Now for the first time in English, one of the world's best-loved garden writers explores the connections between the life of the garden and the life of the mind. In this omnibus volume that ranges from discussing why gardeners should grow bad-smelling plants to how readers should eat their flowers, Jürgen Dahl identifies curiosity and patience as the gardener's chief virtues. What matters most to Jürgen Dahl is that a garden is not a sterile copy of a picture in a book, or a beautiful "triumph" that lacks all experimentation and wonder. In Jürgen Dahl's garden, things do not "work," but instead they happen --- or maybe they do not. Many things that please, surprise, or disappoint a gardener do so because the garden's living creatures can only rarely be tricked into obeying the gardener's will; in their own quiet but unyielding way, they follow their own laws. Jürgen Dahl's stories are wise and cheerful, and full of opinions and premonitions, all told with the insatiable curiosity of the true explorer.

Jurgen Dahl (1929-2001) was a bookseller until he sold his bookshop to write and garden

There is a garden sprinkler that shoots off to one side like a rocket when one turns on the tap. It gets stopped short by the hosepipe, twitches around a few times, and then remains flat on the ground on two of its legs, pointing its third one into the air. It is unbelievable what havoc such a twitching sprinkler can wreak in only a few seconds. Its ergonomically wonderful but otherwise rather fragile adjustment has broken off. One could perhaps order another one, but one must first think up and construct a counterweight to keep the thing in place for the future. And, as soon as it has been built and installed, one of the legs snaps off as though it were made of very thin plastic - which indeed it is. No doubt qualified engineers, ergonomists, designers, and marketing experts have worked on this sprinkler, and perhaps it has even been tried out on the testing ground of - well, no names! A simple gardener does not know anything about ergonomics and design and marketing, but he does notice whether a thing works or not. So his awe at what engineers and ergonomists and designers and marketing experts do is always mixed with a dose of skepticism. Does this thing do what it is supposed to do? Is it supposed to do what it does? There are many things to marvel at besides sprinklers with rocket effects. Above all, there are motorized things. An electric lawnmower with a box for the grass, seven levels of depth adjustments, and a soft-lifting mechanism is one of the cheaper offerings. At the other end of the range, one can find a remote-controlled lawnmower by an Italian tractor company that does 2.6 kilometers per hour and can mow 1200 square meters of lawn per hour. Even on slopes. Thus the transition between gardening implements and cars is not clearly delineated. There are many lawnmowers that could be used equally well for driving one's children to school. And there are edge cutters that sound like secondhand cars. And if one is annoyed about the fact that it is now illegal to saw off one's exhaust pipe, a shredder will more than compensate for any enjoyment one feels one has lost. Strangely enough, the motorization of gardening is inversely proportional to the decrease in the average size of building plots. The smaller the gardens became, the more motorized the kit. An explanation for this may be that people's lawn mowing is a kind of displacement behavior for driving, without traffic jams and oncoming traffic, or maybe people can only bear to look after a garden if it at least sounds as though they are really driving. Taken to extremes, the garden itself is regarded as a type of car. For a long time now, the equivalent of the car-washing ritual, usually carried out on Saturday mornings, has been the lawn-mowing ritual, undertaken on Saturday afternoons. In some areas, people mow on Friday evenings while their children are being bathed, and one can readily see that cleanliness is the strongest connection between gardens and cars. The process of irrigating one's garden with drinking water can be mostly automated, with moisture sensors and sprinklers that push themselves out of the soil when needed just as intercontinental rockets push themselves out of their silos. However, there is inexplicably a gaping hole in the range of products available. The empty space falls between fully automated irrigation systems on the one hand and those mangy sprinklers and their stands that one has to weigh down with stones to stop them dancing around on the other. There is no middle ground, not even some kind of tripod that can lift the legs of some sprinklers high enough to make them rain on the whole garden, as the manual promises us they will. And, speaking of water, we are still lacking a watering can that we can leave outside without our eyes being offended by the most vile shades of green. It can be made of plastic, because of the weight, but why is it never made of that