This month on Good Day Alabama on WBRC Fox 6, I shared two of the best novels I’ve read in a long time and a reprint of a favorite guide to Southern woodlands.
By Ann Patchett, audiobook read by Meryl Streep
First of all, Ann Patchett is amazing. Her latest book, Tom Lake, is amazing. But to have Meryl Streep read it to us? Truly amazing! Set in the spring of 2020, when the world has shut down, three daughters return to the family cherry farm in Northern Michigan to wait out the pandemic. As they work together to bring in the harvest, the sisters beg their mother to tell them about the famous actor Peter Duke and the time she shared a stage—and a romance—with him at a summer stock theater company called Tom Lake. She does, and this becomes a sweeping tale of love and marriage and family and the lives parents live before their children are born. Everyone—the girls and their mother and father—have time to reexamine their own lives during the telling. It is a luminous story full of insights about what it means to be a family.
By Daniel Mason
This is the story of a house in the woods in New England and the people who have lived there through the centuries. The novel starts when two lovers leave their Puritan colony for a humble cabin in the woods. This cabin becomes home to a succession of human—and nonhuman—inhabitants. In the 1700s, an English soldier abandons the battlefields of the New World and devotes himself to growing apples here. His twin daughters become spinsters as they experience war, famine, envy, and desire. A crime reporter unearths an ancient mass grave. A disgraced historian goes looking for a further clue to the grave. A young girl in the late 1990s finds herself there after an accident and stays and stays. In between, there’s a lovelorn painter, a sinister con man, a young man who communes with past inhabitants, a stalking panther. Even a beetle has a place here. Each chapter tells a different story—of history, nature, love, the seasons, the trees, human nature, and the afterlife—in this beautiful, inventive, haunting book.
Listen to the Land: Creating a Southern Woodland Garden
By Louise Agee Wrinkle
Louise Agee Wrinkle, a prominent local gardener, is known for inspiring and encouraging native gardening across the country with her beautiful book detailing her own Southern woodland garden in Mountain Brook. The book, which came out in 2017, has been updated and reprinted, and Louise is being celebrated with a weekend (May 4 and 5) of garden tours and a documentary about her garden and her love of native plants.
The book is about Louise’s efforts—the challenges and the joys—to create a curated natural space. She’s filled her two acres with native plants and Asian counterparts in a sun-dappled space with a lovely stream and meandering paths and places to sit and enjoy it all.
Four private, Birmingham-area gardens—including Wrinkle’s woodland sanctuary— will be open for tours during the Garden Conservancy Open Days program on Saturday, May 4 from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. This is the first time that has happened since 2009. Admission is $5 for Garden Conservancy members and $10 for non-members. Tickets are available at www.gardenconservancy.org/open-days.
The Garden Conservancy will premiere its latest documentary film, A Garden in Conversation: Louise Agee Wrinkle’s Southern Woodland Sanctuary, on Sunday, May 5 at 3 p.m. at the Virginia Samford Theatre. The film and following panel discussion are free, but registration is required. Go to www.gardenconservancy.org to register.
I link to Amazon to show you exactly what book I’m talking about, but I love to shop locally at Church Street Coffee and Books, The Alabama Booksmith, Little Professor, and Thank You Books in Crestwood. And I visit my local library often in person and online!
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