Table of Contents

Part One: Food for thought
Including interviews with Charles Jencks, Beth Chatto and Sir Roy Strong

Part Two: The Quiet Garden Movement
Including interviews with Metropolitan Kallistos Ware and Philip Roderick (Founder of the Quiet Garden movement), as well as visits to some Quiet Gardens

Part Three: Journey across cultures
Including a look at Baha'i, Islamic and Buddhist gardens, and the creation of the Interfaith Garden at the Chelsea Flower Show.

Bibliography

Promotional Information

Quiet Gardens is an exploration of horticulture as a medium for meaning and for spirituality.

About the Author

Susan Bowden-Pickstock has RHS qualifications in general horticulture, as well as an honours degree in Literature and Religious Studies. She designs gardens in her spare time, maintains an allotment and leads a contemplative spirituality group. She was until recently Faith and Ethics Producer for BBC Radio Cambridgeshire, producing a weekly faith programme and making radio documentaries.  

Reviews

Category Preview in The Bookseller, February 2009

Reviewed in Good Book Guide, 1 July 2009

Here is a manual not on weed­ing or mowing, but for listening and looking. We are to remember Can­dide's sane advice when, after en­dur­ing every kind of activity and its usually ghastly consequence, he says: "We must cultivate our garden" — in order, of course, to have some­where to do nothing in.  Quiet Gardens guides the reader through the contemplative plots of the world, and contains the confes­sions of, among others, Beth Chatto and Sir Roy Strong. Mrs Chatto is matter-of-fact: "My spirituality, such as it is, I find here in the living things, and even in the stones and the earth." Sir Roy is elegant. Garden writing has never been without contemplation, but here is an easy-to-understand entrance to it. It is a wise and delightful book, and it will help to restore your faith and to answer many questions. Adam, of course, did no work in Eden; it was only when he was turned out of the garden that he had to dig. Simplicity can flower in gardens, but not puritanism. They are places for the senses, for touch, for vision. Susan Bowden-Pickstock wants cathedrals, mosques, prisons, hospitals, parish churches, and univer­si­ties to give as much attention to providing Quiet Gardens as they do to providing car parks. And why not?
*Church Times*