Author Hits the Dirt

Novelist and memoirist Merilyn Simonds (The Holding, The Convict Lover) has announced a new gardening-dedicated blog, Frugalista Gardener.

To be honest, yet another author starting yet another blog wouldn’t be such big news… except not only is the writing luminous (of course), Frugalista Gardener genuinely adds to the panoply of gardening blogs. Put another way, if you love beautiful writing or if you love gardening, you will likely find something worthwhile here. If you love both, you’ll be bookmarking in haste.

Meanwhile, a taste:

What is it, this urge to dig, to peel back the earth’s skin and sink my fingers into moist soil, to manipulate what grows there of its own accord?

It is not a simple thing.

We arrived at The Leaf in the spring of the Millenium. Fifteen acres of woods with a strip of mown meadow around the house, along the road. From the kitchen, looking west to the two-hundred-year-old boundary fence of split rails, there was only grass, a bank of cedars dividing the space roughly in half, an apple tree off-centre in the nearer distance.

I saw a room. A banquette of flowers around the apple trunk. A shrubbery to wall off the road; a rise of perennials on the other side. At the far end, a border of Rosa rugosa broken by two soaring limes, a pillared portal to the allée that led over and up into the woods.

Frugalista Gardener is here. January Magazine’s 1999 interview with Simonds is here.