The Southern Garden

By Southern Accents Magazine and Lydia Longshore

Book Overview

Southerners have always gardened with great style. The temperate climate of the American South allows the garden to serve as an extension of a home's interior. With patios, terraces, and pools, Southern homes frequently spill into outdoor living space. The long growing season provides ample opportunity to carve these areas and the surrounding landscape into beautiful gardens. From the vast estate gardens to the simplest potager supplying juicy tomatoes throughout the summer, the garden holds a place of supremacy in the Southern imagination.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0821227440
• ISBN13: 9780821227442
• Release Date: November 2001
• Publisher: Bulfinch Press
• Length: 187 Pages
• Weight: 2.80 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 9.3" x 11.5"

Customer Reviews

The Garden as A Life Metaphor

Lydia Longshore's, The Southern Garden, is not the typical pretty picture book about gardens. Although it is lavishly photographed, and written by a true garden lover and gardener, Longshore unflinchingly describes the breakup of her marriage and her attempts to "bring order and beauty to the bleakest of domestic moments."Her description of her childhood, her family, her own children, and her recovery after her divorce is haunting but without a trace of self pity.Longshore takes the idea of the garden and illustrates how much human life is truly part of the natural life: planting, growth, pruning, death -- all these events happen both in a garden and in one's life.As profound as any book of philosophy, as well as vastly informative, and lushly romantic.