Question from Barbara:
Just finished “All My Edens” and wanted to thank you for sharing your varied and interesting personal experiences with nature and gardening. Those remarkable, timeless moments along with great gardening tips (ear-marked those pages) and an engaging family history made for reading that I never wanted to end. Having, by choice or by chance, lived in La Mesa, Julian, and La Mesa again, I know how profoundly our Edens can be created, lost and found again, but can never stay the same.

Thanks, too, for posting more biographical details so there’s an update on your story.
I look forward to reading more of your great gardening advice and hope someday to meet you at one of your events.

Answer from Pat:
Thank you so much for your kind email regarding “All My Edens”. It pleases me deeply when I discover that fourteen years after “All My Edens” was published and long after it went out of print, it is still giving pleasure and inspiration to people such as you.
Your thoughtful and well-stated remarks came at a moment that makes them particularly encouraging and appreciated.

I am now in the midst of writing a second memoir covering the years of my marriage to my late husband, Louis, his illness and death, and the experiences and revelations that life has brought me since then. I also am recounting more stories from my childhood and youth in England and America that I left out of my former memoir. Several readers have written saying they wanted to “hear what happened to all those people” I intend to include an epilogue that will tie up all those threads.

I have finished fifteen chapters so far and am in the middle of the book—always the most challenging part to write but especially with this book. At this time, the title is “Grief and the Gardener: A Love Story”. It is a book on grief and has something to say to anyone who has suffered loss of a loved one, but it is not a sad book. I think and hope people will find it inspiring. Also, like “All My Edens”, gardening and nature are woven into the story like threads throughout.

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