MixedThe Washington PostThere are moments of poignant observation ... But these sharp insights are undermined by the book’s exceeding discursiveness. One chapter, called \'Reality and Metaphor,\' encompasses everything from the gardening dynamic between Virginia and Leonard Woolf to the Hanging Gardens of Babylon to gardens as subjects by artists as varied as Monet and Munch. This may be gently didactic for readers with no gardening background. If you are even mildly versed in such topics as Tulipomania, the English landscape style, the creation of Sissinghurst Castle Garden, it seems cursory and, in the absence of stronger connecting threads, actually quite tedious. More engaging are Lively’s reminiscences of her personal life ... Reading Life in the Garden, I felt like I was peering out of an airplane window, surveying lots of territory but not really seeing anything.
