That link doesn't work for me, Tony, and I'm not sure I can explain it. Maybe the image of the pages from the book are on the screen, but the text isn't available to my screen reader. I keep coming back to Woodyoak's comments about the original three metaphors in this post's title. She wrote, "Perhaps what metaphor is useful depends on the stage of the gardens development and the particular objective under consideration as well as the mindset of the gardener at the time." Woodyoak, your garden sounds much further along than my own. Which got me thinking about time. There's been a thread here a while back about how to create the look and feel of age in a garden. In other words, artificial aging. The more recent thread about the beautiful ruins of an old stone barn is the real thing. But, some of the design questions still hinge on how you want to tell the story of those stones or what story you choose to tell. I live on an average street, in an average house, in a town that is so average it came in 2nd in the contest to be the "real" Springfield where the Simpsons live. Glaciers dominated this region for a very long time, and then prairies interspersed with thick bands of forest grew here for tens of thousands of years. For just a couple of handfuls of decades European settlers farmed the surface of this land, while a little later first and second generation immigrants mined it. Most of the homeowners within the city limits are required to purchase insurance for mine subsidence. Not always a comforting thought, as this is the region of the new Madrid fault line, famous for relative inactivity, famous for the strongest earthquake ever recorded in the lower 48 states. That's a story that my father, a geologist, liked to tell to get the hairs on the back of our necks to stand on end. He felt downright cheated when I called him a few years back to tell him I'd experienced a tiny little seismic tremor. An elderly friend told us that one of the largest mine heads was located about a three minute walk from my house. In a slightly different direction I can walk 3 or 4 minutes to where the last corn fields were sold three years ago. Now McMansions have sprouted up on their tiny lots. Amili wrote, "But then perhaps the garden is more often meant to be the setting for a good story, the lush and sensuous backdrop, a catalyst, not the author." Which got me to ask myself, "Why have I been going down this road?" Why try to make a garden tell a story? "To celebrate," writes Nandina. And that's what I would attempt to do in telling stories. Not the stories of western expansion, industrialization, or the blanding of life in suburbia. The stories I play with in my mind's eye are celebrations. They help me to dream my garden more clearly when, as now, it sleeps beneath an ice storm. Wellspring

The site is actually a companion to the publication, and an attempt by CR to stay viable in the publishing business. The method being used is called a "hook". You review the free limited information with the hope a viewer subscribes to the site, or the magazine for total access. Just recently CR offered me a discounted publication subscription renewal along with a free gift subscription for anyone of my choice. And, this is not the first time one of my subscriptions has done this. Right now on the desk next to my monitor is an offer from Smithsonian Magazine. They are offering me a reduced renewal, and two free gift subscriptions. The "hook" is being directed towards both myself, and in the future the new readers. It is obvious to me the Internet is rapidly effecting the publication industry. Finally for myself when I am spending money, as I did just recently on a new SS refrigerator and a SS range, I am more concerned as to the quality and reliability of the information rather than as to whether it is free or not. You get what you pay for as nothing is free in life. DA

I want to add anyone that was thinking along the lines of the ipads or the bigger 10" tablets the deal they have on the Acer Iconia is absolutely awesome! That is a super tablet, it has Android 3.0 honeycomb running it which is the best OS for a tablet. It is in the same category as the xoom. It has a dual core processor which is the best you can get right now in these tablets. Acer ICONIA A500 16GB, Wi-Fi, 10.1in - Black REFURBISHED It is manufacturer refurbished that is why the price is cut so much. That would not bother me since it is done by the manufacturer.

Is this thread being "wrapped up"? I agree that it has been very enlightening, but I have only just finished my third CD book, "Nicholas Nickleby", and I am about one third of the way into "The Old Curiosity Shop". What started with the proposal of this thread and the subsequent discussion looks to stretch indefinitely into my reading future. I want to thank everyone for sparking my interest - and I especially what to thank whoever it was who had the idea of general, individual readings of Dickens rather than concentrating on just one Dickens book. To supplement Ackroyd's Dickens bio, I also read Tomalin's. friedag, you are right that different biographers have different perspectives. Like carolyn_ky mentioned, it is obvious that Tomalin's big interest is "the affair" between CD and Ellen Ternan and thus Tomalin's biography is about half the length of Ackroyd's. Maybe that shows some of the differences between male and female biographers, because Ackroyd recounts the affair rather perfunctorily but includes much more detail of other aspects of CD's life. It could be, too, that Tomalin is more attuned to what interests female readers of biographies: relationships, factual and rumored. friedag, Charles Palliser's "The Quincunx" is said to be a Dickens pastiche. New Zealander Lloyd Jones wrote "Mister Pip" - the setting is Papua New Guinea and could be right up your alley! I have not read either of those, but I did read Gaynor Arnold's "Girl in a Blue Dress" and Richard Flanagan's "Wanting", both of which were inspired by CD's unhappy marriage to Catherine. All I can say about them is they are intriguing takes, but I found them quite maddening (angry-making, that is, not crazy-making).