That could have been the title of my autobiography but instead it’s the title of Eleanor Perenyi’s book of assorted alphebetized essays on gardening and this months selection for the Garden Blogger’s Book Club (graciously hosted by Carol at May Dreams Gardens). A slightly used copy of Green Thoughts: A Writer in the Garden has been in my bedside stack mostly unread for months. When I discovered recently that it was this months book I thought “oh well, too bad I didn’t read it sooner”. But I opened it up again anyway and realized that it’s really not meant to be read cover to cover in a sitting. Rather, pick a chapter, any chapter! Her topics range from “Blues” to “Tools” to “Magic” to “Potatoes” to “Partly Cloudy” and seem almost like blog posts to me. Ms. Perenyi says in the forward “a writer who gardens is sooner or later going to write a book about the subject – I take that as inevitable”. It’s true whether you’re a writer who gardens or a gardener who writes – we are an opinionated bunch and we love to share! She’d fit right in the blogging community. She makes me chuckle and bristle by turns just like some of the writers on, say, Garden Rant! And I have the added benefit of having a copy underlined by a previous reader – it’s almost like the book has a comments box. In the “Lilies” chapter, this line was underscored: “I order lilies only every other year and spend, each time, about $100. I waste twice that on cigarettes.” Kindred spirits, clearly! Prices of lilies and cigarettes notwithstanding, this book could have been written yesterday or tomorrow. Ms. Perenyi sounds like a lot of us when she talks about organic gardening methods: “…I can now either beg or steal the bags of leaves unwisely set out for collection by the inorganic neighbors and add them to our store.” And what she writes about “old fashioned and solidly made garden [tools]” that she bought in “a sort of hardware heaven” that went out of business and was “replaced by a store called Unisex, whose speciality was blue jeans” is -ugh!- so frustratingly true.

One thing that seems to me to have changed since 1981 is that I don’t believe as she did that “gardens like mine, which go by the unpleasing name of ‘labor intensive’, are on their way out”. I think that if gardening was truly passe then, it’s back in vogue now. Proof is in on the internet by way of hundreds of garden blogs, in well loved public gardens like Blithewold and the reprinting of Eleanor Perenyi’s “classic” Green Thoughts. (I guess I’ll need a different title for my book…)

The June/July selection for The Garden Bloggers’ Book Club is My Summer in a Garden by Charles Dudley Warner and this time I read the book! (Lately, since we’ve gotten into the maintenance groove, I’ve been able again to open a book and not just pass right out – hooray!)

Warner wrote this book in 1870 – about 20 years before the Van Wickles bought and built Blithewold’s first house – and if it weren’t for slightly elderly language as well as very elderly racial and political attitudes, it reads like I wish I had thought of it. And it reads like it was written by a gardener. Seems like every gardener I know has a similar sarcastic bent and a tendency to cynical optimism (hopeful pessimism?). On weeds, Warner says,

I scarcely dare trust myself to speak of the weeds. They grow as if the devil was in them … The sort of weed which I most hate (if I can be said to hate any thing which grows in my own garden) is the “pusley”, a fat, ground-clinging, spreading greasy thing and the most propagatious (it is not my fault if the word is not in the dictionary) plant I know.

Just last week I was talking to another gardener (Hey Pam!) about purslane and how we all have bumper crops of it and too bad we don’t think it’s super tasty. (She’s actually tried it; I don’t feel the need to) Warner goes on to say (in a way that makes this modern-day gardener cringe and that I won’t quote verbatim) that he saw an Asian man boil and eat it “with relish” and worried that if he worked in Warner’s garden, the man might “cultivate it at the expense of the strawberries and melons.” The humor at least is up my alley…

One passage that was non-cringe inducing was his rhapsody about a new hoe. We gardeners love our tools! (A tangent question to readers: What’s your favorite tool? Mine is my 15 year old hori-hori: The handle is polished from use, the blade is smooth as silk and sturdy, intimidating to weeds and fits perfectly in my back pocket – nevermind that my pockets have all blown-out) About his hoe, Warner says,

… I do not mind saying that it has changed my view of the desirableness and value of human life. It has in fact made life a holiday to me.

Nothing like a well designed tool to make a gardener’s day! Our vegetable garden volunteer, Dick, uses his mother’s tools and guards them from the rest of us. They just don’t make hoes and spades like they used to…

I’m not sure whether Blithwold’s Bessie (Van Wickle McKee) would have read or enjoyed the book. (Comments from the elves in the archives would be most appreciated!). Warner teases his wife mercilously (sweetly or meanly, it’s sometimes hard to tell), accuses her of stealing the credit of growing his vegetables and says in pre-votes-for-women days,

Here I sat at the table, armed with the ballot, but really powerless among my own vegetables. While we are being amused by the ballot, woman is quietly taking things into her own hands.

All in all, reading My Summer in a Garden is like a studying snapshot portrait of a nineteenth century gardener – it’s interesting for the view in the picture’s background of a different time and fun to find there’s a family resemblance.

I haven’t read the book club’s selection for this month: Passalong Plants by Steve Bender and Felder Rushing (every time lately that I sit still with any open book I pass out cold – it’s spring…) but there’s an invitation to join the club with a story — and as luck would have it, one of Blithewold’s extra special “passalong” plants just started to bloom!

Around the turn of the (20th) century, the Ladies Association of Mount Vernon sold rooted cuttings of a chestnut rose (probably the one called ‘Martha Washington’) as a fundraiser to preserve and restore that property. According to evidence found in Blithewold’s archives, Bessie Van Wickle, a member of The Colonial Dames, visited Virginia around that time and quite probably returned with (at least) one of those roses. The Rosa roxburghii by the Visitor’s Center is a massive shrub that blooms a clear pink single that a horticulturist at Mount Vernon agreed looks to be the same as theirs. British author, Marion Cran, visited Blithewold in the 1920′s and in her book Gardens in America, commented on Bessie’s chestnut rose – it must have been in bloom when she visited…

Things sometimes come around full circle, and now that Blithewold is a non-profit public garden in need of funds for preservation and restoration, seedlings and cuttings of Bessie’s Chestnut Rose have occasionally been potted up for sale and passed along!