Garden daydreams

Grandma and Grandpa came to go out to Easter dinner with us and they brought this fabulous book from my childhood.

It is Gardens Through the Ages by Marcelle Verite published in 1963. I remember sitting and looking over it's pictures time and again. I was a child when black and white t.v. with one channel was the norm and the word Nintendo had never been spoken from any ones lips, so sitting and perusing a coffee table book did not seem an odd activity. This afternoon I had the chance to open the pages after probably 30 years since the last time I had closed them. Most of the words and all of the pictures were all familiar to me, I could feel myself sitting in the rocking chair at my parents house studying the pictures. The story starts in the garden of Eden and follows gardens and gardeners up through house plants and back yard gardens. Now that I have a more in depth view of history, thanks to our homeschooling, the book is more entertaining than when I was a child. While looking at it I wondered if my love of digging in the dirt started with this book. As I look through it I dream of our garden being planted in a seventeenth century maze pattern.


Of course, there would be no weeds, tulips and lilies would line the boarders, and the inside would be full of perfectly ripe tomatoes, peppers, and all the other goodies we plant. To make the garden even more romantic, it would have benches to lounge on with peacocks roaming up and down the rows and around the beautiful water fountain in the middle. We would have a garden that Claude Monet would want to paint and would give King Nebuchadnezzar a run for his gardening money.


I am going to leave the book laying around our living room and hopefully my children will open the pages and start their own garden dreams.