Barely into the first few pages of Penelope Lively’s thoroughly engaging LIFE IN THE GARDEN, the impatient child that annoyingly resides in me flipped ahead to see the expected plant pictures. There weren’t any.

Illustrations, yes --- exquisite page-sized line drawings by Katie Scott separate the six chapters, a cross between William Morris wallpaper designs and what you might find in the best adult coloring books. And, of course, the dust jacket blooms with the colorful profusion of pressed flower artistry by Cheryl Welch. But no identifying plant photographs!

In prose that’s as blithe as her name, Lively tosses in plant varieties, both common and botanical, like currants into a fruit cake --- the more the merrier. And she admits to keeping her iPad handy for calling up unfamiliar specimens online when she herself reads gardening books with no pictures. I briefly wondered if I should be doing the same to accompany LIFE IN THE GARDEN.

"LIFE IN THE GARDEN is the best reason that has come along in years to set aside the opulent coffee-table plant books for a bit and settle into a masterful and joyous narrative about what’s really important when we live among things that will continue to grow and bloom long after we’re gone."

Here’s when I admit to being what some kindly call an “intuitive” (unschooled) gardener, one slowly succumbing to horticultural panic. Does my garden contain examples of bad or even vulgar taste in plant combinations? Have I been seduced by commercial nurseries to choose bigger rather than better plants? And so on and so on…

If I’d continued that line of thinking, LIFE IN THE GARDEN might have left me feeling inferior and incompetent even before finishing the Introduction. But Lively, both a Booker and Carnegie Award winner, knows what she’s doing down to the smallest detail. I soon realized that while good gardening books need pictures, great ones don’t. I was in the presence of greatness.

Having spent most of her 80-odd years creatively messing around in gardens (her own and other people’s), an important lesson among the many Lively enticingly shares is that the garden of one’s imagination is every bit as real and life-enhancing as the gardens one aspires to create out of the opportunities (or lack of them) at hand.

When that realization dawned --- I can almost hear her saying “use your imagination” --- I was hooked, ready to explore a world of very visual prose as she wandered purposefully through a selective history of famous literary garden references; gardens and visual art; gardens as social architecture; fashion in gardening; even gardens as expressions of power. In each chapter, the familiar brushed up against unexpected eccentricity and revelation.

Lively has an acute sense of whether a given writer might truly be a gardener (in which case tiny but correct details are celebrated), or when the author just grabbed names from a catalogue without really knowing much else. She has “busted” more than one fellow scribe!

Particularly noteworthy, regardless of the reader’s relative skill at actual dirty-hands horticulture, are Lively’s thoughtful and illuminating commentaries on how gardens affect our human experience of time and emotion.

She goes into fascinating detail on why and how the English garden is so quintessentially English (it’s much more than copious variety and color), and why the ubiquitous rose in its numerous variations has exercised such a powerful influence on global politics, art and society. And certainly not least is her deeply rooted affection for writers and their gardens, for whom she remains a truly inspired mentor.

LIFE IN THE GARDEN is the best reason that has come along in years to set aside the opulent coffee-table plant books for a bit and settle into a masterful and joyous narrative about what’s really important when we live among things that will continue to grow and bloom long after we’re gone.