Ever since her childhood on a Niagara farm, Debi has dug in the dirt to find resilience. But when her husband, Peter, was diagnosed with cancer in November, it was too late in the season to seek solace in her garden. With idle hands and a fearful mind, Debi sought something to sustain her through the months ahead. She soon came across Victory Gardens-the vegetable gardens cultivated during the world wars that sustained so many. During an anxious winter, Debi researched, drew plans, and ordered seeds. In spring, with Peter in remission, her garden thrived, and life got back on track. But when Peter's cancer returned like a killing frost, the garden became a reminder that everything must come to an end. A Victory Garden for Trying Times is a personal journey of love, loss, and healing through the natural cycles of the earth.

"Osler's plea is not so gentle; rather, its opinionated (though never dismissive), bell-clear, wickedly humorous, brilliant--a call for cultivated anarchy in the garden that turns an oxymoron into a sensuous, sensible act. ``Why garden? God knows ... Damn those fine mornings. It's then that guilt seeps in like bad gas, '' groans Osler, one of England's best-known gardeners. Don't buy it for a minute. Her love of gardening is obvious, even if ``a great number of gardening jobs are pure slog.'' And her garden, eclectically wanton as it is, enemy of everything regimented and overly neat, shot through with the native vitality of plants for atmosphere and mystery, brings her to her knees much of the time; untidiness requires work. She wouldn't have it any other way. She likes a rude edge, to blur and enchant, the unruly ``quality that adds an extra sensory dimension.'' She loves hedges, walls, and paths--``the bones of a garden''--as long as they don't rob the garden of its sensuality. Here she offers not so much advice as the experience of her Shropshire garden: trees for their summer crowns and bare winter branches, stone for its texture and floral affinities, water for its attractiveness to humans and kingfishers and newts, bulbs for their individuality and scope. She's not tethered to flowers, but she loves them too (``who can go outside and kick a lily?''). Like her garden, Osler will not be confined, and she delights in moving off in many directions, to weather wars and the transporting quality of scent, botanical illustrations and the patron saints of gardening (Osler suggests a small figure of one in the garden ``might be just as efficacious as a blast of Phostrogen''). Osler's thinking is original, intuitive, and sharp as a tack; as a gardening writer she rightly sits up there with Henry Mitchell and Eleanor Perenyi.