Garden Varieties

Even before I opened Autobiography of a Garden, the title struck me as intriguing. A garden is writing its autobiography? Others have played with the notion of inanimate objects telling their stories. There’s Autobiography of a Face by Lucy Grealy, a survivor of disfiguring cancer; Autobiography of a Corpse, the wildly fantastic philosophical fable by the Russian writer Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky; and Eric Larsen’s provocative The Autobiography of an Apartment House, which begins, “If buildings could talk, what would they say?”

In Autobiography of a Garden, the plants don’t have a say. The book is a fairly straightforward story of the making of a garden called Glen Villa near North Hatley, in the Eastern Townships of Quebec. In 1996, Patterson Webster and her husband, the Canadian journalist Norman Webster, purchased back a property that had previously been in his family. The house that now graced the scene was modern and sprawling...