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The poet in naturalist Diane Ackerman invests her writing on the seasons with a lyrical grace, writes Harsh A. Desai Cultivating Delight:
A Natural History of My Garden
WE city dwellers—dwellers of the concrete jungle, pine for gardens and if we don’t often get to indulge ourselves, one can not help but get excited when the poet naturalist Diane Ackerman writes a book about her garden. Well, I may not often walk in a garden but surely I can read about one, is the sentiment. Ackerman is a naturalist who has written many books about nature, including her best selling A Natural History of the Senses. She is also a published poet and a good one at that. She tends to bring her skills as a poet—the active imagination and the power of description to nature writing. This book is structured like Antonio Vivaldi’s musical work Four Seasons and the book is divided into four parts i.e. Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter—an enticing proposition for a Bombayite where there are only two Seasons, summer and monsoon. She lives in Ithaca, New York near Cornell University—a very beautiful part of America but Ackerman is careful never to tell you the exact size of her garden. There are 120 rose bushes and a swimming pool on the ground and deer come to munch apples so it looks like a pretty substantial one. You feel all the excitement of spring coming and she has quoted a beautiful fragment from Robert Frost’s poem Two Tramps in Mudtime about the indecisiveness of April—a poem which seems so appropriate that I went back to it from time to time while reading. Ackerman is strongest when describing her garden—the various flowers, the roses, the peonies et al, the trees, the humming birds and the wrens, the deer and the raccoons and the joy of summer approaching when the garden is in full bloom. But soon enough the cicadas pipe out loud as Scottish infantry and a chill is in the air, summer is retreating and autumn is approaching. As summer was a season of flowers, autumn is a season of leaves—changing into yellows, browns and reds—almost like a new England autumn and is very beautiful and soon enough winter and snow have arrived. Winter is the weakest part of the book and Ackerman gets distracted from describing her garden in winter. She gives tantalising glimpses of a winter landscape—the footprints of animals and birds in the snow as also techniques that trees use to survive winter but unfortunately never develops them farther and goes into seemingly irrelevant asides such as the story of Gertrude Jeakyll a writer on gardens with a weak eye-sight. She is relevant to gardens in general but not to winter gardens. I distinctly got the feeling that Ackerman was struggling to find things to say about her garden in winter—a sad way to end a book which is so readable. |
