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FeedCultivating Inspiration
Books can give a little magic to the literary gardeners in your life
By Bonnie Blodgett
Photo by John Abernathy
But they’re not the books that linger on in your heart.
There’s another genre of gardening book whose presence under the tree represents something more intimate. A book of gardening essays or stories is a gift of love from someone who knows you very well and takes an active interest in the life of your mind. Such a book is almost always about the intangibles, rather than the actual plants and pots in the backyard. It’s about what goes on inside; the thoughts and feelings that drive one to garden in a serious way and inflame the imagination while one fiddles with flowers. I’m talking about the little book that comes along at a certain magical time in every serious gardener’s life that marks (or perhaps makes) their passage from dilettante to dedicated gardener. Very often, that little book describes the author’s own such passage.
Several such books transformed me from amateur to obsessive. All came to me unexpectedly. I didn’t ask for them because I didn’t know about them. The only such books I ever actually bought were either second and third copies—I’d loaned out mine and had to replace them—or other works by an author I couldn’t get enough of.
The late Washington Post garden columnist Henry Mitchell is one of the latter. The neighbor who gave me One Man’s Garden (Houghton Mifflin, 1999), his first collection of newspaper pieces, is more than just a neighbor. She is enough older than I am, and enough smarter, calmer, and more patient, to be someone I think of as a mentor in the art of living (and aging) gracefully. Her garden is small, formal, and immaculate. She hires people to help her. So should I.
She knew that I would be captivated by Mitchell’s singular blend of crankiness and besottedness with beautiful plants. He was a collector of interesting specimens, not a designer of gardens. His tiny garden was cluttered and chaotic, but his plants were fussed over like standard poodles at the Westminster dog show. For him, recommending a plant was no trivial matter; he might have been sending it off to college. He knew that dahlias aren’t for everyone, that alpines are an acquired taste, and that two cultivars of a single species could be as different as a tiger and a gnat. He was always hunting for the best or most unusual cultivar, and then experimenting until he figured out exactly how it liked to live.
When Mitchell’s subsequent books came out, I began buying them for my friends and myself. I’ve read them again and again. He has a grounding effect. Just a paragraph of Henry and I settle down, take a breath, have a chuckle, and then rush headlong out to the shed to find my trowel.
I was also bowled over, though in a different way, by Mirabel Osler’s classic of garden philosophy, A Gentle Plea for Chaos (Arcade Publishing, 1998). I first read Osler’s famous essay of the same name in the legendary English quarterly, Hortus. Both Chaos and Hortus helped inspire me to launch my own newsletter, The Garden Letter, though in opposite ways. Hortus was the literate, handcrafted package; Chaos was the content, with the message that gardeners shouldn’t take their gardens too seriously and should allow a bit of nature to creep in.
Osler’s essay collection was a gift from my sister’s mother-in-law, a woman very different from me, though one I admire greatly. Her garden, too, is formal and immaculate, though huge. No-nonsense and practical, she has the personality of a camp director. The book, she confessed, was “just not my thing.” She correctly guessed that it might be mine.
One of my several thousand second cousins gave me Michael Pollan’s Second Nature: A Gardener’s Education (Grove Press, 2003). She and I were only vaguely friends then. She was much younger and yet much more appreciative of old-world things than I was. She loved Pollan’s descriptions of the fragrant roses that flourished in gardens before the introduction of the hybrid tea, and his prescient lament that egalitarian-minded Americans shouldn’t feel so guilty about putting a wall around their yards and gardens (we’ve gotten over that).
My final nominee for a gardener’s Christmas stocking is Eleanor Perenyi’s Green Thoughts: A Writer in the Garden (Modern Library, 2002), another book I discovered back when I was beginning to be a serious gardener (and beginning to think about producing my own gardening publication). I gave The Garden Letter the subtitle “Green Thoughts for the Northern Gardener” in honor of Perenyi (and in hopes she would never find out about this bit of worshipful plagiarism). Perenyi’s writing voice is wise and often bemused, but she is opinionated, as is Gertrude Jekyll, another favorite of mine.
All of these writers are opinionated. What good writer isn’t? Perenyi’s opinions carry a faint whiff of elitism: she disdains anyone who would grow ... certain plants (I’ll not further besmirch their reputations). Her taste is like that of any well-heeled matron living in Connecticut who was formerly married to a European count. Yet she somehow manages to be both unstuffy and down to earth. Most of all, she appreciates competence and horticultural depth, and is enormously curious about plants—where they came from, how they got their reputations, and what they like.
I can’t leave out these three authors: Any book by Elizabeth Lawrence, Christopher Lloyd, or Vita Sackville-West is bound to impress any budding gardener. Lawrence gardened in the South and traded seeds with the likes of Katharine White, fiction editor of The New Yorker. Her books are filled with Southern charm, know-how, and pathos. Lloyd, who died recently in his nineties, was an energetic and enthusiastic, hands-on dirt gardener to the end. I am still amazed that I met him once—in fact, spent an entire evening talking about plants with him (he was too old to “circulate”) in a quiet corner of a crowded room during a cocktail party. His garden in England launched the “hot-tropical colors” trend. He was an original.
The novelist Vita Sackville-West, mistress of Sissinghurst, wrote chatty, informative garden columns on the side. Reading them is like having a gabfest with a witty neighbor who happens to be a garden-design genius. A little treasure of hers is Some Flowers (Trafalgar Square, 1996), containing fond (and very short) essays on flowering plants she especially loves, accompanied by pretty color drawings.
Before you give such books as gifts, be forewarned that one of two fates await them: Either they’ll sit under the tree indefinitely (until someone slips them into the bookcase), or they’ll elicit a gushing thank-you note filled with long quotations and assertions that you changed their life. I’d say it’s worth the gamble. You can always get something more practical next year. A garden photography book would be nice.
Bonnie Blodgett, a St. Paul writer, edits The Garden Letter: Green Thoughts for the Northern Gardener.
From the Heart
Some garden books instruct, some inspire. Others are the perfect gift for the gardeners in your life who also love to read. These are some of my favorites:- Gertrude Jekyll, Color Schemes for the Flower Garden (Ayer Company Publishing, 1983)
- Elizabeth Lawrence, A Southern Garden (University of North Carolina, 2001), and by Emily Herring Wilson, Two Gardeners: Katharine S. White and Elizabeth Lawrence—A Friendship in Letters (Beacon Press, 2003)
- Christopher Lloyd, The Well-Tempered Garden (Weidenfeld Nicolson Illustrated, 2003)
- Henry Mitchell, One Man’s Garden (Houghton Mifflin, Edition 1999)
- Mirabel Osler, A Gentle Plea for Chaos (Arcade Publishing, 1998)
- Eleanor Perenyi, Green Thoughts: A Writer in the Garden (Modern Library, February 2002)
- Michael Pollan, Second Nature: A Gardener’s Education (Grove Press, 2003)
- Vita Sackville-West, Some Flowers (Pavilion Books, 1993)
11 ISSUES (1 YEAR)
