This book and I did not get off to a good start. All I knew about it going in was that it was about magical gardening, a subject dear to my heart. I hoped to find a book about gardening as a practice of spiritual cultivation, or perhaps a book concerning plant lore, though I can imagine being just as pleased with, say, a survey of agrarian goddesses and their rites.
The gardening information in this book is fairly scanty, and for the most part derivative. The author does at least recommend buying a good book or two on gardening in order to get the basic information, and I would concur that such would be a much-needed supplemental text. (Telesco does not name any books in particular, but I would personally recommend Steve Solomon's Growing Vegetables West of the Cascades for the nitty-gritty of getting your own soil to bear fruit, Sylvia Thompson's The Kitchen Garden for a broad range of information on useful plants and the Seattle Tilth Pacific Northwest Maritime Gardening Handbook. But these are only a few among many good books on gardening.)
The mildest thing that can be said for Telesco's associations between plants and goddesses is that they are creative. Spurious might be more to the point. I am not so lacking in humor as to condemn linking Bast and catnip but... the rest of Telesco's list left me wondering how I could possibly have missed the greatly revered Native American goddess Demeter (at least, she must have been such from her plant associations) and at times spluttering at the obvious associations that were either mismatched or missed entirely, such as her omission of Athene's creation of the olive tree. (If I'm going to recommend other books, Roy Vickery's Dictionary of Plant Lore, while dealing only with British folklore, is excellent.)
Having written all of this, I must confess that by the time I finished reading this book, I found myself becoming fond of it.
Despite the book's many shortcomings, I was charmed by the author's attitude. I have read many books by better gardeners, and books with better magical information. But Telesco presents her material with a simplicity and sincerity that I can only admire. I did not feel that I was being harangued by someone who fancied herself an expert, but rather that I was invited into the garden of an eager and effective if perhaps not particularly well-read witch, led into her tool shed and asked to take whatever I thought I could use. This is a generous book.
The bulk of the book is taken up by suggestions for gardens dedicated to a number of goddesses. Each goddess is described briefly, in terms that, if a bit too pastel for my tastes, are fairly standard for books of this genre. Telesco goes out of her way to make it clear that she is providing material and inspiration rather than instructions, and for each goddess she provides a list of possible plants, ideas of garden patterns, shapes and design, uses for the harvest and lists of minerals that she deems beneficial. I am a bit dubious about her idea of "companion planting" with gemstones. I can't quite imagine spreading semiprecious stones throughout my garden in quite the manner she suggests. Perhaps for windowsill pots this might be appropriate.
In the end, gardening is itself a magical act. This is inherent. And for those of us who wish to take up the practice of gardening, we each need to do so for our reasons, find our own paths into the garden, our own inspiration. In the end, any criticisms I might have of this book are moot if it is the one that guides your hands into the earth. And I can imagine that it might be.
New Page Books, 2001; ISBN 1-56414-553-0