It confirms that I am not the only one who doesn't read these books, just enjoys the gorgeous photos. Although I love to read, I rarely have patience for the text in gardening books. There are several reasons:
1. Its a regurgitation of what is in EVERY garden book: Design (includes measuring, garden plan, site), Soil (hohum), planting (honestly how hard is that? could you write a whole chapter on it?), and finally the requisite plant list. All of this is very important, but how many times do you need to read it?
2. Sometimes, the book takes a different spin than the topics listed above, and then the problem is how do you describe something that is almost completely visual? It goes like this "a monochromatic combination allows the simple beauty of forms and textures to shine". (Yes, I can see that in the picture!) There is a certain value to putting these things into words, but there are only so many sentences such as the one above that one can tolerate. Here's my garden book ---A good edging plant allows the simple beauty of the composition of the the garden to shine...a repeating pattern of certain plants in a garden allows the simple beauty of the eye being drawn through the length of the garden...a pairing of complementary colors allows the individual colors to shine. At a certain point it all becomes blather which might be better suited to a list.
3. There is no story. Maybe I should write a book about the time the tree fell over on Kip as he was trying to move it into the hole in a lightning storm. Or getting the bobcat stuck in the mud. Well, actually maybe gardening isn't all that exciting.
I have so many gardening books - its a bit crazy. But if a publisher wants to get me to buy one - just make it all pictures, like the most recent one I bought -Gardens of New England. Each full page photo just has a sentence describing where it is and a garden credit. Thats the way to "write" a book.
No comments:
Post a Comment