"I confess to being an enthusiast for this book. The World is in My Garden is based on a very simple formula, but one as far as I know never carried through in book form (there are plenty of poems in history that qualify): the idea that the private garden is a metaphor for everything that goes on in the macrocosm, including ecological, social, personal, and spiritual issues. ... I have rarely so genuinely wished such a venture success.
"The notion of a garden has always been a metaphor for consciousness. There is the garden of Gethsemane; the gardens in which Persian and Eastern mystics saw their visions; the garden of Eden. In western literature and art there is a long-running metaphor of the garden: the hortus conclusus, the enclosed space as representing communion with the virgin, the mother, and with the feminine.
Lilac in spring glory.
"In this garden, the eternal woman is shown encountering the unicorn; the virgin receives the angel Gabriel who announces to her the nativity—while a white lily in the painting attests her purity. Much later in art, the garden may be an image of wild nature; although none of these images are specifically taken up by the Masers, their garden certainly attests to the wild as well as to the enclosed and sacred. I simply wish to put the metaphor in its context: let them tell us what it means for today's world.
"This is a very intelligent sort of book. What simplifies it is human experience, the fact that it is their garden, Chris and Zane's: not just a metaphor but a very real place (indeed, if there is anything I miss at all in this book it is simply a description of the garden itself so that, as I consider the ideas raised, I can feel at home—and explore with my eyes as well as my ears). Chris writes, 'It is through gardening that I have struggled with such concepts as crisis, self-knowledge, experience, change, killing, death, and peace.' That he has wrestled with them actually in the garden of their Oregon home, is continually evident, both in the anecdotes of the book and in the general reference to the plants, weeds, insect and mammal life, predators, diseases, the compost, the young shoots, the cycle of generation and decay, and the presence in this remarkable space of two human beings—beings who are fundamentally part of the system, not even remotely separate. 
"And that is a key concept of Chris's ecology. He is not, I may say, someone full of ecological clichés: he is an original thinker around ecological issues, at times even a rebel within his own field (which is principally, but not entirely, forestry). At one stage I thought that it was only the comparison between the garden microcosm and the ecological macrocosm that the book was about. I could not have been more wrong: it has five sections, one of which is introductory. The others see the garden as metaphor for social issues (here questions of community, trusteeship, what is natural, how we can help, all get discussed); for personal issues (I particularly liked the discussion of the concept of crisis and opportunity, but this also includes a look at grief and death), and spiritual ones (transformation, acceptance, finding peace).
"If I say that MY GARDEN is a work of criticism I run the risk of puzzling readers of this magazine. But in the best sense of that word, it is precisely what this book is, and that is no mean compliment. The book is a criticism, that is to say a constructive exploration, of what really is our role in community, one with another and in participation with nature, and it will most certainly enlarge the mind. And that, too, I mean in the best sense."
Colum Hayward
Bookshelf
Stella Polaris
(a British magazine)
London, UK
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