt, made very wide"). Language is often horto-porn - the garden version of gastroporn - fetishising fennel and foxgloves, sniffing around the compost. Goes unmentioned that by and large one needs to buy a large piece of land to garden - few of the anthologised dames and ladies are allotment women. Paintings and pix overly perfect: where are the mud and bugs of female truth?
