That link doesn't work for me, Tony, and I'm not sure I can explain it. Maybe the image of the pages from the book are on the screen, but the text isn't available to my screen reader. I keep coming back to Woodyoak's comments about the original three metaphors in this post's title. She wrote, "Perhaps what metaphor is useful depends on the stage of the gardens development and the particular objective under consideration as well as the mindset of the gardener at the time." Woodyoak, your garden sounds much further along than my own. Which got me thinking about time. There's been a thread here a while back about how to create the look and feel of age in a garden. In other words, artificial aging. The more recent thread about the beautiful ruins of an old stone barn is the real thing. But, some of the design questions still hinge on how you want to tell the story of those stones or what story you choose to tell. I live on an average street, in an average house, in a town that is so average it came in 2nd in the contest to be the "real" Springfield where the Simpsons live. Glaciers dominated this region for a very long time, and then prairies interspersed with thick bands of forest grew here for tens of thousands of years. For just a couple of handfuls of decades European settlers farmed the surface of this land, while a little later first and second generation immigrants mined it. Most of the homeowners within the city limits are required to purchase insurance for mine subsidence. Not always a comforting thought, as this is the region of the new Madrid fault line, famous for relative inactivity, famous for the strongest earthquake ever recorded in the lower 48 states. That's a story that my father, a geologist, liked to tell to get the hairs on the back of our necks to stand on end. He felt downright cheated when I called him a few years back to tell him I'd experienced a tiny little seismic tremor. An elderly friend told us that one of the largest mine heads was located about a three minute walk from my house. In a slightly different direction I can walk 3 or 4 minutes to where the last corn fields were sold three years ago. Now McMansions have sprouted up on their tiny lots. Amili wrote, "But then perhaps the garden is more often meant to be the setting for a good story, the lush and sensuous backdrop, a catalyst, not the author." Which got me to ask myself, "Why have I been going down this road?" Why try to make a garden tell a story? "To celebrate," writes Nandina. And that's what I would attempt to do in telling stories. Not the stories of western expansion, industrialization, or the blanding of life in suburbia. The stories I play with in my mind's eye are celebrations. They help me to dream my garden more clearly when, as now, it sleeps beneath an ice storm. Wellspring

It's not often to find a fiction book that really appeals to plant people! I highly recommend SEARCHING FOR MISS FORTUNA- THE HUNT FOR A BROMELIAD by world-renowned bromeliad hybridizer Chester Skotak of Costa Rica. Chester Skotak, a Texas native raised in Houston, attended Texas A & M University, then moved on to South Florida and eventually drifted down to Central America. He has lived and worked in Costa Rica for 29 years and has published a novel loosely based on his lifetime of collecting, breeding, selecting, and propagating rare and beautiful plants. Skotak is a respected and accomplished nurseryman who has traveled widely throughout the Americas. On these trips, he has encountered oddball characters in unbelievable situations and has overcome seemingly insurmountable obstacles. SEARCHING FOR MISS FORTUNA is well-crafted fiction using vivid descriptions that allow the reader to become an armchair explorer. You smell the rain forests, feel the cool rivers, travel the by-ways of Panama, Costa Rica, and Nicaragua -- territories the author knows well -- and even take a side trip into the ritzy Miami social merry-go-round of farce and fancy. Along the way, you encounter dreamers, schemers, seers, and liars -- each neatly embroidered into a tapestry of exploration and misadventure. As the free-spirited narrator (Skotak's alter ego) sets off on a river journey through Costa Rica to Nicaragua, the dam of his soul opens wide and spills out a fascinating, bizarre tale of his search for an elusive bromeliad, Guzmania 'Fortuna,' -- a pineapple relative of unsurpassed color and beauty -- lost in the hinterlands of Panama and Costa Rica. Chester Skotak's decades of isolation at his nursery in the highlands of Costa Rica have been punctuated by occasional collisions with the real and surreal worlds of botany, horticulture, and travel. SEARCHING FOR MISS FORTUNA brings all this together in such a manner that it beckons to be read with the understanding that it reveals as much of the author as of his provocative subjects and fictional characters. The book, which began as a father's simple attempt to leave a lasting memoir for his children of who he is and why he chose such a reclusive lifestyle, evolved into an elaborate story of broad scope and deep insight. SEARCHING FOR MISS FORTUNA will appeal to anyone with wanderlust, to those with horticultural interests, to the curious who appreciate the interesting characters that inhabit and visit remote areas of the globe, and especially to those who have come to grips with their need to find and acquire the ultra rare and the most unusual. Here is a link that might be useful: Author's web site

Vee -- Good question. What MAKES a work a novel? Is it length? Content? Lack of illustrations? Lack of "words" (shall we call them "pseudo-words"?) such as "splat" or "aarrgghh"? Are we to constrain the term "novel" to merely works that are predominantly comprised of text? What if a work had one or two illustrations? Shall we consign such works to the bonfires of the "non-novel"? Of course, if a work had equal parts illustration and text, what shall we call those? Picture books? Half-novels? Literature for the illiterate? Yes vee, graphic novels are just picture books with few or no words. And you are correct -- those of us who purchase such works are lookers and not readers. You see, we don't really know how to read anything other than large, stylized but emotive printed text like "yeek" or "aargh" or "splat". These terms, by the way, follow a unique canon of agreed upon words, conventions, pictures, exclamations, and sock colors that all graphic novels MUST abide by. If they don't abide by them, then they can't be called graphic novels. It is put out by the Graphic Novel Code Authority and all graphic novel purchasers are REQUIRED to buy a copy otherwise they won't understand what's going on (after all, the medium and the paucity of words does not lend itself to expression). A select and secret committee of graphic novel artists and writers get together every full moon to discuss the entries in the canon and they burn their notes afterwards. If the smoke arising from the fire is purple, it means that they have a new definition but if the smoke is colored green, it means that they couldn't agree on a definition or whether to order subs or wraps for lunch. As a sampling of such terms and their agreed upon definitions, here are a few : yeek - a codeword for something icky -- as in when someone sees a mouse, you see the term "yeek" with the character pointing at the offending item/creature aargh - in graphic novels, this is placed in a panel with a stricken character as a form of extreme unction signifying that the character is about to shuffle off this mortal coil (or is in the process of shuffling off but can't seem to figure out where he left his house keys especially when the cabbie's waiting at the door) splat - a very old and respected brand of cushion that used to buy hidden advertising space in comic books. It is used to signify mushy things suddenly decelerating against a non-yielding surface. The term has migrated to the graphic novel space in honor of the company's previous support of the graphic arts. Unfortunately, the financial support that they provided stopped when the company went bankrupt following a bank run in Honduras after a bizarre banking scandal. The company's employees had discovered that when the company said it was investing their 401k into CDs, the company really WAS investing in compact disks manufactured in Honduras. The company CEO subsequently disappeared but is...

lacey, the books by F J Macdonald are very gentle reads about his simple life growing up on a remote croft on Harris (it's worth looking it up on a map just to see how far it is from the centre of population). I remember he describes his Grandfather, the Kirk Elder, who lived in the 'town' of Tarbert, having the first flushing WC installed and soon wondering what had happened to the wonderful oyster harvest in the sea-loch. The price of progress! I think JFM must have been born at the end of WW1 or early '20's and his story takes him up to WW11 . . .hence the Lysander . . . He used to give talks on the BBC and when I read his work I could 'hear' his Highland lilt coming through. 'Scots' or 'Scottish' are fine. I don't think 'Scotch' is correct; it's a drink. I can't help you on your second request (unless it's Robert Louis Stevenson and the 'Kidnapped' stories) but the Abe books site below might jog your memory. Here is a link that might be useful: Some books about the Highlands