Poems For Gardeners

Marianne Moore said that the poet’s job was to depict “imaginary gardens with real toads in them”. In truth, gardens are always imaginary because they are always the garden that you are aiming for rather than the garden you have, but the toads are real and immediate.’ So says Germaine Greer in this wonderful anthology. A collection of poems culled from all periods, ranging from Roman to Mediaeval poetry, and including the best known paean, Marvell’s ‘The Garden’, Tennyson’s comic ‘Amphion’, and Donne’s meditations on individual flowers, herbs and trees, this is a book of beautiful texts and intriguing information that can be read along with the seed catalogues in the dead of winter, or in the gaps between tasks on a busy day in spring, or between snoozes in the hammock in the deep midsummer.