Diane Ackerman

Understated elegance, lush language, historical and scientific nuggets, artful digressions and apt quotations....an enchanting book. If flowers could choose their keepers, I bet there’d be a queue for the spacious yard in Ithaca, N.Y., of which Cultivating Delight offers a tour. Ackerman’s attention to detail is as delicious as her voluptuous joy in contemplating the wax-candle luminosity of a magnolia’s petals. {She is} excellent company on every page, wearing her knowledge with enviable insouciance. Life, according to many religions, begins and ends in a garden. Reading Ackerman’s book reminds us that we too can make our paradise here and that tranquility can be achieved contemplating the petals of a rose.

In a generous and jauntily haphazard excursion through the four seasons of her Ithaca, N.Y., backyard landscape and the innumerable interests of her fertile mind, poet and naturalist Ackerman (A Natural History of the Senses; A Natural History of Love) reprises her role as an enchanting intellectual sensualist. Her extensive flower (and even weed) beds provide both subject matter and metaphor. More interested in what a great garden does for a person's spirit and soul than in how to make it grow, Ackerman buzzes productively from idea to revelation to insight, lighting on topics as diverse as how roses are reminiscent of dolls' faces; why we see faces in nature; how plants, animals and humans are alike; whether plants have motives and instincts; how flowers protect themselves from both heat, aridity and freezing cold; and why women are more prone to hypothermia than men in just five paragraphs. She celebrates the diversity of weeds, finds beauty in chaos and order, embraces trial and error as a way of learning and respects the inevitable cycle of birth, death and rebirth. Ackerman's breezy philosophical lyricism should flourish among both garden enthusiasts and fans of encyclopedic curiosity.

Ackerman’s joy is palpable and persuasive when she turns her gaze outward, lost in compassion, spiked through with awe, filled with admiration for the growth that passes through her hands and before her eyes.”.

Ackerman’s rich prose is a bridge to a world of discovery...{and} many tender moments in which the author taps the reader in the heart.

Prose so electric you can practically smell and touch her garden.