Love S Garden

A collection of real-life Buddhist love stories, with commentary and guided exercises for couples developed by Peggy Rowe-Ward and Larry Ward, senior students and ordained Dharma teachers in the tradition of Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh. These personal stories, from couples of a range of different ages and experiences, illustrate how Buddhist principles can help couples navigate any stage of their relationship. It took the authors some good living and good loving before they realized that the love that they were seeking was already present and available in the depths of their hearts and mind. Love does not depend on anything that is happening "Out There" and is not dependent on anything "he" or "she" might do. It depends on our own willingness to look within and to act. This insight is a result of practicing the teachings of the Buddha on right diligence and right effort. The authors have been studying and practicing with Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh and they are happy to report that the practices work. In "The practice is not difficult. We simply need to get in touch with and nourish the practices that are helping us to experience peace. And then we need to stop doing the things that keep us from experiencing peace." Larry Ward Foreword by Thich Nhat Hanh

It is 1898. India is ruled by the British, and India's women are ruled by British masters as well as Indian men. A desperate young widow sacrifices her firstborn child to save herself from ultimate dishonor. She marries a stranger, but her damaged second family pays dearly for this Faustian bargain. Then, an extraordinary atonement, strange liaisons in politics and love-spanning the two world wars and the Indian independence movement-help her descendants heal from this traumatic private history. Love's Garden demonstrates the strength, resilience, and unbreakable spirit of mothers and daughters navigating layers of oppression, all while the sun is not-so-peacefully setting on British India.

'Charming, inspiring, uplifting ... pure lovely,' - Marian Keyes 'Read Rhapsody in Green. A novelist's beautiful, useful essays about her tiny garden.' - India Knight 'Glorious...for anyone who loves fruit, vegetables, herbs and language. It makes you see them with new eyes.' - Diana Henry 'A witty account of 'extreme allotmenteering' for all obsessive gardeners' - Mail on Sunday 'An extremely entertaining and inspiring story of one woman's passionate transformation of a small, irregular shaped urban garden into a bountiful source of food.' - Woman & Home 'A gardening book like no other, this is the author's 'love letter' to her garden. She relays warm and witty stories about the trials and tribulations throughout her gardening year.' - Garden News '...this inspirational, funny book, written by someone who hankers after a homesteader's lifestyle, will make you look at even your window box in a new, more productive light.' - The Simple Things Gardening can be viewed as a largely pointless hobby, but the evangelical zeal and camaraderie it generates is unique. Charlotte Mendelson is perhaps unusually passionate about it. For despite her superficially normal existence, despite the fact that she has only six square metres of grotty urban soil and a few pots, she has a secret life. She is an extreme gardener, an obsessive, an addict. And like all addicts, she wants to spread the joy. Her garden may look like a nasty drunk old man's mini-allotment, chaotic, virtually flowerless, with weird recycling and nowhere to sit. When honoured friends are shown it, they tend to laugh. However, it is actually a tiny jungle, a minuscule farm, a wildly uneconomical experiment in intensive edible cultivation, on which she grows a taste of perhaps a hundred kinds of delicious fruits and odd vegetables. It is a source of infinite happiness and deep peace. It looks completely bonkers. Arguably, it's the most expensive, time-consuming, undecorative and self-indulgent way to grow a salad ever invented, but when tired or sad or cross it never fails to delight.

A Globe and Mail 100 Best Book Finalist, Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction Finalist, City of Victoria Butler Book Prize A deeply affecting portrait of a long partnership and a clear-eyed account of the impact of a serious illness, writing as consolation, and the enduring significance of poetry from one of Canada's most celebrated voices. When we ran off together in 1978, abandoning our marriages and leaving wreckage in our wake, I was a "promising writer," Patrick had just won the Governor General's Award. I was so happy for him, and I've continued to be every time an honour comes his way, but I knew if I didn't grow, if I remained merely someone who showed potential, we wouldn't last. I swore I wouldn't play the dutiful wife, cheerleader, and muse of the great male writer, and he didn't envision a partner like that. We aspired to flourish together and thrive in words and books and gardens. When Lorna Crozier and Patrick Lane met at a poetry workshop in 1976, they had no idea that they would go on to write more than forty books between them, balancing their careers with their devotion to each other, and to their beloved cats, for decades. Then, in January 2017, their life together changed unexpectedly when Patrick became seriously ill. Despite tests and the opinions of many specialists, doctors remained baffled. There was no diagnosis and no effective treatment plan. The illness devastated them both. During this time, Lorna turned to her writing as a way of making sense of her grief and for consolation. She revisited her poems, tracing her own path as a poet along with the evolution of her relationship with Patrick. The result is an intimate and intensely moving memoir about the difficulties and joys of creating a life with someone and the risks and immense rewards of partnership. At once a spirited account of the past and a poignant reckoning with the present, it is, above all, an extraordinary and unforgettable love story. Told with unflinching honesty and fierce tenderness, Through the Garden is a candid, clear-eyed portrait of a long partnership and an acknowledgement, a tribute, and a gift.

A garden is a peaceful, beautiful sanctuary, but beneath its serene appearance is a seething hive of sex, violence, and treachery--among its flowers and insects, that is. Based on years of voyeuristic observation, Love in the Garden reveals intricate, humorous, and often horrifying intimate details about the frenzied sexual lives of garden flowers and insects. Written with a poetic fancy and with wit, and from a shamelessly anthropomorphic viewpoint, Love in the Garden delights in the ingenuity and variety of the sexual tactics of insects and flowers. The bee orchid, for instance, attracts male bees by duplicating the scent emitted by female bees during mating season. A gullible male arrives and searches excitedly for the non-existent female opening. Then, a second male arrives, mistakes the first male for a female, and, as they wrestle and wiggle furiously, the bee orchid is pollinated. In the realm of insects, sex is often accompanied with violence and in some cases, even cannibalism. Take the notorious female praying mantis: in the midst of the sexual act, she beheads her enraptured male partner, who carries on though headless, while she devours him bite by bite. Love in the Garden does not aim to enrich the scientific knowledge of its reader. Instead, it hopes to involve the reader, through sexuality and all forms of sensation, in the turbulence of life.

Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction Finalist for the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography “An exhilarating romp through Orwell’s life and times and also through the life and times of roses.” —Margaret Atwood “A captivating account of Orwell as gardener, lover, parent, and endlessly curious thinker.” —Claire Messud, Harper's “Nobody who reads it will ever think of Nineteen Eighty-Four in quite the same way.” —Vogue A lush exploration of politics, roses, and pleasure, and a fresh take on George Orwell as an avid gardener whose political writing was grounded by his passion for the natural world “In the spring of 1936, a writer planted roses.” So be-gins Rebecca Solnit’s new book, a reflection on George Orwell’s passionate gardening and the way that his involvement with plants, particularly flowers, illuminates his other commitments as a writer and antifascist, and on the intertwined politics of nature and power. Sparked by her unexpected encounter with the roses he reportedly planted in 1936, Solnit’s account of this overlooked aspect of Orwell’s life journeys through his writing and his actions—from going deep into the coal mines of England, fighting in the Spanish Civil War, critiquing Stalin when much of the international left still supported him (and then critiquing that left) to his analysis of the relationship between lies and authoritarianism. Through Solnit’s celebrated ability to draw unexpected connections, readers are drawn onward from Orwell‘s own work as a writer and gardener to encounter photographer Tina Modotti’s roses and her politics, agriculture and illusion in the USSR of his time with forcing lemons to grow in impossibly cold conditions, Orwell’s slave-owning ancestors in Jamaica, Jamaica Kincaid’s examination of colonialism and imperialism in the flower garden, and the brutal rose industry in Colombia that supplies the American market. The book draws to a close with a rereading of Nineteen Eighty-Four that completes Solnit’s portrait of a more hopeful Orwell, as well as offering a meditation on pleasure, beauty, and joy as acts of resistance.

Fight garden pests and increase your yields the natural way with this tried and true technique! Planting vegetables and flowers together is one of the oldest ways to create a healthy, bountiful garden; but there's more to the method than you might think. Vegetables Love Flowers walks you through the ins and outs of companion planting, from how it works to which plants go together and how to grow the best garden for your climate. Alongside gorgeous garden photography, you'll also learn about: Seed-starting, growing, and harvesting How to make garden flower bouquets, with "recipes" for various arrangements How to attract beneficial creatures to pollinate your garden and prey on its pests Pesticide-free pest-control measures Composting heaps and bins With the right information and some careful planning, you can help your plants thrive—and beautify your garden in the process.

It all began when Simon Griffiths decided that he and his whippet couldn't live in his tiny but gorgeous one-up one-down shopfront in Albert Park any more. He had a yearning for open spaces, country air and, most importantly, a garden of his own. On finding his cottage in Meadowbank, and trialling different plants, he gradually became part of the secret gardening network. The one where cuttings are exchanged between friends and planting successes and failures are recounted over neighbourhood fences. Simon is a brilliant photographer, bringing warmth and joy to all his subjects, but he is also a very knowledgeable plantsman. In this book he has captured his favourite 20 country-style gardens and shares the knowledge he has gleaned from fellow garden lovers.