For Southern Californians, January is not the best time to read about gardening. We should be out in the yard, getting the last of our fall plantings in before the big, theoretical rains come in February.
To read about gardening -- in Canada, of all places -- is a bit of an indulgence.
And yet, Liz Primeau's "My Natural History: The Evolution of a Gardener" is a forthright and simple account of a nice lady who has spent her life tilling the soil north of the 49th Parallel. Along the way, she also has dug up personal salvation, and a career.
Born in Winnipeg, Primeau spent her formative years pulling weeds in her father's prized World War II victory garden. "He soon had me weeding the rows of vegetables in his twenty-by-twenty foot plot," she writes, "and generously allowed me to be the picker for dinner."
When she wasn't tending to her father's vegetables, Primeau was out on the prairies with her friends. As she remembers: "We weren't far from home, but these trips were like going on safari, an adventure with no adults around to ask us to help with the dishes or tidy our rooms."
Primeau's father died when she was 14, and her family moved to her grandmother's farm in Southern Ontario. There, she found a new gardening mentor in her Uncle Ren. A masterful gardener with a weakness for flowers, his cuttings live to this day in her yard.
After moving to Toronto as a young woman, Primeau endured a perfect storm of a bad marriage. Postpartum depression and 1950s-era repression plunged her into agoraphobia and debilitating panic attacks.
But while Primeau is frank about this period, she's not particularly probing, and clearly didn't read her Betty Friedan.
"I've wondered many times," she muses, "whether my need for individuality and control of my own space, combined with the fenced-in life I was leading as a round-the-clock mother and wife isolated in the 'burbs, contributed to my emotional state." One senses she is being polite, even a bit fusty, in her dogged pursuit of practical matters rather than emotional nuance.
As before, Primeau turned to her garden in these difficult times, and again found solace in the earth. She left her husband and began to work in journalism, which aligned with gardening when she became the editor of Canadian Gardening magazine, and then the host of Canadian Gardening Television on HGTV.
