Six Square Metres: Reflections from a Small Garden

Australian journalist Simons (Resurrection in a Bucket) delivers a small but charming collection of her gardening columns. Some of her Aussie terminology is obscure (“chooks” are chickens; “quolls” are a kind of marsupial), but never her perspective on gardening. “Sometimes you reap what you sow. Sometimes you reap what other people sowed. Sometimes you haven’t got a clue... and you just get lucky,” she observes, then adds a fillip: “All these things are true of life, as of gardening.” Therein lies her charm: she may start by writing about her six square meters, but then she’s digressing about the links between gardening and life in general: about doing her taxes while boiling beef bones—“taking stock and making stock” or what her two main reporting beats, politics and gardening, have in common—“muckraking.” Despite claiming her book is not a how-to, she offers practical tips—generally translatable from one hemisphere to another (though American readers will have to keep in mind her seasons occur at different times of year, or they will be confused by a sentence placing April in late autumn). In the tradition of Germaine Greer, Vita Sackville-West, and Katharine S. White, Simons proves herself a modern doyenne of wry garden writing. (May)