Libraries, Gardens and Arabian Nights

I have always thought of gardens as libraries — housing genetic material to be read and recombined. Cameron Smith in the Toronto Star (June 14, 2003) in "The army in our gardens" makes a similar point.

A garden, then is a storybook of life. You can read as much, or as little, as you like. It is so full of stories, you will never come to the end. And, as in The Arabian Nights, each story so fascinates, you end up longing for the next one.

Smith goes on to review a book. A Breath of Fresh Air: Celebrating Nature and School Gardens by Elise Houghton with photographs by Robert Christie. He writes:

The book has 129 colour photographs of ponds, gardens, rehabilitated areas, and — the ones I like the most — of children, and their expressions of wonder.

If I can't find the book in my local library, I might settle for a World Wide Web search for "children AND gardens".

And so for day 659
02.10.2008