While I am an avid reader, gardening books didn’t have a big place in my life until our family was preparing to leave New York City for the wilds of Heath. By happenstance, I was given “Onward and Upward in the Garden” (1979) by Katharine S. White, with an introduction by her husband, E.B. White.
I had tended vegetable gardens before but hadn’t ever given a thought to flower gardens. However, that is where Katherine White’s heart lay. The very first essay in the book is “A Romp in the Catalogues” with an image from the Roses of Yesterday and Today floral catalog. It promised “old-fashioned — rare — unusual” as well as “selected modern roses.” That book changed my life. I sent for the catalog and began planning a hardy old-fashioned rose garden before we even arrived in Heath in December 1979.
White was an elegant woman and an elegant writer. While she had help in her Maine garden, she made the decisions about plants and arrangements. Her descriptions of her reactions to the catalogs, of flowers and vegetables are deliciously opinionated. When talking about one particular book for example, she wrote, “Your head will swim, your mind will boggle at the cataloguer’s task but soon you’ll realize that if you do your homework conscientiously, it will not be (the author’s) fault if you do not grow its seeds successfully.”
Just a list of the chapters gives you a sense of her personality and humor.
The well-known British author of novels, mysteries, children’s books and plays, Beverley Nichols, also wrote numerous books about his houses and gardens. His book, “Garden Open Today (1965),” is wonderful. I have to credit British-born Elsa Bakalar, my Heath neighbor, for introducing me to Nichols and a number of other British gardeners and their gardens. She shares a sense of humor with gardener/writers like Nichols and I was happy to join the fun.
The thing to remember is that, if the garden is open, the gardener is sure to meet visitors who have different opinions. Nichols has acknowledged them and gone on to be very firm with his own views and findings. In the chapter “Mysteries,” he declaims about his experiences with the Climbing Flaming Nasturtium (Tropaeolum speciosum). He concludes that chapter with “I hope I have written enough to dispel any illusion that mine is a garden where nothing ever goes wrong.”
None of us gardeners can ever make such a claim, but it is because of this book that I became entranced with the ideas contained in “Garden Open Today,” especially when visitors to my own gardens would whisper to a companion — “She doesn’t weed, does she?” In spite of such visitors, my annual June Rose Walk, which is open to the public, is a joy.
Having mentioned Bakalar, my neighbor, I cannot tell you how much she taught me. I, who had never planted a perennial before, found her stuffed perennial borders breathtaking. She taught me about color and variety and other gardening tips.
“(Garden catalogs) would describe both of these colors as red, and that is so imprecise. One is scarlet and one is crimson. . . . To me, scarlet is the color of a guardsman’s tunic, and crimson is the color of Victorian draperies,” she told me once.
Though she was very particular about the use of color, and all the other elements of the garden, she was also devoted to the right of every gardener to do exactly what she or he wanted.
Her beloved husband, Mike, encouraged her to put all her wit and wisdom into a book. Happily, her book, “A Garden of One’s Own,” with its glorious photos by Gary Mottau, generously teaches all of us how to make perennial gardens filled with all our own passions.
There are other books I treasure, not all of them by British authors. Czech brothers Karel and Josef Capek, for example, wrote and delightfully illustrated “The Gardener’s Year” in 1931. This amusing book about the trials and tribulations of being a gardener takes us through the year from frost flowers on the January windowpane to the trials of flower catalogs in December. I would not have expected that the author of a book like this would also be the Czech author of science fiction who invented the word Robot. But, as others have said, there are many mysteries in the garden.
Amy Stewart has written several fascinating garden books, but I was particularly intrigued by “Wicked Plants: The Weed that Killed Lincoln’s Mother and Other Botanical Atrocities” (2009). Stewart is a great researcher and writer. She found a stunning number of poisonous plants. I will not leave you on tenterhooks; the weed that killed Lincoln’s mother was white snakeroot, Eupatrium rugosum. This plant was sometimes found in Indiana pastures where cattle grazed. Their milk made their cows very sick. The milk could kill those who drank it, including Nancy Hanks, who died at age 34, leaving her son, 9-year-old Abraham Lincoln, an orphan.
I will have to end here, but all these books are available for sale or at your local library through the magic of the CW Mars interlibrary system. Happy reading.
Pat Leuchtman has been writing and gardening since 1980. Readers can leave comments at her website: commonweeder.com.