Night Gardening

By: E.L. Swann

Narrated by: Dick Hill

Maggie is recovering from a stroke in her overgrown and neglected garden in wealthy Cambridge, Massachusetts. Tristan, a landscape architect, is rebuilding the garden next door for the new homeowners. He spies Maggie through a crack in the stone wall between the two properties, and is intrigued by her beauty and her strong will as she tries to learn how to speak and walk again.

The affair between Tristan and Maggie rejuvenates both of them, and Maggie's neglected garden thrives. Night Gardening is a story about the healing power of love, but it's also a romantic tale about passion blooming in life's later years.

©1999 E.L. Swann (P)2008 Brilliance Audio, Inc.

Loved it but hated the ending!

Amazing gardening descriptions! Makes you want to create with your plants. Very thoughtful. Sad ending!

If you garden and love a great love story this is a most read.

This book tells the story of Maggie and Tristen and their love for each other and for the gardens they create. Maggie a widow and stroke survivor meets Tristen the landscape architect and the rest is magical.

It will make you smile, cry and want to learn more about plants and gardening. Maggie tells great stories of her past and Tristen tells Maggie all about the gardens he created for his daughters through the years. It is a true love story.

pleasant reflections, not for thrill-seekers

Enjoyable musings on romantic love at the edge of old age, especially if you also love gardens, so that the frequent descriptions of seasonal beauties of plants, flowers, and landscape architecture, which are essential to the meaning of the book, will come alive in your mind. However, if you're looking for an action-filled plot or wild, nubile sex, this isn't the one for you. Small quibbles with the artistry: the book does seem a bit short, and not as vivid as I might have hoped. But to be fair, the book does just what a novel should do: tell a specific story and then stop. The story is simply a small one, a tiny slice of a particular kind of life at a particular time in life. It seems clear that the author loves nature; and indeed when I looked up her other works, they are mainly books for children and the plots rely on some aspect of nature. The fact that she usually writes for kids helped me understand her rather gentle approach. Narrator is fine.