J ames Golden spent most of his working life in New York as a writer, with a Master's degree in modern poetry behind him. Nearing retirement he gave in to what he has described as a long-buried pull toward the natural world and moved to a clearing in the woods of western New Jersey, on heavy clay over a wet hillside, to make a garden.
Federal Twist is what came of it: a wet prairie of giant grasses and tall perennials planted directly into the existing weedy matrix, a garden that ignored most of the rules of the territory and discovered its own. Golden has been making and unmaking the place for nearly two decades, and writing about it on his blog of the same name. The garden has been profiled in Gardens Illustrated and the New York Times; in 2019 Monty Don filmed there for the BBC's American Gardens.
His book The View from Federal Twist: A New Way of Thinking About Gardens, Nature and Ourselves draws together two decades of garden-making with the cultural, literary and philosophical reading that grew alongside it — a meditation on what a garden can be when it stops trying to dominate its site.
