Inner Gardening

April 16, 2001
In this resolutely optimistic, self-help-meets-how-to manual, Dreher, author of The Tao of Inner Peace
and professor of Renaissance literature at Santa Clara University, offers a month-by-month guide to gardening as a spiritual pursuit, in which hands-on garden advice provides the grist for a metaphor-driven, checklist approach to "inner" growth and cultivation. (Notes on weeding the flowerbed meander into prescriptive musings on "weeding" the "unwelcome intruders" and "unproductive activities" from one's life.) Dreher neglects the ways in which gardening can itself be trying—requiring the gardener to stare down rot and death on a daily basis, placing physical strain on body, wallet and even land. More irritatingly, she takes a finger-wagging tone toward much of contemporary culture and offers wistful (and ahistorical) glances at the medieval and early modern world, which she idealizes as having allowed the "natural" and "simple" to flourish. Still, this book offers some delights: a cache of agreeable quotations, charming historical and literary anecdotes (Adam's naming of plants in Milton's Paradise Lost), useful instructions on such tasks as double-digging and tips on how to make a compost heap more productive (toss in a box of energetic earthworms). More successful on the firm terrain of practical counsel for the gardener and as a pastiche of garden trivia, this book falters when striving to offer guidance on self-transformation. (June)Forecast:Dreher's
Tao of Inner Peace sold more than 150,000 copies in trade paperback; this one has the potential to reach those readers as well as those who are seeking to cultivate their gardens as well as their souls.