Once upon a time, not so very long ago, Dominique Browning had the world at her feet. She had written two inspiring and widely admired books that combined tantalizing fragments of memoir with graceful meditations on the healing power of place. She had — so the first of those books, “Around the House and in the Garden,” told us — allowed her own home to salve the wounds caused by the brusque ending of a 15-year marriage. “Paths of Desire,” Browning’s follow-up book, applied the same treatment, with the same entrancing combination of humor and humanity, to a beloved garden. What Browning scarcely mentioned in either book was that for nearly 13 years she was also the editor in chief of House & Garden magazine. Work, she now confesses, was “the scaffolding of my life.”