Spectacular gardens are viewed from the perspective of a snail in Virginia Woolf's "Kew Gardens" and from that of a sheltered teenage girl in Katherine Mansfield's "The Garden-Party." Children discover their own peculiar paradises in Sandra Cisneros's "The Monkey Garden" and Italo Calvino's "The Enchanted Garden," while adult gardeners find things that move and haunt them in William Maxwell's "The French Scarecrow" and Jamaica Kincaid's "The Garden I Have in Mind." Gardens of the imagination round out the anthology: the beautiful but fatal garden of Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Rappaccini's Daughter," the crystal buds of J. G. Ballard's "The Garden of Time," ravenous orchids in John Collier's "Green Thoughts," and Matsudo Aoko's "Planting," in which a young woman plants each day whatever she has been given. Garden Stories is an abundant crop of entrancing stories and the perfect gift for gardeners of all kinds. This delightfully wide-ranging collection brings together all sorts of tales of the tilled earth, featuring secret gardens, enchanted gardens, gardens public and private, grand and humble.