In Cultivating Delight, naturalist, poet, and author of the widely-beloved and bestselling A Natural History of the Senses, Diane Ackerman shares with her readers the delight, joy, and pathos she experiences in the life of her garden and its myriad inhabitants. Here, Ackerman explores the living world outside the human element. It is through the ever-changing life and lives of and in her garden that Ackerman juxtaposes that which we attempt to control as humans whose natural inclination is for the imposition of order against that which is natural and therefore uncontrollable, and steeped in the always chaotic change of the seasons and the passage of time.

Whether Ackerman is deadheading flowers, or glorying in the profusion of more than 100 rose bushes and perennials; providing a regular meal of sugar water for the frenetic, frazzled and short life of the hummingbird; offering an off-season treat of peaches to the most dreaded, scavenging, and beautiful of garden pests, the deer; or even studying the slug, the author welcomes the unexpected drama and extravagance, as well as the sanctuary the garden provides not only to her, but to its other inhabitants as well. It is through her garden that Ackerman offers her readers the firsthand experience of the beauty of impermanence, with which the passage of time comes not only death in the garden, but life as well.