As fall turns to winter, it is a fitting time to break from labor in our Napa Valley gardens and pick up some garden writing. Books and periodicals allow us to contemplate the pleasures of gardening without the limitations of time, soil and climate.
Garden writing of wide variety and vigor abounds. There are, of course, innumerable comprehensive references ranging from Sunset’s Western Garden Book (Sunset Books, 2007) and the American Horticulture Society’s Encyclopedia of Gardening (Dorling Kindersley, 1993) to the Master Gardeners’ own California Master Gardener Handbook (University of California, Publication 3382, 2002).
Scores of gardening periodicals are published each year. It seems that every horticultural society, botanical garden and garden club publishes a periodical devoted to its particular interest, whether that be orchids, conifers or irises.
And then there are the big national and international gardening magazines. Any gardener would be seduced by the glossy photographs, and the possibilities, offered by Fine Gardening, English Garden, Garden Design, Gardens Illustrated, Horticulture, Organic Gardening and San Francisco-based Pacific Horticulture. Each offers graphics, advice, gardening tips and recommendations for specific climate zones, as well as designs that promise to make your garden the neighborhood standout.
All of these contemporary works are familiar to most gardeners. They are useful, even essential, but they are not the only offerings. Nor are they the most delightful. The writings that can give the most pleasure are those that, by well-tended prose, engage and educate the reader and connect him or her to other gardeners who also worked in soil, albeit in other places and at other times.
Take Hortus, a British gardening quarterly published and edited by David Wheeler at Bryansground Press. This superbly written and beautifully printed bound journal presents the finest literary garden writing published today. You won’t find in these pages a single glossy photograph or a list of the 10 best plants for your zone. What you will find is impeccable writing on an astonishing array of garden topics, by authors, both British and American, who marry a passion for gardening with the craft of good writing.
Quite different are the essays of the late, inimitable Henry Mitchell. For more than 20 years, Mitchell wrote the garden column for the Washington Post. His essays have been collected in several books, including The Essential Earthman (Houghton Mifflin, 1981), One Man’s Garden (Houghton Mifflin, 1992) and, posthumously, Henry Mitchell on Gardening (Houghton Mifflin, 1998).
Mitchell is Everyman as gardener, and gardener as Everyman. His essays are literate, often wickedly funny, and always a comfort. They provide a respite from the garden bullies who tell you what you must do this month in the garden or else, and a release from the notion, as seductive as it is empty, that perfection in the garden is actually attainable.
Different from Mitchell but still delightful are the garden writings of Katharine S. White and Elizabeth Lawrence, whom many gardeners meet for the first time in Two Gardeners: A Friendship in Letters (Beacon Press, 2002). White gardened in Maine, Lawrence in North Carolina. In their letters, these two women, both noted authors and inveterate letter writers, share their successes and failures, both in writing and in gardening.
White, wife of E.B. of Charlotte’s Web fame, authored Onward and Upward in the Garden (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1979), a collection of 14 now-classic garden essays that appeared in the New Yorker magazine from 1958 through 1970. White’s particular interest was seed, flower and bulb catalogs. She was one of the first writers to review catalogs as books and express the pleasure that can be found in perusing them.
For her part, Lawrence was not only an exceptional gardener, but also an author with that wonderful ability to delight and inform at the same time. The voluminous correspondence she maintained with gardeners across the country broadened her appeal to gardeners beyond the southern zone. In the most charming of her books, The Little Bulbs: A Tale of Two Gardens (Duke University Press, 1986), she turned her observant eye to the lesser known bulbs and conducted an extended conversation about their habits and qualities with her network of gardening friends around the country.
In turning from gardening to garden writing, we can only nod in agreement with Elizabeth Lawrence’s sentiment that “Gardening, reading about gardening, and writing about gardening are all one: no one can garden alone.”