My Favorite Gardening Books

Even though the garden book title that best describes me now is this one….

I still read gardening books as if they were novels….

Think a gardening book can't be a page turner to a novice gardener? The one on the left hooked me on gardening when we bought this 1920 farmhouse and 24 acres in 1990…..

We Made A Garden by Margery Fish made me fall in love with gardening. It is the story of her East Lambrook Manor in Somerset. (There is a slightly autocratic husband too.) She wrote:

"You can't make a garden in a hurry, particularly one belonging to an old house.

House and garden must look as if they had grown up together,

and the only way to do this is to live in the house,

get the feel of it,

and then by degrees the idea of the garden will grow."

The book on the right above is The Gardener's Essential Gertrude Jekyll, and those boots on the cover are Miss Jekyll's army boots that she gardened in.

 Even now, no longer much of a gardener, I put aside this book to read one chapter again--"Flowers in the House." I can't resist putting this quote for those of us who love to picture someone's rooms….

"My house has the walls of all rooms plainly lime-whited, giving a white of delicately warm color…the sitting room, whose window curtains are of a madder-dyed cloth, and whose other furniture is mostly covered with stuff of a dull orange color, likes to have the furniture color repeated in its flowers, and is never so happily be-flowered as with double-orange Day-Lily or orange Herring-lillies (Lillium corceum), and with this it often insists on some bowls of purple flowers. This is where they show on the warm-white wall, away from the madder-dyed curtains, in combination with the cool gray-brown of the large oak beams and braces."

Can't you just picture Gertrude Jekyll's sitting room? The introduction to this book is by Elizabeth Lawrence and her book is below because it's time to turn to American gardeners. First though I have to show this beautiful book, an anthology of Vita Sackville-West's writings.

I can't say that this book was much help to me as a gardener. My house is not Sissinghurst. It is a beautiful book, a treat to read and gave me far too much lust for English roses that was impossible to fulfill.

Next is Through the Garden Gate by Elizabeth Lawrence. 

A Georgia girl who lived and gardened in North Carolina, this month by month book is a favorite. She was called the Jane Austen of the gardening world.

I also have her The Little Bulbs, found at Goodwill with the name of the previous owner inscribed. Highly annotated throughout, I imagined how beautiful the owner's garden must have been back in the late 1950s. I collect old Nashville phone books from the 1940s through 1950s and found the owner in one, with her address!

R.H. drove me on a spring pilgrimage to the house one day but too many decades had gone by for the yard to show many remains of the spring bulbs she may have planted. I was disappointed but it did give me the idea for a book I spent some time working on, picturing it as a movie with Minnie Driver starring. Minnie Driver will be far too old to star in it by the time I finish writing the book!

Next book, and I can't even begin to tell you how much I love this book: Onward and Upward in the Garden….

Probably totally irrelevant today but my fascination with Katharine S. White and her husband E. B. White knows no bounds. I think I've always been a little bit in love with her husband. 

Andy--I call him Andy and who's going to stop me? Andy wrote the introduction for the book and edited the articles in it that were originally in The New Yorker magazine. They were actually critiques of garden catalogues, and they are as interesting as best seller novels. 

Mrs. White--I call her Mrs. White--had a different gardening style from that of Gertrude Jekyll, that of no gardening style. Andy wrote:

"Her Army boots were likely to be Ferragamo shoes…

If when she arrived back indoors the Ferragamos were encased in muck,

she kicked them off.

If the tweed suit was a mess, she sent it to the cleaner's."

One thing I can guarantee from reading everything I could about Katharine S. White--
she was a character. And he was a sweetheart and adored her, I think.

She did inspire a love of garden catalogues in me and I still read them. Here is a 1930 one that I treasure…. 

There are other favorite gardening books in my collection. A book by The Old Dirt Dobber. My father used to listen to his radio program…

The Practical Book of Garden Flowers by Richardson Wright. I could read Mr. Wright write about changing a light bulb and be enthralled…

The garden book I've had the longest came with me when I got married. It's an old National Geographic Society book called The World in Your Garden.

I remember lying in bed with a horrible case of tonsillitis in the 10th grade and drawing pictures from it...

And here is the only new garden book I've bought in years,

Tara Dillard's The Garden View

How I wish that R.H. and I had found her book decades ago! 

Tara's blog is on my blogroll  [and HERE]. You're in for a treat when you visit her. Tara is a nationally known garden designer, author, lecturer, garden genius.

Right now she is moving to an early 1900 house, leaving her beautiful gardens intact for the lucky buyer, so you will be in at the beginning of her exciting new plans if you've never visited her blog. Be sure to spend some time clicking on her "Vanishing Threshold" label. It will transform your life!

Here's a quote from Tara:

"I believe in more than a beautiful landscape.

I believe the action steps of creating/

keeping a beautiful garden

are the key to a beautiful life."

And be sure to watch for how Tara Dillard signs every post and almost every comment she leaves wherever she visits. I'm not going to tell you what it is. Go see for yourself.

Added later, And a very happy birthday to our amazing daughter Christy!

This picture was taken in our picnic shelter when Christy and Bryan visited us on Memorial Day last year. They'll be back here soon for July 4th!