Oh Garden of Fresh Possibilities!: Notes from a Gloucester Garden Book

Kim Smith makes a living as a professional decorator, but her real passion is her garden, a small and densely packed quarter acre beside her Gloucester seaside home, into which she has crammed nearly every species imaginable and a few (like apricots) that most of us would consider unimaginable. We are not going to claim that this is a book for all gardens and gardeners, but its twenty-two chapters really cover an immense amount of ground—all centered on the 5-6 coastal zones that cover most of the Eastern Seaboard from Georgia to Maine, while taking into account the expected vagaries of New England weather.

This is a book that should appeal equally to serious gardeners interested in the specifics of varieties and cultivars that thrive in coastal zones and garden designers who want to learn more about what lives best where. For Smith is wise in not writing merely about the plants, shrubs, and trees and their cultivation; this is a book as much about mood—about how to design and visualize a small garden—as it is about what varieties and cultivars to buy. Eclectic in its approach, incorporating quotations and citations from Eastern as well as Western sources, she challenges with the eye of an artist, but also with the down-and-dirty experience of someone wrestling with a small space, limited sunshine, the usual encroachments of blight, bugs, beasts, and the particular New England challenges of a relatively brief growing season and mediocre soil.

Illustrated in full color with her own drawings, this is a book that should recommend itself to anyone who gardens in the coastal zones of the eastern United States. What Smith suggests has been tried and tested, and what sheproposes is both sensible and sensitive.