Poems For Gardeners

• Poems about gardens and gardening from around the world and across time, collected by the writer, critic and gardener, Germaine Greer.

• A light-hearted and witty but scholarly approach

Marianne Moore said that the poet's job was to depict 'imaginary gardens with real toads in them'. In truth, gardens are always imaginary because they are always the garden that you are aiming for rather than the garden you have, but the toads are real and immediate.' So says Germaine Greer in this wonderful anthology.

This collection of poems, culled from classical antiquity to the twenty-first century, includes perennial favourites such as Marvell's 'The Garden' and Frost's 'After Apple-picking' and Roethke's famous greenhouse lyrics, as well as surprises like Tennyson's anti-botanical 'Amphion' and Fleur Adcock's 'Emblem' on the mating of slugs, not to mention small masterpieces like Philip Larkin's 'Cut Grass' and Phoebe Hesketh's 'Death of a Gardener'.

Poems for Gardeners can be read along with the seed catalogues in the dead of winter, or in the gaps between tasks on a busy day in spring, or between snoozes in the hammock in the deep midsummer.

Germaine Greer was born in Melbourne and educated in Australia and at Cambridge University. Her book, The Female Eunuch (1969), remains one of the most influential texts of the feminist movement. Greer has had a distinguished academic career in Britain and the United States. She makes regular appearances in print and other media as a broadcaster, journalist, columnist and reviewer. Since 2001 she has been involved in rehabilitating sixty hectares of subtropical rainforest in south-east Queensland; in 2011, she set up Friends of Gondwana Rainforest, a UK charity, to help in financing that and similar projects.

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