In a love letter to the art of gardening, illustrated throughout with her beautiful watercolors, Virginia Johnson chronicles a decade-long adventure in transforming a narrow, rubble-filled city backyard into a lush and soulful oasis-a place to nourish the spirit, delight the eye, express the seasons and rhythms of nature, and invite solitude and easy socializing in equal measure. She also tells how she did it: How to think about scale and proportion, how to use the genius of trees to build the bones of a garden (her heroes are horn-beams), how to create a personal palette of flowers and colors. Above all, how to understand that a garden is, joyously, forever a work in progress, and that it can be anything you want it to be as long as it has heart. Which it will, if you approach your days of gardening with love and curiosity. Book jacket.