Digitalriftlegion

Every so often I like to read something that's completely outside my competence zone -- after all, it's the best way to learn something new. With this in mind, I'm reading The Education of a Gardener by Russell Page, originally published in 1962 and brought back into print in 2007 by NYRB Classics. Page (1906-1985) was a world-class garden designer with a career spanning nearly six decades, and in this book, he embarks on a sort of mental tour of the gardens that struck him as particularly lovely and/or well-adapted to their settings. It's beautifully written, with an astonishing eye for detail (Page originally trained as a painter), and above all, it's relaxed -- a word I mean as high praise. So much of life now revolves around a deluge of information, with sensory assaults ever increasing and attention spans ever shortening. To indulge in a book like this one, whose pace is set solely by the rhythms of the natural world, makes for an escape of the very best kind.