Read by Michael Flamel
Dear Gardener,
Gardening, at its most basic, is the act of coaxing life from the earth. You dig, you plant, you water, you wait. Straightforward enough. But anyone who has ever actually tried it knows that gardening is not merely a tidy hobby of sowing and reaping. Rather, gardening is like a long-running improvisational play—equal parts comedy, tragedy, history, and farce—one in which the gardener holds the dual roles of stage manager and bewildered understudy. Sometimes you find yourself cast as the noble cultivator of beauty, other times as the hapless custodian of weeds. If you’re lucky, you might even get a hummingbird to appear in your production, though you’ll have no control over its entrance or exit.
Welcome to the Green Perspectives Story Collection of very unique gardening stories by Diana Wells!
A long-time contributor to GreenPrints, Diana has given us story after story that blends botanical fact with personal anecdote, literary reference with earthy detail, and often, just enough mischief to make you realize that gardening is never quite what you expect. This Collection gathers many of her most memorable tales, each one a reminder that plants, people, and the peculiarities of both are forever entangled.
What makes Diana’s stories so appealing is that they rarely stop at being simply about plants. Tomatoes, roses, carrots, poinsettias—these are not just crops or blooms in her telling, but doorways into memory, culture, and humor. A single fallen apple can lead her to reflect on loss, patience, or simply the passage of time. A greenhouse pane becomes a stage curtain, separating us from the dramas of history and the stubbornness of ivy. Even the most unassuming carrot suddenly carries the weight of human health, myth, and misunderstanding. Diana’s writing is both deeply personal and delightfully universal.
Take her story, “Boys, Poinsettias, and Tomatoes.” This is not merely about three horticultural items (though that combination would make for a rather lively recipe). Instead, it’s about the entanglements of family and garden, the ways in which plants tie themselves to our memories of people we’ve loved—or, in some cases, barely tolerated. The poinsettias and tomatoes here are less horticultural specimens than characters, stubbornly reminding us of the boys associated with them. In Diana’s hands, the line between garden bed and memory lane just doesn’t exist.
In “Elisabeth Woodburn,” Diana turns her attention to one of the great figures in the world of garden literature and book collecting. Here, the story is both tribute and excavation—a gardener’s way of keeping alive the memory of another gardener who shaped how we think about the very act of keeping records. Diana has a gift for writing about others with the same intimacy and curiosity she applies to plants, making them bloom again for us, long after their earthly season has ended.
Of course, no Diana Wells collection would be complete without the occasional embrace of the odd or the macabre. “Daughter of Beauty, Lover of Flies” is exactly what it sounds like—a tale that reminds us that gardeners must often accept the unsavory alongside the lovely. Beauty in the garden is never without its quirks, and sometimes, as with flies, downright nuisances. And yet, Diana manages to draw from this subject not disgust but intrigue, weaving together natural history and sly humor in a way that makes even the most buzzing of companions seem worthy of reflection.
What is striking across these pieces is Diana’s ability to link the botanical to the historical, the personal to the cultural. In “Plants Behind Glass,” she traces the way humans have long tried to contain and control the plant kingdom, bending nature to architecture. The greenhouse is not just a shelter for plants but a monument to human vanity, curiosity, and occasional folly. Meanwhile, in “Carrots: The Root of Health,” she turns a humble vegetable into a protagonist of medical theories, folk remedies, and nutritional debates. Suddenly, your side dish of steamed carrots carries centuries of argument and anecdote on its orange shoulders.
At her most playful, Diana explores the intersection of plants and human vanity. “Horticulture Haute Couture” is a romp through the ways fashion and flowers intersect, and how gardeners, like designers, have always been prone to excess. “Are Gardeners Good?” poses the sort of philosophical question only a gardener would dare ask, and answers it with equal measures of sincerity and tongue-in-cheek humor.
Altogether, this collection is not simply a set of garden stories. It’s a portrait of gardening itself, seen through the keen eye and dry wit of a writer who knows that the act of cultivating plants is inseparable from cultivating perspective. Diana Wells gives us history without pomposity, personal reflection without self-indulgence, and humor without ever slipping into farce.
Gardening, in her telling, is not merely about growing things. It is about living among them, with all the unpredictability, absurdity, and beauty that entails. It’s about finding joy in hummingbirds and flies, lessons in carrots and apples, meaning in roses and glasshouses. Most of all, it is about recognizing that plants and people are forever entwined—and that the stories we tell about them reveal as much about us as they do about our gardens.
So, dear reader, prepare yourself for a journey. Within these pages you’ll find boys and poinsettias, roses and ghosts, hummingbirds and haute couture. You’ll find yourself reflecting on courage, dye, chores, vines, and flies. You will laugh, you may sigh, and you might even feel the urge to go out and plant something—though, if Diana has taught us anything, it will not turn out exactly as you planned.
And that, of course, is the point.
Happy reading,
Bill Dugan
Editor & Publisher
GreenPrints
