A fine collection by a master photographer.

Few artificial creations can equal the joy of a beautiful garden. And while Americans, as a whole, care little for lovely gardens – witness the bare minimum handkerchief of grass and a few tired drought resistant plants so common here – Sam Abell shows that beauty is to be found if you look, and Abell has been doing that with an expert’s eye for decades. And you don’t get published regularly in National Geographic for nothing.

I find the Japanese approach, which sees the garden as a thing of spiritual beauty, much preferable to the America minimum cost/dress-it-for-sale version. Or, for that matter, brown lawns decorated with beer cans in all those tract homes and subdivisions bought and lost by fraudsters, whom we will all be bailing out these next few years.

At last count my garden of some two acres had four lawns, three olive trees and some fifty other trees, both fruit bearing and decorative, and while I work mightily to keep it looking just so, it cannot compare to even the worst picture in this fine book.

If you like lovely gardens and landscapes beautifully rendered, with a serious hint of Eliot Porter thrown in, you will like this book. At $5.95 mine is a Depression Era special, rivaling the cost of a Big Mac and fries with none of the health implications. (Disclosure: I am long MacDonald’s stock – they may serve poisonous garbage but health and morality have nothing to do with stock selection).