Beautiful Madness: One Man's Journey Through Other Peoples' Gardens by James Dodson, Dutton Publishers, 2006

This is an enjoyable, chatty book that follows Dodson on his year of garden discovery. A must for the garden lovers.

Dodson lives in the north of Maine on a hillside where winters are very Canadian (subzero cold) and summer is at best seven weeks long. Apparently, he has tried to ignore that and build an English garden full of tender perennials – a true test of a garden masochist. Each summer he works in a frenzy trying to get everything as he would like it, spending hours and pots of money in the process, only to weep at the winter kill and proceed to envision new plantings the next summer.

His garden centre owner/friend suggested he take a year to be nosy in other people’s gardens and get a horticultural education, So he did, beginning with the Philadelphia Flower Show in March. His journalism skills and contacts brought him to Walt and Linda Fisher who force bulbs of all kinds over the winter to bloom all together in a great crescendo for the Show. From there it was a hop skip and a jump to other gardeners, other gardens and other shows, the famous Chelsea Flower Show being one of them.

One poignant chapter relates his visit to Sweet Alice Brown, an old friend of his mother’s. All her life she had loved her garden and her flowers, but was now in a nursing home suffering from slight dementia. Dodson remembers the riot of plants around her little blue cottage and offers to take her by to see it again. When they get there, he sees scrappy grass, a rusted Monte Carlo, sagging porches, and a chained yellow dog – nothing much left of the garden’s former glory. All that remains is two redbud trees. At her urging, he quickly digs one up (distracting the dog with the remains of his takeout milkshake) and they make a quick getaway.

This is a book for those who love to garden, and for those who love reading about gardens. Dodson has a conversational style that carries you along from page to page, garden to show to gardener to wonderful new discoveries. He invests himself in every scene and anecdote in such a way that you get to know who he is and the enthusiasm he brings to his investigations. His final story in the book is about visiting his mother’s house, long since sold to strangers, to spread her dog’s ashes. Great ending to a most enjoyable book.