Amazon Category:  Home & Garden Publisher: DreamTime Publishing ISBN-10:  160166012X Type: Non-Fiction Pages: 179 Copyright: March 1, 2008 ISBN-13: 9781601660121 A primer of possibilities on how to enhance the quality of your life through interaction with the living green world. Open Your Heart with Gardens looks at plants from a new angle -- that is, the many angles of approach to the living green world. From hobby to healing, as sanctuary or for sharing, for art, entertainment, and even survival, gardens help us nurture our unique natures. The narrative weaves together the author's experience plus stories from people around America revealing how plants bring peace; empowerment; joy; refreshment; and other positive feeling or purpose to life. Tips on gardening across environments show how to fit plants into most any lifestyle, integrating the physical and the spiritual into a balanced whole. Opening our hearts to gardens opens our minds to a larger world, which then opens new doors to opportunity and fulfillment. It all starts with gardens, just as gardens start from seeds. Excerpt Each year, it happens afresh: After months of brown and gray and white ... cold and hard and dark ... the day comes when I step outside and behold a tip of green protruding from the ground. The first daffodil! The sight of it drops me to my knees, mentally chanting, Thankyouthankyouthankyou! Then I leap up into The Happy Dance because there at my feet lies proof that the world has kept turning, the invisible forces of the universe have kept churning, and Mother Nature has again fulfilled her promise despite everything I doubted and feared. Thankyouthankyouthankyou! People who live in dry climates probably feel this way when the rains come, as do folks in gray and soggy places when the sun finally emerges. Me, I live in the mountains of northern New England, where snow can be on the ground from October through May, and every winter, for days -- sometimes weeks -- the temperatures can sit at double-digits below zero. The environment becomes a cruel antagonist. I can’t imagine how anything, much less a tender plant, survives. To me it’s a miracle when that first daffodil breaks through. The annual surge of joy and gratitude that accompanies it is what first opened my heart to gardens. It started, indeed, with daffodils. Inspired by their signal of spring rebirth, and cheered into summer by their happy yellow, I needed to ensure they came back; so I planted more in autumn. Hope for their survival carried me through winter. They rewarded me the following spring, year after year after year. Like sunshine incarnate, daffodils warmed my soul enough to want to share the glow with other people. I began planting bulbs every autumn wherever I lived, whether the landlord allowed gardens or not. Many times I changed dwellings so soon that I never saw whether the daffodils grew and blossomed. Knowing that they probably did -- and that I’d left behind a ray of sunshine -- let me move on without regret into the next chapter of my life. Eventually I came to rest at a home I could call my own, complete with somebody else’s left-behind garden: overgrown, in some places hidden, a relic of love begging to be revived. We moved in during the depth of winter, so that first spring was a bounty of discovery. And that first autumn I planted daffodil bulbs. The following spring, some of them blossomed. Ironically, here at my permanent residence, many of my daffodils have failed to return in subsequent years. Trying to figure out why, and how to build the swath of them I’ve always dreamed of, pulled me into the mysteries of plant lore -- doubly provoked by the daffodil clusters planted by the previous owner, which thrive in the shady bog where they’re not supposed to be able to grow. I never consciously decided to garden. Instead, my heart was captured by something elemental that led to a richness of experience I didn’t imagine yet sought in other places but never found. I guess I was predisposed to it, given that our suburban family home was the only one on the street without a rectangular, uniformly green front lawn. Instead, it was edged with a low stone wall containing a solid mass of myrtle, through which flagstones zigzagged to the front door. A Japanese maple arched as centerpiece, and random sparks of yellow, white, and purple crocus popped up each spring. Toward the end of the season, a flowering quince dropped gold orbs into the underbrush, while a wisteria that canopied the front porch dropped long, crunchy pods. Midsummer, we competed with the birds for blueberries in the backyard, and ate tomatoes that didn’t come from the store. All because my mother had opened her heart to gardens. She’s the one who gave me the poetry book that inclined my own heart to daffodils. I was nine, and it was a winter gift -- “Happy New Year,” she inscribed -- one of the first books of my own. Amid its delightful and poignant mix of verses was this classic: I wandered lonely as a cloud That floats on high o’er vales and hills, When all at once I saw a crowd— A host, of golden daffodils, Beside the lake, beneath the trees, Fluttering and dancing in the breeze. Continuous as the stars that shine And twinkle on the Milky Way, They stretched in never-ending line Along the margin of a bay; Ten thousand saw I, at a glance, Tossing their heads in sprightly dance. The waves beside them danced, but they Out-did the sparkling waves in glee; A poet could not but be gay In such a jocund company; I gazed and gazed—but little thought What wealth the show to me had brought. For oft, when on my couch I lie, In vacant or in pensive mood, They flash upon that inward eye Which is the bliss of solitude, And then my heart with pleasure fills, And dances with the daffodils. --William Wordsworth “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” (Poems in Two Volumes, 1807) In the decades since, I’ve found that while the sunrise gets me through each day, the daffodils get me through each year.

Midwest Reviews
Growing your own garden, raising the plants to maturity and then enjoying the spoils of your long, hard, arduous labors can create quite the sense of accomplishment in you - it can almost be explained as enlightening. "Open Your Heart with Gardens: Mastering Life Through Love of Plants" is here to help those who seek this sense of accomplishment and enlightenment achieve those very feelings using the hobby of gardening. Promoting tips on how you can benefit from gardens emotionally even if it isn't your own, the unusual quirks of gardening, and the other benefits the garden can promote for its' gardeners. "Open Your Heart with Gardens: Mastering Life Through Love of Plants" is highly recommended for both self-help and gardening community library collections, and for any amateur gardener hoping to get something intangible yet invaluable out of their gardens.