Share one ordinary man's spiritual journey in rural gardening and landscaping. Stir some of your own gardening ideas and gain a deeper insight into what is important in life. A spare, insightful meditation on garden philosophy, with some how-to on the side to keep the reader grounded. It's the kind of book many devoted gardeners wish they could write to express what they have gained from creating and nurturing a garden. Colson...who gardens on a rural property outside of Hawley, MN, is a precise writer. ..As someone who lives in northern Minnesota, where winters can be long and dark, Colson devotes an entire chapter to "Holding Back the Darkness," by which he means more than just the relentless wind of the prairie or nights that last 16 hours. Here's what he says: A garden exists at the twilight between the spiritual and the earthly, but we can also describe a garden as lying at the frontier between turmoil and tranquility, form and formlessness, wild and tame. A garden exists only so long as we are successful at keeping entropy at bay. It is always just a small step from chaos. A Little Book of Gardening in Northwest Minnesota is a little book—just over 100 pages, but it's a deep book, too, with passages you will want to mark and read again. It's illustrated with many color photographs ... many of which celebrate the cold and light of northern Minnesota.—Northern Gardener