Vanished Gardens by Sharon White

Vanished Gardens by Sharon White

White gives a surprising portrait of the resilience and richness of the natural world in Philadelphia. In prose now as precise as the paths in a parterre, now as flowing and lyrical as an Olmsted vista, she explores the city's gardens as a part of its ecosystem and animates the lives of individual gardeners working there.

Vanished Gardens, like the gardens of Philadelphia it plots so brilliantly in its pages, presents itself as both highly formal and completely natural in its composition and its fruitionIt is a book that saturates space, horizontal and vertical, as well as exhausts time. As with all excellent gardens, everywhere one looks one is delighted, surprised, awed, and restored. And as with all excellent writing about landscape, Vanished Gardens transforms the world before our eyes so that the reader, held in its thrall, begins to see to see.

I know of no book about gardens that comes close to the beauty of Sharon White's Vanished Gardens. Her lyrical prose moves effortlessly through the centuries, through the stories and histories of people and flowers, of rivers and plants. Stunning work.

* author of The Hopes of Snakes & Other Tales from the Urban Landscape *

Sharon White mixes memory and desire in this multi-layered exploration of the archeology of the gardens of old Philadelphia. Evocative, historical, and sensual all at once, her book reveals the former diversity and richness that lies beneath the contemporary city; you can almost smell the storied vegetation of some of America’s most important, now lost gardens.

* author of The Paradise of All These Parts: A Natural History of Boston *

Vanished Gardens is an evocative walk through the Piedmont's intertwined human and natural history.

* author of Merle's Door: Lessons from a Freethinking Dog *

A thorough and thoughtful look at the evolution of Philadelphia gardens . . . The chronology of the growth and later descent of gardens in the city will charm all, especially residents. Overall, White's book is an insightful study in to the area's environmental history and the fascinating life of one of the city's most celebrated families.

[White] does a beautiful job with fostering a clipped, elliptical, oblique texture. Evocative, but never goopy.

* Live Journal *

About the city as garden, as 'wilderness just under the surface' . . . White lends her poet's eye to the landscape.

[A] lush, quiet, deeply observed and carefully researched book . . . [White] gets it, this new city of hers, and there is joy, a kind of raw sensual pleasure in her discovery.

* phillyskyline.com *

SHARON WHITE is the author of a collection of poetry, Bone House. Her memoir, Field Notes: A Geography of Mourning, received the Julia Ward Howe Prize, Honorable Mention, from the Boston Author's Club. Some of her other awards include a Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Fellowship for Creative Nonfiction, the Leeway Foundation Award for Achievement, a Colorado Council on the Arts Fellowship, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. Her poems, essays, and articles have appeared in many magazines and journals, including Isotope, House Beautiful,Appalachia, Kalliope, and North American Review. She teaches writing at Temple University in Philadelphia.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780820337821
ISBN 10	082033782X
Title	Vanished Gardens
Author	Sharon White
Series	The Sue William Silverman Prize For Creative Nonfiction
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	University of Georgia Press
Year published	2011-03-15
Number of pages	216
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.