To be able to read in a garden is a joy. I wish I could be more like the Reader in my photograph, absorbed in the beauty of words while surrounded by the beauty of flowers, waterfall and stone.

Whenever I try to read in Rosetta, or in any other garden for that matter, I find the sights and sounds of nature around me so wonderfully distracting that I can’t focus on the words on the page. So I surrender and read the flowers and the trees and the view instead.

I wonder what my Reader is reading. If I could only let the flowers just be background and not demand my attention, I would sit in the garden and lose myself in Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life, a novel just as beautiful and intense as the flowers.