Cultivating Delight: A Natural History of My Garden

“Ackerman has done it again … one of the most buoyant and enjoyable garden reads … uplifting, intelligent.” — Boston Globe

In the mode of her bestseller A Natural History of the Senses, Diane Ackerman celebrates the sensory pleasures of her garden through the seasons.

Whether she is deadheading flowers or glorying in the profusion of roses, offering sugar water to a hummingbird or studying the slug, she welcomes the unexpected drama and extravagance as well as the sanctuary her garden offers.

Written in sensuous, lyrical prose, Cultivating Delight is a hymn to nature and to the pleasure we take in it.

In the mode of her esteemed bestseller A Natural History of the Senses, Diane Ackerman's new book, Cultivating Delight celebrates the sensory pleasures she discovers in her garden.

Ackerman delights in her garden through all the seasons. Whether she is deadheading flowers or glorying in the profusion of roses, offering sugar water to a hummingbird or studying the slug, she welcomes the unexpected drama and extravagance as well as the sanctuary her garden offers. She chronicles instances of violence in nature but also intuits loneliness and desire in the clamor of male crickets in the spring. And there is wonderment and marvel as she happens upon a tiny frog asleep inside the petals of a tulip. Visitors to her garden range from botanical explorers of earlier centuries to the nature mystic John Muir to the brilliant British garden writer Gertrude Jekyll.

The author's garden nourishes its creator, who imaginatively returns the favor and seizes privileged moments to leap from science and metaphor to meditation on the human condition. Written in sensuous, lyrical prose, Cultivating Delight is a hymn to nature and to the pleasure we take in it.

"Lyrical, knowledgeable and imaginative." - Booklist

“Diane Ackerman takes us down the garden path with a renewed sense of awe …[and] enlightened eyes.” - Los Angeles Times

“Ackerman’s rich prose is a bridge to a world of discovery.” - Nature

Understated elegance lush language, historical and scientific nuggets, artful digressions and apt quotations. Ackermans book reminds us that we too can make our paradise here and that tranquility can be achieved by contemplating the petals of a rose. - New York Times Book Review

“A fascinating tour of plant mythology and fact …[Ackerman] plays both sleuth and poet.” - People