Amy Goldman

A remarkable book in concept: the sheer devotion it took to plan, establish, and grow the garden (on the part of the author/garden owner) and take the photographs, requiring years of effort and even more years of experience and historical knowledge (on the part of the photographer) is breathtaking. The publishers made some really good decisions in book design. One subtle but effective choice was to print the photographs with an extra-glossy covering on the photograph part (alone) of the already-glossy page. There is probably no practicable way to reproduce the metallic, reflective quality of an actual daguerrotype, but this is a good attempt at conveying something of the same effect. On the other hand, a design decision that I found baffling was to print all the text pages in black on a white page with closely spaced diagonal grey stripes. Perhaps it was an attempt to make the pages less high-contrast, but I found that the muted colour of the page meant that the page was too dim to read without increasing the light level to the point that the stripes caused their own kind of reading difficulty. I feel sorry that after my library went to the trouble of borrowing this book all the way from Ottawa for me, I can't manage to do much more than look at the beautiful pictures. People whose eyes are less than 50 years old may find it easier to enjoy this book in its totality.… (mer)