Magical Garden

I love to garden. This is not something I grew up loving, in fact when I was young I would watch my mom garden but would never ever think of getting my hands dirty. Yet when my husband and I bought our house it came with a very nice little garden in the front of our house. This little garden started me on my gardening adventure and to my love of planting and growing flowers and vegetables. I started with one small garden and now I have expanded to have a garden on the side of my house and in my back yard. This year I have extended my backyard garden, I'm hoping to plant a bunch of sunflowers. One part of my garden that I'm constantly fighting is the morning glory plants that my neighbor planted on her side of the yard but have tried to take over the whole back garden. Each day I have to go out and pull the baby vines out before they begin to overtake the garden. This brings me to my first book review.
(The photo is of the morning glory vines that I'm constantly out in my garden digging up.)









The book is "GARDEN SPELLS" By Sarah Addison Allen. In this book the main character lives in a magical house with a garden that also has magical plants. The main plant is an apple tree that if you eat the apples you find out what the biggest event in your life will be. The owner uses the plants in her cooking, and has a catering business. One of the sections of the book that I liked was about the "ivy" in her garden and I quote: " tiny leaves of ivy were sprouting. Ivy in the garden. Overnight. The garden was saying that something was trying to get in, something that was pretty and looked harmless but would take over everything if given the chance." Pg. 35. I have read this book a couple of years ago and this spring when I saw the Ivy (morning glories) starting to grow in my garden, I remembered this book and had to borrow it from the Library. I love the idea of a magical garden, and being able to use plants in your cooking to get a desired result such as making a person think about the past, or think you are special. I also like the idea that the plants growing in your garden could be telling you something about your future. This book is fun to read. I have to warn those of my friends who read it that it does have some curse words, and it does have some explicit love scenes. It is interesting to read of the family dynamics and the ideas about magic. I am enjoying reading it for the second time.







Two children's books about gardens I picked up this week at my work and had to bring home and read are "THE ROSE IN MY GARDEN" by Arnold Lobel and "THE PUMPKIN MAN AND THE CRAFTY CREEPER" By Margaret Mahy.


The Rose In My Garden is a great book to share with young children who want to learn about gardens. It starts with one small illustration of a rose and each page more flowers are added. Each is beautifully illustrated. On the rose is a bee, and at the end of the book a cat chasing a mouse and the bee all clash for a very interesting ending.


The Pumpkin Man and the Crafty Creeper caught my attention because of the illustration of the crafty creeper which to me looks a lot like the morning glories that I'm trying to get rid of in my garden. It starts with a man who is walking home with a wheelbarrow of potting mix for his pumpkins. The crafty creeper then convinces him to take it home, and life becomes very complicated fast for the quiet pumpkin man. The owner of the Crafty creeper ends up saving the day by coming and retrieving her plant that she calls a weed. It is a very fun book to read. Although in looking for a link for it you may find it hard to find this book if your library does not have it.
Well I have done my first book reviews and tried to link them to sites about the books. I hope this all works. Here is another site to check out about Garden Spells, it is a book club site I came across, if you read the book you may want to answer the questions.http://www.readinggroupguides.com/guides_G/garden_spells1.asp
I hope to do my next review soon.