No comments about A Passion for Survival: The True Story of Marie Anne And Louis Payzant in 18th Century Nova Scotia.

1 comments about My 26 Stanley Cups: Memories of a Hockey Life.

1. An enjoyable trip amongst the stars and events of the past as told by one who was there. Dick Irvin is a kind, gentlemanly figure who avoids any attempt at contraversy in his writings. This book is on one hand a refreshing escape from the "tell all" books that aim to rip the halo from its heroes; on the other hand, it is a santitized look at the past which skirts a number of harsh issues and unsavoury incidents. As one who remembers as a lad watching the Rocket on tv, it is like sitting down with a friend as he reminisces about your youth and the people you knew. If you didn't know better, you would assume that you and Dick had grown up together, knowing as many of the same people as you do. A lightweight book that is a good summer afternoon retreat!

4 comments about In Veronica's Garden.

1. This book sets out to tell the story of a garden and the larger-than-life personality who helped in its creation. The garden is the Milner Garden and Woodland, near Qualicum Beach on Vancouver Island off Canada's south west coast. It has an international reputation as a beautiful "natural" woodland garden. Sadly, the book does not do the garden justice.

   The Veronica of the title is Veronica Milner, born to an aristocratic English family and related to both Winston Churchill and Princess Diana. She first married Desmond FitzGerald, Knight of Glin and lived a life of privilege in an Irish castle. Her second husband, Ray Milner, was a prominent and wealthy Canadian businessman who seems to have been an exceptionally nice man. Ray had previously been married to Catherine and the two of them had bought the land and developed what became the Milner Garden. Both loved the garden and the trees that gave it its lovely natural setting beside the ocean. After Catherine's death Ray met and married Veronica and somehow managed to live amicably with this selfish, snobbish, difficult woman and to finance her extravagances, which included improvements to the garden.

   The writer seems to be fascinated with Veronica's wealthy and titled background, and with visits from the Queen, Prince Philip, Prince Charles and Princess Diana to the garden. The reader has to struggle through page after page of name dropping. I had been hoping for a book about the garden, not "Lives of the Rich and Famous". There is very little information about the design of the garden, and how it evolved, and it seems that Veronica took much of the credit due to Ray and Catherine Milner. The illustrations are adequate (except for the maps, which are quite crude) but not professional quality and don't really reflect the beauty of the garden.

   This is a regional book with little to recommend it to readers outside British Columbia. Actually, there's not much to recommend it to local readers either.




2. Thoroughly enjoyed this book..great saga, even for non-gardeners. A most interesting woman. A true biography, way more then a book about gardens. Will hold wide appeal.



3. Great read about an eccentric lady and the two amazing gardens she built. Lots of royalty namedropping and interesting pictures. Well written.



4. Now that I live on Vancouver Island, British Columbia, it's a short drive up the Island Highway to Milner Gardens in Qualicum Beach. A recent visit to the woodland gardens and English-style cottage with its breathtaking views of the Strait of Georgia was all the more memorable due to my reading of Margaret Cadwaladr's book, In Veronica's Garden. (The title comes from a book of the same title by poet Alfred Austin published in 1896.)
   
   Whether you can visit the garden in person or not, you can delight in its beauty in the pages of Cadwaladr's book. She has woven a fascinating story around botanical names of flowers, family histories, facts about the ownership of Milner Gardens, its famous visitors and the garden experts who have influenced it. Most of the colour photos that greatly enhance the book were taken by the author. This is an engrossing book, one of those that is difficult to put down.
   
   At the heart of the story is Veronica Milner. In fact, when author and subject met, Veronica said it was important to understand her in order to understand the garden. A garden which features over 500 varieties of rhododendrons contrasting with the majestic Douglas-firs and red-cedars of the West Coast rain forest. To gather information about the garden and its owner, Cadwaladr put many photographs of the garden in an album. As they chatted and looked at the photos, the visual cues would trigger Veronica's memory and keep her focused. Cadwaladr found this tactic to be so useful that she also took picture books from the Edwardian era, for instance, to her visits with Veronica.
   
   Within a week of meeting Veronica in 1996, Cadwaladr took her first trip to Ireland and visited Glin, the castle where Veronica lived during her first marriage to Desmond FitzGerald, the Knight of Glin. Veronica's son Desmond, the current Knight of Glin, allowed Cadwaladr access to his father's detailed diaries, which ended shortly before the elder FitzGerald's death in 1949. The diaries confirmed for the author many details about artists, writers and prominent garden experts who had influenced the development of the gardens in Qualicum Beach.
   
   Veronica Villiers was born in London, England, in 1909 and was descended from the Duke of Marlborough, as was Winston Churchill, her mother's cousin, which meant they were related to the late Diana, Princess of Wales. When Veronica married Desmond FitzGerald in 1929, they moved to Glin, the castle and 500 acre estate near Limerick. The couple had two daughters and a son. From the time Veronica and Desmond began their married life, they began to update the castle (built in the 1780s) and create a magnificent garden.
   
   Cadwaladr gives a candid portrait of Veronica, an imperious woman, who was a gardener as well as a painter of flowers. Apparently, she had dalliances during her first marriage and was known to be a difficult, complex and unusual woman. When Desmond was ill with tuberculosis, he and Veronica travelled to New York and Chicago to visit several doctors. While on a train, they met Canadian businessman Ray Milner. After Desmond died, Veronica, in a crimson satin dress, married Ray Milner in London in 1954.
   
   The home that Veronica moved to in Qualicum Beach on Vancouver Island had been the summer home of Ray and his first wife Rina. With the help of Ted and Mary Greig, who owned a nursery in Royston, Veronica began to expand the garden. It became not a manicured garden of mowed lawns but rather controlled chaos, as it has been described. Garden writer William Robinson had a profound influence on Veronica and therefore on the style of the garden and the plants chosen for it.
   
   Veronica became a widow again in 1975 when Ray died. She continued to travel and employ servants from India. Winston Churchill's daughter Mary Soames visited her in 1984. Charles and Diana visited in 1986. A photograph of Princess Diana, her feet on the rung of a chair, stirs a poignant memory. Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip visited the garden and stayed at the house in October 1987. Veronica, though, had to stay at a nearby hotel while the royal visitors slept in her room (on a new mattress) and only got to see them in the last hour of their visit.
   
   To preserve the gardens, especially following her demise, Veronica found a benefactor via Malaspina University-College in Nanaimo. The garden was dedicated on May 17, 1996, and Veronica was presented with a honorary certificate in horticulture. The author and her husband, Jim, who was coordinator of the horticulture program at Malaspina, were in attendance. That was the day Cadwaladr met Veronica, a woman who complained about "the decline of the aristocracy." Cadwaladr found her subject to be "both gifted and far-sighted." Veronica "created a Canadian version of a "wild garden" in the rainforest, a teaching tool and living laboratory in a time when conservation was becoming increasingly important." Veronica Milner died in 1998.
   
   This book is a stunning example of the results of dedication to life story, including the research, the interviews, the special relationship formed, the surprises and knowledge gleaned along the way. In Cadwaladr's case, she took on the extra challenge of starting her own publishing company to publish her book. When I last spoke to her, she was getting ready to go into a second printing.
   
   Margaret Cadwaladr has had a long-standing interest in autobiography and life story. She took an interdisciplinary graduate-level course at the University of British Columbia on the topic and gives workshops now on life writing as well as on the subject of self-publishing. She often is asked to speak to gardening clubs in Canada and the U.S.
   
   by Mary Ann Moore
   for Story Circle Book Reviews
   www.storycirclebookreviewsorg
   reviewing books by, for, and about women

1 comments about Brother Twelve.

1. I found the book to be well written. The history of BC and furthermore Nanaimo and Canada's false prophet "Brother XII" really opened my eyes. As a person who has lived in Nanaimo for all of my 17 years I had never heard of Brother XII before. The information in this book and references to Nanaimo and the surrounding area was wonderful. To think such a spiritual scam occurred right on Nanaimo's back door was amazing! My hat real goes off to Mr. Oliphant who researched many of the people who lived in town, in Vancouver, and in many other places affected by the Brother. I will definitely read it again, and I recommend anyone interested in BC or Vancouver Island history also read this book as it is an invaluable chapter to our past!

2 comments about Dear Harry: The First Hand Account of a World War I Infantryman.

1. I thoroughly enjoyed this captivating collection of WW1 letters. A remarkable, true Canadian story; Dear Harry reads like one long, bittersweet loveletter. I couldn't put it down.



2. Being a history buff,I was drawn to the cover of this intriguing book about a WW1 Canadian soldier. The accounts of Harry Hillyer as depicted in his letters home to his wife and child gave me a very real perspective on the life of a foot soldier during one of our country's most critical eras. This book is filled with history as seen and experienced by someone who was there. I laughed at many of the written exchanges between Harry and Jen; I felt their passion and pain; and I cried real tears at the finaly few pages.
   "Dear Harry, First Hand Account of a WW1 Infantry Man" should be a part of every high school curriculum, it's that good.
   Author Norma Shephard has done a magnificent job putting together this great literary piece and has done her grandfather a great service in the process.

No comments about George Grant: Selected Letters.

1 comments about Polar Pioneers: John Ross and James Clark Ross.

1. Sir James Clark Ross went from end of the world to the other in a little wooden ship (or so it seems to me, comparing the expedition craft of the early nineteenth century with the supertankers and aircraft carriers of today).

   His uncle, Captain John Ross, managed some of the most successful Arctic winterings-over of his time, as well as suffering some of the most appalling privations. (Captain John Ross' operant procedure for the prevention of scurvy deserves respect and praise.) At the same time neither of these gents was perfect in every respect, and Captain John Ross' career may be said never to have recovered from a premature decision he made to abandon a search for the Northwest Passage based on a disputed sighting of a mountain chain (later found to be non-existant) that would have made northerly progress impossible.

   This book presents the accomplishments, and errors, of uncle and nephew in full recognition of their human failings and failures of judgment; but appropriately credits them for their accomplishments -- which are unexpectedly significant when seen as a whole.

   It also traces the history of the animosity that existed between Captain John Ross and Secretary of the Admiralty John Barrow -- a relationship characterized by sometimes truly puzzling venom. It seems pretty funny now to read about the violence and vitriol with which the two of them spoke of each other in print, and there is probably something to be said about the cultural environment then versus now; but the conflict was very real, and had very real -- sometimes tragic -- repercussions.

   This book may be very profitably read either by itself -- for the entertainment and interest it provides -- or in conjunction with Fergus Fleming's "Barrow's Boys," which also provides a window on the tension between Barrow and Captain John Ross (one is tempted to say, sometimes between Captain John Ross and the world).

   It is a biography that covers a remarkable span of Polar exploration during the glory years of Royal Navy expeditions. A readable and intriguing study of the careers of two of the English-speaking world's more influential Polar explorers!

No comments about John Graves Simcoe 1752-1806: A Biography.

1 comments about Quebec During The American Invasion, 1775-1776: The Journal Of Francois Baby, Gabriel Taschereau, And Jenkin Williams.

1. The three writers of the journal were agents sent by the British governor of Quebec, Sir Guy Carleton, to travel among the surrounding parishes and missions to find out who had lent support to the American troops in their invasion of Canada during the Revolutionary War. The Americans knew that they had support among some of the French-Canadian "habitants" (i. e., peasants). Though this support turned out not to be widespread or effective enough to help the Americans to victory, Carleton wanted to weed the supporters out of the local militias. In their journal, Baby and the others reported parish by parish the actions they took against individuals posing a threat to British control of Canada and the reasons for this. Some militia men performed military duties such as standing guard for the invading rebel forces; others encouraged support for them; and others offered them food or transpiration. Carleton's punitive measures were mild, dismissal from the militia in most cases; but they were effective in virtually eliminating what support there was for the Americans among the French-Canadian peasants. The journal is an important historical document first published in the 1920s.

No comments about Wild and Free.