The grass is greener when Alice is in the garden
‘A garden is a thing of beauty and a job forever’, writes Alice Taylor in a paraphrase of John Keats; her version indicates her lack of pretension as a gardener, so that she offers experience, rather than expertise, in her latest book.
The work ethic applies to small gardens, as it does to large ones; anyone who has ever planted a row of raspberry canes in the wrong place (and, to tell the truth, there are few right places for raspberry canes) and discovered the primeval forest, which arrives with spring and spreads its ebullient stems generously throughout the plot, can only smile grimly at the notion that the bench under the apple tree is intended for leisure moments.
