How does an individual garden relate to the larger landscape? How does it connect to the natural and cultural environment? Does it evoke a sense of place? In Spirit of Place, Bill Noble helps gardeners answer these questions by sharing how they influenced the creation of his garden in Vermont. He explores the history of New England gardens and how they were shaped by a rugged landscape, harsh climate, and European ideas about design and plantsmanship. Throughout, Noble reveals that a garden is never created in a vacuum, but is rather the outcome of an individual's personal vision combined with historical and cultural forces. Sumptuously illustrated, this thoughtful look at the process of garden-making will inspire home gardeners everywhere to leverage the history and site of their own landscape to create a truly spirited place.

2021 Foreword Indies Honorable Mention for Essays What is a lyric essay? An essay that has a lyrical style? An essay that plays with form in a way that resembles poetry more than prose? Both of these? Or something else entirely? The works in this anthology show lyric essays rely more on intuition than exposition, use image more than narration, and question more than answer. But despite all this looseness, the lyric essay still has responsibilities—to try to reveal something, to play with ideas, or to show a shift in thinking, however subtle. The whole of a lyric essay adds up to more than the sum of its parts. In A Harp in the Stars, Randon Billings Noble has collected lyric essays written in four different forms—flash, segmented, braided, and hermit crab—from a range of diverse writers. The collection also includes a section of craft essays—lyric essays about lyric essays. And because lyric essays can be so difficult to pin down, each contributor has supplemented their work with a short meditation on this boundary-breaking form.

"Be with me always-take any form-drive me mad! only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you!" Thus does Heathcliff beg his dead Cathy in Wuthering Heights. He wants to be haunted-he insists on it. Randon Billings Noble does too. Instead of exorcising the ghosts of her past, she hopes for their cold hands to knock at the window and to linger. Be with Me Always is a collection of essays that explore hauntedness by considering how the ghosts of our pasts cling to us. In a way, all good essays are about the things that haunt us until we have somehow embraced or understood them. Here, Noble considers the ways she has been haunted-by a near-death experience, the gaze of a nude model, thoughts of widowhood, Anne Boleyn's violent death, a book she can't stop reading, a past lover who shadows her thoughts-in essays both pleasant and bitter, traditional and lyrical, and persistently evocative and unforgettable.

I wrote this book as a autobiography (Memoirs) for which I am giving tribute to my biological mother and two stepmothers who assisted in raising me from infant to adulthood. My father gained custody of me at the age of two (2) and raised me with the help of my two stepmothers. Growing up as a child was a journey for me and my mother(s) gave me specific gifts to prevail and succeed. I thank them for their loving, caring, and sharing attitudes toward me. I forgive my dad for his abusiveness during my childhood as he did not know what he was doing. However, he had the insight to choose women who were remarkable human beings. Children from dysfunctional family backgrounds will hopefully enjoy reading this book; and adults who have similar backgrounds will appreciate from whence I have come. I hope that this book will be an inspiration to all affected persons to succeed.

Lord & Schryver, the first landscape architecture firm founded and operated by women in the Pacific Northwest, designed more than 250 gardens in Oregon and Washington, including the grounds for Reed College of Portland, Salem parks, and schools, public buildings and churches. Gaiety Hollow, the Salem house Elizabeth Lord and Edith Schryver built as a home and studio for themselves, is now owned by the Lord & Schryver Conservancy and (in non-pandemic times) open to the public. The Conservancy has lovingly restored the gardens at Gaiety Hollow according to Lord & Schryver's plans. They also manage, and have restored, the gardens at Deepwood, a Queen Anne house two blocks from Gaiety Hollow. Lord & Schryver met as young women and in 1929 established a highly successful landscape architecture firm in Salem; their work is acknowledged as one of the milestones in the history of garden design in the Northwest and beyond. Their firm is the only Oregon firm recognized in Pioneers of Landscape Architecture, compiled by the US National Park Service. The Cultural Landscape Foundation describes them as "consummate professionals in the broadest sense, as they worked to raise the profile of landscape architects by involving an audience beyond their clients. Their work represented a transition from a formal symmetrical style of garden design to one which responded in a distinctive way to the unique features of Northwest climate, soil, topography, and plant material.