This essay suggests looking to garden writing for eco-sustainable impulses and a dialogue between a human subject and a living environment. By giving centre stage to gardening issues, garden writings present readers with a narrative that resituates anthropocentricism in ecological contexts as human subjectivity emerges from between the lines. The example discussed, Eleanor Perényi’s Green Thoughts: A Writer in the Garden (1981) uses a guidebook format to convey alternative ideas on modernising nature by presenting eco-sustainability as a process that is both historical and transcultural.