Bonnie Marranca: Daydreams in the Garden
This botanical history post was featured on The Daily Gardener podcast:
April 28, 1947
On this day, Bonnie Marranca—critic, publisher, and writer—was born.
In American Garden Writing (1988), she measures a garden by the love that tends it and the daydreams that live there.
“I judge a garden by the gardener who cares for it, the one who invests space with daydreams.”
“How well I know the downward gaze into the face of the earth, the feeling of a luxurious body and good, dark soil that slips through the fingers in the rush to return to its dirty delirium.”
“Each gardener creates an ideal world of miniature thoughts that drift languidly into each other like flowers on a dry afternoon. Here silence has the rhythm of wishes.”B
Bonnie's work reads like the gardener’s creed: tenderness as policy, silence as a vote for bloom.
If you’ve ever looked up from weeding and felt time behave, you’ve met Marranca on the path.
Find the book here: American Garden Writing
