A Little Light Weeding Evergreen Reading for the Perennial Gardener by Richard Briers

I had picked up various books, a wednesday morning of a lot of months ago at the book store of Books for Dogs, located in Umbertide, when I decided to search also for something in the garden's section. I didn't have the pale idea of what I was searching about. 

I live in a countryside, so we do garden, we plant flowers, veggies, fruits trees, I know some guidelines or I try. I mean: I know something of this stuff. 

I have various books for the perfect garden; I was fine under many ways.

But I know very well something: that seeing a garden with the eyes of Britons is an occasion that you can't miss.

So I started to look at the various titles.

Close to the most classic books on gardening I spotted this one:

• A Little Light Weeding Evergreen Reading for the Perennial Gardener by Richard Briers. When I opened it, it was like to enter in a romantic, dreaming, poetic place. Briers was an actor, but he developed soon passion for gardening and then he puts his experience at the service of other people, other passionate but also new gardeners without too much experience and searching for information, creating this rare gem of beauty. 

In his book garden whispers thanks to citations, quotes, lines, rhyms, poems of the most important english writers, in every chapter, and the garden is not analyzed as a: plant this, plant that. This book is not divided in bush, flowers, perennial, annual, etc. Forget it. 

The garden is lived like a song, the most beautiful one, a whole where everyone play its own special part. So a chapter will be dedicated to bees, another one to bats; cuckoos brought to my memories the rhym we always chant to him; hearing the cuckoo in Italy is something exciting. When my dad became too deaf for hearing the cuckoo and his chant,  he was sorry. He loved to hearing it.

A chapter will help you to define and design your own garden, but also drinking in the garden; enjoying the garden under all the possibilities, in particular if you have a big, wonderful diversified garden where you can see blooming everyday new flowers or plants.

Herbs, insects, manure, parties, more than a real garden book this one is a celebration of gardening passing through literature, poetry. That's why, to me when you will finish to read it, or the portions that interest you at the moment, you will become a wonderful gardener: because you have learnt thanks to the words of Briers and old wise men of the past the beauty of nature and all the gifts it bring us in a daily base. Also: as a gentle soul can re-create Heaven on Earth.

Highly recommended.

Anna Maria Polidori