A garden requires patience and attention. And [Patrick Lane], after a life he claims was wilder than Jack Kerouac's or Allen Ginsberg's, needed to pay attention. He grew up in the interior of B.C., and he, his brothers and parents all worked hard and fruitlessly, through the boom and (mostly) bust cycles of the resource economy.

"Feeling has come back on tentative feet," he writes, half-way through his year. Patrick's garden is also justly famous. It sits on a half-acre in a middle-class subdivision on the Saanich Peninsula in B.C.

Patrick loves orb spiders, and he is delighted to hear that there is a peculiar loud, coarse noise emanating mysteriously out of the earth under my bathroom window. "The tree frogs are back!" he says. "I was worried."

'I didn't want to die." Patrick Lane, one of Canada's greatest living poets, sits quietly in his house, surrounded by the garden that saved his life. His memoir, There is a Season, written through the annual cycle of his garden, out this month from McClelland and Stewart, is already considered one of the best memoirs to be published in this country.

There is something different about a man who gardens. Francis Bacon called it "the purest of human pleasure." It changes everyone who properly engages with the patch of ground behind his house.

One of my dearest friends gardens, and when I walk into his house, instead of the hard surfaces and matte steel of the successful bachelor, I see a forest of delicate plants, many nursed from seed. Vines drape the rooms and windows, and I am always set back on my heels with the sheer, shuddering beauty of it all. His backyard? Magic. A man who makes a garden cannot be cruel.

I am not a gardener. My friend explains how to start seeds: "you take a damp paper towel, fold the seeds inside it, make sure every day that it is damp and in a few days .... " Remember to keep a paper towel wet? Are you kidding?

A garden requires patience and attention. And Patrick Lane, after a life he claims was wilder than Jack Kerouac's or Allen Ginsberg's, needed to pay attention. He grew up in the interior of B.C., and he, his brothers and parents all worked hard and fruitlessly, through the boom and (mostly) bust cycles of the resource economy.

With only a high school education, married with a child by 20, he started reading his way through the canon of great literature. "As a boy, I was the one with a book in my back pocket, and four more scattered through the house."

He started writing poetry at 21. The first publication of one of his poems, when he was 24, electrified him. And from then on, that is what he did.

Eventually, that meant goodbye to the sawmills and brutally hard odd jobs that had sustained him and his multiplying family.

Along the way, he won one prize after another, published 21 well- received volumes of poetry, produced five children, divorced twice and drank hard, every single day.

"The story of literature is the story of excess: Gwendolyn McEwan, Milton Acorn, John Newlove. Margaret Laurence, for instance, and she is not alone, ruined her last working years by drinking," he says.

"When I decided to stop, four years ago, I was afraid I couldn't write again. So three weeks after I came home from rehab, I decided to write about the garden. That'll make me write for a year, I thought. I was very fragile, very vulnerable."

"Feeling has come back on tentative feet," he writes, half-way through his year. Patrick's garden is also justly famous. It sits on a half-acre in a middle-class subdivision on the Saanich Peninsula in B.C.

"I have seen gardens the size of a small closet" he writes. "A beautiful garden shines, it doesn't have to be some huge display, just a couple of flower beds."

Patrick's garden shines. It is dense with plantings. There is a pond, there are places to sit, and it is mature and sheltering.

At the end of each chapter, there is a list of the flowers and plants that grow in his garden, and the critters, bugs, spiders and birds who visit.

Patrick loves orb spiders, and he is delighted to hear that there is a peculiar loud, coarse noise emanating mysteriously out of the earth under my bathroom window. "The tree frogs are back!" he says. "I was worried."

"Writing a book is worth 10 years of therapy," says Oprah.

Lane's memories return, as he digs up a bed, divides plants, considers how to make an azalea bud again.

He goes on his annual stone-collecting trek with poet and friend Bryan Brett. Every rock in his garden holds memories as strong as those evoked by Proust's madeleines. Through the year, the pain of the long-ago past begins to subside.

And Lane reveals himself as an ecstatic, a man who can rise at 5 a.m. on a Sunday, and find himself "turning in a silly primitive dance, utterly in love with the morning."

After 22 years with poet Lorna Crozier, he marries, for the first time fully aware of that awesome step.

He is hyperaware of what goes on in his garden, too. There can be no better guide to gardening on the West Coast, or anywhere in Canada. Lane knows every plant, what it needs and when it needs it. He knows what each insect contributes.

Along with a memoir, he teaches awareness, stillness, and gives good solid practical advice for the ebb and flow of every season.

A curious neighbour walks by and looks in. "How long did it take you to build this?"

"Sixty-two years," he answers.

Patrick Lane's memoir and garden are the crowning works of his life.