Bookmark: Reading about other people's gardens tides us over until we can plant our own

It's mid-February, nearly time for me to turn my dining room into a potting shed.

I did this last year, too — with COVID-19 raging, we knew we weren't going to have company anytime soon. So in early March my husband and I shoved the dining room table over to the windows, laid down a thick plastic mat covered by newspapers, set out rows of tiny paper pots, and planted seeds.

It was heavenly to walk into the dining room on a snowy day and smell fresh dirt.

Some of the tiny Mexican sunflower seeds that we planted then didn't just sprout; once transplanted in the yard, they grew more than 8 feet high, crazy with orange flowers and a stem as sturdy as a trunk.

At the moment, it's a little too early for me to start seeds, so instead I'll make do by reading about other people's gardens.

In Kiltumper, by Niall Williams with Christine Breen

This joint memoir by a married couple recounts one year in the life of their garden in the far west of Ireland. It's a fraught year — with noisy, mammoth wind turbines being installed right outside their kitchen window, necessitating the removal of many trees and the destruction of an ancient stone wall, and with Christine battling cancer. But through it all, the garden remains their serene place, with the "delicious green stillness" in January, the return of the swallows in May, and the harvest of spinach, peas and shallots in the fall.

Part history, part memoir, part literary examination, Lively's book recalls gardens in her youth (in Cairo), in art (Manet and Monet) and in literature (she is unhappy that Proust doesn't name the plants in "Remembrance of Things Past" — while his famous cookie brought to mind "all the flowers in our garden," she scolds, "You would like some naming of names").

Gardening in literature, she notes, always means something else; gardening in life, however, is purely an act of optimism. "We are always gardening for a future," she notes. "We are supposing, assuming, a future." Gardening, she says, "corrals time, pinning it to the seasons, to the gardening year, by summoning up the garden in the past, the garden to come."

The Jewel Garden, by Monty and Sarah Don

You might know Monty Don as the soothing gardener who hosts the BBC TV show "Gardeners World," but he is also the author of more than a dozen books. "The Jewel Garden" is his memoir of how gardening sustained him after he and his wife lost everything. The pair had been living the high life in London with Sarah's jewelry-design business when the crash of the 1980s ruined them.

Broke, living in Sarah's mother's spare room, deeply depressed, Monty went on the dole. Eventually he got some writing work, and a little work with the BBC. He and Sarah rented a rat-infested farmhouse and began to garden. "I always come back to this visceral need to scrape a hollow in the ground," he writes. "It has to do with the literal earth. ... Earth heals me better than any medicine."

I think back to last March, our dining room rich with the smell of dirt, the table covered with pots and slumped bags of compost, and I cannot wait to begin.