Growing Myself:A Spiritual Journey Through Gardening Handelsman, Judith and Handlesman,Judith

From Booklist Handelsman writes about the deep levels of love and connection with plants--the healing power of "inner gardening." In her travels from Brazil to Scotland, Handelsman has explored this holistic approach to gardening, which stresses the role of the gardener as a nurturing figure. If you apply an inner perspective to gardening, she believes that you can add a new dimension to garden tasks, such as watering, pruning, transplanting, and feeding. She notes that plants as living beings need the same things we do: food, air, water, and love. Handelsman surely takes the concept of talking to your plants to the extreme and assures gardeners that the dividends are ample for both them and their flowers. George Cohen Product Description The author of Tender Loving Care for Plants presents a holistic approach to gardening and self-knowledge, emphasizing the gardener as nurturing figure rather than manipulator, and explores ancient and current teachings about the relationships between plants and people. 35,000 first printing. From Publishers Weekly whole Gardening Gardening as work and play and as an activity that involves the soul are topics considered in Zen Gardening: a Down-to-Earth Philosophy by Veronica Ray. In essays that are refreshingly free of prescription or how-to advice, Ray captures the essence of gardening as a restorative, instructive process that offers more valuable rewards than just the anticipated harvest. Addressing an outdoor statue of St. Francis of Asissi as "Frank" and calling for gardeners to work with?rather than in?their plots of earth, Ray reminds us of the joys as well as the demands of gardening. (Berkley, $10 192p ISBN 0-425-15299-5; June) In Growing Myself: A Spiritual Journey through Gardening, Judith Handelsman draws on her personal experience with growing things to offer advice to others. Notable here is her conviction that the gardener can?and should?communicate with plants to establish a nurturing bond that will facilitate their mutual growth. The book includes accounts of the author's travels and environmental tips, e.g., philodendrons can reduce the amount of formaldehyde in the air. (Dutton, $21.95 192p ISBN 0-525-94057-X; June) Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Kirkus Reviews New Age hokum meets true perception in this work of horticultural confession and counsel. ``Inner gardening is about thinking for yourself, being yourself, and then watching the results flower around you.'' Handelsman, onetime gardening columnist for New Age Journal and Vogue, finds in plant life a dependable source of human spiritual renewal. For her, gardening is an introspective pleasure that doubles as a metaphor for our own survival. In this collection of linked essays about her coming of age as a gardener and as a woman, the metaphor can be strikingly persuasive when the writer decides to tell revelatory personal stories. For instance, her account of watching a 100-year-old cottonwood tree, ``like a living green Sphinx,'' be felled near her home in Bishop, Calif., conveys the horror of gratuitous slaughter and helpless mortality with a disarming power. But when Handelsman writes in more general terms about gardening's virtues, she sometimes makes herself ridiculous. This devout member of the Prince Charles school of plant relations- -i.e., talk to 'em--advises us: ``Ask the plant to help you'' and ``Thank your plants whenever you can.'' She believes that ``plants provide unconditional love,'' and she needs them to. So when beneficially predatory praying mantises turned up to patrol her cosmos flowers, she ``blew them kisses and billed and cooed.'' Sentimentality set loose in a yard can seem deranged, no matter how good the cause. Some unusual insights are mixed in here with utter daftness. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.