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    Mister Owita's Guide to Gardening: How I Learned the Unexpected Joy of a Green Thumb and an Open Heart
    Unavailable
    Mister Owita's Guide to Gardening: How I Learned the Unexpected Joy of a Green Thumb and an Open Heart
    Unavailable
    Mister Owita's Guide to Gardening: How I Learned the Unexpected Joy of a Green Thumb and an Open Heart
    Audiobook6 hours

    Mister Owita's Guide to Gardening: How I Learned the Unexpected Joy of a Green Thumb and an Open Heart

    Written by Carol Wall

    Narrated by Cynthia Darlow

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    A bestseller in the making, this is the true story of a unique friendship between two people who had nothing-and ultimately everything-in common.

    Carol Wall, a white woman living in a lily-white neighborhood in Middle America, was at a crossroads in her life. Her children were grown; she had successfully overcome illness; her beloved parents were getting older. One day she notices a dark-skinned African man tending her neighbor's yard. His name is Giles Owita. He bags groceries at the supermarket. He comes from Kenya. And he's very good at gardening.

    Before long Giles is transforming not only Carol's yard, but her life. Though they are seemingly quite different, a caring bond grows between them. But they both hold long-buried secrets that, when revealed, will cement their friendship forever.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateMar 4, 2014
    ISBN9780698149649
    Unavailable
    Mister Owita's Guide to Gardening: How I Learned the Unexpected Joy of a Green Thumb and an Open Heart
    Author

    Carol Wall

    Carol Wall is a writer whose essays and articles have appeared over many years in Southern Living magazine and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. She lives on a tree-lined street in the heart of Middle America.  

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    Reviews for Mister Owita's Guide to Gardening

    3.5/5

    79 ratings25 reviews

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    • 3/5
      An in-depth view of two people from vastly different cultures who form an unlikely friendship.
    • 4/5
      Mister Owita’s Guide to Gardening is a great book for someone who doesn’t usually read non-fiction. In fact, I keep having to remind myself that it really is non-fiction. It mimics closely the happy sort of books I’ve read lately, like Lost Lake and The Wedding Bees, in which people come together and help each other out. The biggest difference is that Mister Owita had a simpler and more believable plot. The writing was beautiful and vividly descriptive. I loved that the author included Mister Owita’s letters to her, because their writing was equally beautiful. The letters also helped give me a feel for Mister Owita’s personality and I found them all the more interesting because they were real.

      This book isn’t a memoir about someone doing something extreme, but I liked that about it. Carol Wall’s life is ordinary enough, compared to my daily life, to be very relatable. At the same time, this wasn’t a boring or substanceless book. The author deals with some of the toughest issues a person can face, from racism to illness to death in the family. She also deals with happier big issues like hope and happiness and facing her fears. It helps that Carol is a great story teller. She drew me in and kept me reading curiously, impatient to find out more about Mister Owita and his wife. As is often the case with non-fiction, I have more patience with author’s keeping secrets when it makes sense because of how the story really happened. I think my only complaint is that the book did feel a bit light despite the weighty issues discussed. In a way though, that is also a positive. The author made it easy to contemplate big, difficult questions and really has written the perfect non-fiction for fiction readers. If you like stories about people helping other people, I’d suggest picking this up.

      This review first published on Doing Dewey.
    • 5/5
      Suffice it to say - this is a lovely, lovely book.
    • 4/5
      Since this book was cataloged in the gardening section and not in the biographies I really expected more gardening information. That said; it is a heartrending look at the influence one man from Kenya had on a whole neighborhood in Virginia. Heartrending because it tells of the author's struggles with breast cancer, her mother's stroke, her father's alzheimer's and Mr. Owita's health problems. It is a beautiful book about coping with the everyday stuff life throw at you. It is a book about friendships. It is a book on a very minor scale about race relations. It is an almost stream of consciousness of the thoughts going through the author's head as she deals day to day. The book is inspiring and thought-provoking. At times you wonder how anyone can think that way. Other time you applaud how they cultivate their friendship.The author has poured her heart out. The book is a moving memorial to her experience. There were a few good gardening points in there too. You will definitely need tissues to get through this one.
    • 5/5
      Caroll Wall, who hates gardening, enslists the help of a black man from Kenya who has done wonders for a neighbor's yard to help her with her own yard. She finds a true, gentle caring man, desipite her original prejudices, who transforms her yard and her spirit. They find genuine friends in each other in the process and help each other by healing each other through difficult times in each other's lives.
    • 1/5
      I didn't finish this book. It was too painful. A mix of Home Gardener and philosophical insights. The style made me feel sick. Sentences like "And she let the apple roll off her fingertips back onto the shelf" describes that she didn't want to buy the fucking apple and put it back when she was shopping. It made me want to throw up.
    • 2/5
      A quick read that is sort of a memior. A woman befriends a neighborhood gardener and the book follows their friendship.
    • 3/5
      This was a very nice memoir about a very close friendship which brought meaning, joy, renewal and comfort to the author and Mister Owita. A moving story of loss, fear, and isolation ameliorated via true friendship.
    • 4/5
      Carol Wall decides to get some landscaping done around her yard and is led to Mister Owita and her whole life changes. One of those wonderful stories that brightens your day, your life.
    • 3/5
      I thought this book would be more about gardening, so that was disappointing. It's a memoir about Carol Wall's struggle with breast cancer and how Mr. Owita, a Kenyan gardener, affected her life. I liked Mr. Owita, but did not care for Carol Wall particularly. Odd, stilted language from Ms. Wall; lyrical, interesting dialogue from Mr. Owita. It was just kind of weird.
    • 5/5
      I loved this memoir by Carol Wall about the friendship that grew between herself and a man she observed working in a neighbor's yard. Giles Owita was originally from Kenya, full of knowledge about gardening, but also about life. Ms. Wall slowly began to appreciate his gentle wisdom, and also began confronting her own prejudices and assumptions. This is a wonderful story about the growth of a true and caring friendship, across both racial and cultural divides. (less)
    • 5/5
      What a beautiful way to show the power of relationships developing through the sharing of life issues over time---and all originating over the terrible condition of Wall's yard! Wall writes beautifully about all of her emotions through her health issues and about her personal connections with family and friends over the years. Everything connects with Mister Owita as the two of them share their lives, always connecting through the state of her "compound." Owita is truly a magical sort of person but his magic is slowly uncovered in this memoir and it's fascinating as well as heartbreaking as she shows us how powerful misconceptions are in our lives and the harm they can do. A lovely book---well worth reading and absorbing.
    • 4/5
      Ms. Wall opens her heart up to the reader with all its fears, prejudices, love, and healing. The catalyst for the relationship the author develops with Giles is gardening, but there isn't much about gardening in this book. It is really more about looking beyond appearances and assumptions, facing fears, and learning grace from the way others live.
    • 5/5
      Caroll Wall, who hates gardening, enslists the help of a black man from Kenya who has done wonders for a neighbor's yard to help her with her own yard. She finds a true, gentle caring man, desipite her original prejudices, who transforms her yard and her spirit. They find genuine friends in each other in the process and help each other by healing each other through difficult times in each other's lives.
    • 4/5
      I do not have the greenest of thumbs. When I bought some of the broccoli, spinach, and lettuce plants that the high school horticulture class had babied along from seed, I brought them home and placed them in the sunniest spot I could find in the house as I figured it was too cold to put these tender little things outside. Two weeks later, they were still alive but crawling with aphids. I painstakingly pinched every tiny aphid and egg I could find every other day while cursing my original impulse to buy them. My daughter mentioned my struggles to the horticulture teacher who told her that they're winter plants and should be planted outside. I breathed a sigh of relief and did that. They promptly died. Clearly I'm cursed. And I don't think I'm meant to garden. So I was intrigued by Carol Wall's memoir, Mister Owita's Guide to Gardening, about her own gardening shortfalls that were turned around by the wonderful man she hired to bring order and beauty into her neglected, overgrown yard. Carol Wall hated flowers. They symbolized death to her and so when she hired her neighbor's new gardener, Mr. Owita, to tackle her own yard, one of the first things that she asks of him is that he pull out the gaudy azalea bushes a former owner had planted. He quietly ignores this particular instruction as he starts to transform Wall's yard. As Mr. Owita makes inroads in the yard, he and Wall start to develop a tentative friendship as well, sharing little tidbits about their lives and families. Soon the tentative friendship blossoms into a much deeper friendship with each of them confiding some of their hopes and fears in each other. He is consoling as she walks the difficult path of caring for and eventually losing aging, ill parents and grapples with her own scary diagnosis. She wants to help him and his wife bring their daughter over from Kenya to join the family they've made in the US. As she tells of the blessing of friendship with Mr. Owita, Wall also reflects on the many things he's taught her: gardening, certainly and an appreciation for flowers and their ephemerality but also equanimity in the face of obstacles, an acceptance of the cycle of life, simple gratitude, courage, and the importance of kindness and forgiveness for all. Through her assumptions about this poor Kenyan immigrant, who in actual fact holds a doctorate, she must face her own prejudices, horrified to find that she has any at all. She witnesses his caring interest in his fellow human beings, his tranquility, his contented joy in life, and his simple but important and powerful acts of nurturing both people and plants. She sees the contrast in his approach to life and her own rage against circumstances that she cannot change and the ways that it hurts her and those she loves. From him, she learns to dig in the dirt and to envision future beauty. A very personal and moving memoir, this is very definitely a love letter to a remarkable friend. It is a lovely and engrossing read that will enchant memoir readers looking for more than just another dysfunctional life story. Although there's not perfection here, in either Wall's or Mr. Owita's lives, and there are seemingly insurmountable obstacles to overcome, there isn't the dysfunction so common in the genre. Wall looks honestly at her own past and the battles she has fought. She doesn't shy away from detailing the times when she thought Mr. Owita's advice was wrong or too hard, only to discover that his advice was in fact the thing that she most needed to hear. He turned around more than her yard; he helped her to change how she views the world and her place in it. And he helped her see the beauty in her azaleas.
    • 4/5
      Mr. Owita's Guide to Gardening is a heart warming story of connections and friendships between the unlikeliest of friends. The writing is open and honest, if at times a bit over descriptive, but the story and the message in the book make it a very inspiring and worth while read.
    • 4/5
      This is an early reviewers book that I won last month and when I got it I couldn't remember what drew me to requesting it. I would never in a million years pick apart any form of the writing in this review because Carol could have had one of her students write it and the story would shine through no matter what. It must have been the gardening that caught my attention, and I do remember the joy of starting a project and seeing it through would bring me in the yard. The friendship she develops with Giles and his family will never falter and I will always remember the quote, " Legend has it that the hummingbird is able to float free of time." What a wonderful book, and inspirational read.
    • 4/5
      Carol Wall's MISTER OWITA'S GUIDE TO GARDENING, a memoir of family, friendship and life-threatening illnesses, is something of a slow starter, with Wall telling of her childhood, marred by the death of an older sister, born with Down Syndrome and a heart defect and her own bout with a thymus condition, treated with radiation by an overzealous physician. She believes this treatment resulted in later neck and throat tumors removed during her adolescence. And later, as an adult, she endured breast cancer and its debilitating chemo treatments.But, despite all of these illnesses, she seems to have made a good life as a high school English teacher with her lawyer husband, Dick, who she married when she was only twenty and he nineteen, both still in college. They raised three children who all seem to have turned out well and live in a comfortable home in Roanoke. But now Wall is coping with the decline of her aged parents - her mother is failing physically and suffers a series of strokes and her father has Alzheimer's. And then Wall herself has not just one more recurrence of breast cancer, but two, resulting finally in a double mastectomy and more chemo and radiation and all of the awful side effects. She does not suffer these multiple setbacks gracefully; her husband bears the brunt of her worst doubts, fears and crises of faith (she is a devout Catholic convert).But she finds solace in the close if guarded friendship she has formed with a Kenyan immigrant named Giles Owita, who she learns belatedly is much more than just her 'gardener.' He holds a Ph.D. in horticulture and practices a Zen-like attitude towards life and all living things. She comes to know his wife and children too and learns their story and sad family secrets.And yes, this 'slow starter' soon began to suck me in as the misfortunes of both families began to multiply. Through the medium of plants and gardening the friendship between 'Mrs Wall' and 'Dr Owita' deepens and takes on a meaningful and touching 'professor-student' nature as successive setbacks and tragedies befall both families.Wall's memoir covers a lot of ground: the inevitable ups and downs of a long marriage, coping with serious illness, loss and letting go, fear and misunderstanding, religious faith, and - perhaps most of all - the importance of friendship, because Giles Owita becomes a true friend, and is a man you will not soon forget.This is a book which will probably resonate most with women readers, because of its in-depth documentation of the terrors associated with the diagnosis and treatment of breast cancer. Wall went through it all more than once and each time it tested her marriage and shook her religious beliefs. Because of her blunt honesty in telling of her travails, Wall sometimes comes across as a bit neurotic, maybe even a whiner. But, to be fair, she had reason for her vigilance and hypochondria. She'd already been through it all and was terrified of a reoccurrence. Men - husbands - should read this book too. Highly recommended.
    • 4/5
      This is the true story of a unique friendship between two people, who at first, seemed to have nothing in common with each other. Carol Wall was a white woman living in a middle class neighborhood in middle America. Her children were grown, she was dealing with her beloved parents growing older, and still dealing with the cancer which she had successfully overcome, but she still fears that it will return. One day, she notices an African man tending her neighbor's yard; the same man that bags her groceries at the supermarket. He is from Kenya, and he is very good at gardening. His name is Giles Owita.Before long, Giles is transforming Carol's yard, and also her life. A caring bond grows between them, but they both hold long buried secrets that, when revealed, will cement their friendship forever.I really enjoyed this book, it was a very compelling story. If you are expecting to find actual gardening tips, you won't find them in this book. If you looking for a story about how the power of friendship can change our hearts and transform our lives, then this book is for you. It also teaches the lesson that we as humans have more in common with each other than we think; we just need to take the time get to know each other and scratch beneath that surface.I could see this book being adapted into a movie; I think Meryl Streep would be perfect in the role of Carol.I received a free advance readers copy of this book from Library Thing; it will be released for sale on March 4, 2014.
    • 1/5
      This is what I call a "Grandma Book". No swear words, no sex, no violence, no action. My grandmother, if she was still alive, would have LOVED this book. I, on the other hand would not put it on the top of my list. Not only was it too slow but I also found it to be pretentious, snooty and uppity. I really was hoping I would enjoy this one more but unfortunately I did not.
    • 5/5
      I received a physical advanced reader’s copy of this book for free on LibraryThing in exchange for an honest review.This story shares a touching journey best summarized by Mister Owita himself - “Illness comes into each life, but we must not let it define us”. Warning: reading this book may inspire you not only to embrace life more fully, but also to garden, particularly if you already enjoy working outdoors.
    • 5/5
      When I first saw the title of this book I thought it might be about gardening. As I began listening, I quickly learned the author did not like gardening and hates doing yard work. She doesn’t even like flower and wanted to rip out the Azaleas. Her yard is a mess and she realizes it is a neighborhood eyesore. Soon Mr. Owita would come to her rescue, in more ways than one.Although gardening does play a role in introducing Carol to Mr. Owita, this is not a story about gardening. When the two first meet they appear to have nothing in common other than Carol needs someone to make her yard look better. Carol is a middle-class southern white woman and Giles Owita is an immigrant from Kenya who works at a grocery store and as a gardener to make ends meet. As they work together in Carol’s garden they share their stories and eventually a few family secrets. We learn that things are not always as they appear.This is a story about friendships, relationships, families, growing older, dealing with adversity and overcoming what live tosses in your way. A beautifully written, heartfelt story, both happy and sad. If I appear to be deliberately vague, it’s because I am. To reveal too much of the story will ruin it for the reader. It’s best to experience each revelation as the author unveils it. Highly recommended – don’t miss this one.Audio Production:The book was read by Cynthia Darlow and although she has won several awards, this was the first time I had listened to one of her productions. Her southern accent for Carol sounded convincing (but then, I’m a northerner), and she also had a believable Kenyan accent for Mr. Owita and his wife. This was an easy book to listen to and at only 7 hours long, I flew through it in two days.
    • 4/5
      When I received Mister Owita’s Guide to Gardening by Carol Wall as an Advanced Reader Copy I was eager to dig in (pun intended). I enjoy gardening and wondered what this memoir would teach me. Surprise…it was not really about tending a garden. It was more about tending a life, tending a friendship, tending to people who cross our path. It is the story of a very unlikely friendship between a suburban white wife, mother, teacher and a Nigerian immigrant, professor, horticulturist, gardener. When Carol Wall approaches him to help her transform her yard and garden, she is unprepared for effect his presence will have in transforming her and her life.I found the book touching while not being sappy. It reminded me to pay attention to life around me and the effect of others on the quality of that life. The characters have physical and emotional hardships and you can feel the pain, the frustration and the helplessness that is experienced. It was a gift to be reminded of the power of caring.
    • 4/5
      Mister Owita’s Guide to Gardening is not your typical memoir. The author, Carol Wall, has written a beautiful book about her personal experiences as a Catholic English teacher whose life and garden are transformed through the compassion of others. Wall takes the reader through various issues about life, trust, health, gardening, education, and so much more. The book is easy to read as well as enjoyable. I highly recommend it for anyone, especially those faced with the need for spiritual or physical healing.
    • 3/5
      The publisher’s description of this memoir as “a white woman living in a lily-white neighborhood in Middle America” who befriends a male Kenyan gardener had me a little wary about simplifications and stereotypes. But I actually keep an eye out for books published by Amy Einhorn's imprint at Penguin … and my own yard needs work … and so I looked forward to a memoir that applied gardening metaphors to friendship and life.Alas, I found the writing amateurish (overwritten, with poor time and content management) and the author prickly. But worse (I hate when this happens!), I found the publisher’s description inaccurate -- this is absolutely a breast-cancer memoir and a memoir about aging parents, woven with a thread about friendship ... with Giles Owita, who I did love and welcomed every time he came to the page.