America’s Dirty Secret - Where does our passion for dirt come from?
Beautiful Madness: One Man’s Journey Through Other People’s Gardens, by James Dodson is this springs book for the passionate gardener. Although we may not really understand where Americans seem to get this passion for soil, flowers vegetables, landscaping and so on, James Dodson seems to have figured it out.
James Dodson, is an award winning golf writer and editor, who only writes about things that he loves, and after a whole year of research and travel around the United States, Britain and South Africa, he comes home with stories that tell more than just history, but what universally calls all of us gardening fans to the dirt.
When men prefer to look at their gardening magazines rather than their wives Victoria Secret catalogue, gardening takes on a new meaning that is totally contrary to most of the literature in the area. We tend to think of gardening writers as those people that have a very dry Zen style or a very soft Yin harmony that resonates in spring time when we all want to get out there and get ourselves dirty.
Beautiful Madness however by James Dodson is very different and brings a real Yang adventurous notion to the whole area; which is quite refreshing after piles of FengShui and sustainable vegetable gardening books have begun overflowing on our desks in the study.
Dodson begins the book with a clear notion of his own reasons for getting interested in gardening and how his love for a family Beech Tree took him all the way to the Philadelphia flower show and from there on a quest that would take him to Britain and even South Africa, while discovering a study course for the Master Gardener along the way.
The book journeys through the humor, excitement and basic passion that consumes gardeners around the world. His experience is that all gardeners are wonderful people who just want to show off how they have taken nature and created something extravagant. And each gardener he encounters takes him to another, and then another, along a path that he believes really is the only way to become a Master Gardener, by learning from the very best.
Beautiful Madness is the perfect book for those who have read everything about gardening and are looking for a book that is almost like a movie in words, filled with stories and adventures that tell it like it is.
Dodson uncovers the mystery of why New England gardeners are so obsessed with some of the most difficult places to do gardening in the world, that goes all the way back to Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin and even the first Botany Shop some 20 years before the American Revolutionary war.
America is on the brink of a new hobby that consumes more and more people every day. Gardening. In Britain the common blue collar citizens have been obsessed with gardening for decades, while the whole competitive art has been around since before Charles Darwins expedition across the New World.
The South African species that enchant with tropical temperatures were even some of the favorites of famous American Presidents as John Adams. All this and more goes into this revolutionary book of Americas secret passion for dirt and the garden.
Sometimes this secret passion was even taken to the point of smuggling sunflower seeds from Italy on pain of death. It turns out that Jefferson himself once did this in fact. New Hampshire seems to have had an important role in our forefathers little dirty secret and its all here in Beautiful Madness: One Man’s Journey Through Other People’s Gardens by James Dodson.
