Drawing on the experience of designing her own garden, Mirabel Osler gives us a multitude of horticultural reflections, describing with an imaginative touch and a dry humour rarely found in gardening writing, how her garden evolved and how, without meaning to, it took over her life. She muses on many themes, principally her gentle plea for chaos - a move away from the planning ad regimentation of gardening with the mentality of a stamp-collector. She writes about the alchemy of gardens, nineteenth-century plant collectors and plant illustrators and of the gardening philosophers all fertilising great thoughts along with their hollyhocks.
