Garden Books 

By Pen and By Spade: An Anthology of Garden Writing From “Hortus” is garden writing at its best. This diverse and inspiring compilation includes essays by acclaimed past and present garden writers from around the globe who were featured in Hortus magazine, a quarterly published in Wales.

Joe Eck and Wayne Winterrowd were a creative team whose work in the garden and in print were so intertwined it is difficult to separate them. A Year at North Hill is a masterful account of their garden in Readsboro, Vermont, which showcased their knowledge, dedication, and love. I was fortunate to know Joe and Wayne and to visit their garden often. It was one of the most beautiful gardens I’ve ever seen. “Gardening is the knot we have chosen to catch up all the other threads of our existence.”

The Tulip, Anna Pavord’s big, beautiful book, is the story of one plant genus from its origins in the Asian steppes to the present day when thousands of millions of bulbs are planted every year. She presents the insanity of tulipmania in the 17th century, when fortunes were made and lost over a single tulip bulb. This book is subtitled “The Story of a Flower That Has Made Men Mad” and in our New England gardens, the tulips drive us mad as the bulbs are planted only to be eaten by chipmunks, squirrels, and deer.

One of Allan’s fellow gardeners in the London allotment was Howard Sooley, who also provides the photographs for the book Derek Jarman’s Garden. In this intimate memoir, the filmmaker reflects on the garden he created in the bleak and inhospitable environment around the fisherman’s cottage where he lived at the end of his life. On a shingle (stony) beach, he made an oasis comprised of driftwood, rusty metal, and plants. “Paradise haunts gardens, and it haunts mine.”

Eleanor Perenyi’s Green Thoughts is inspired by her garden on the Connecticut coast. A series of chapters from A to Z touches on topics including “Ashes,” “Blues,” “Partly Cloudy,” “Toads,” and “Wildflowers.” This is a terrific bedside companion to be opened and read at random on a snowy night.

From 1947 until 1961 Vita Sackville-West was the weekly garden writer for the London Observer. V. Sackville-West’s Garden Book is a compilation of many of the articles from her column. Though she was a haughty aristocrat, Vita’s writing presents her in a friendly, personable manner: encouraging, bantering, and conversational. She imparts her vast knowledge of plants in a delightful stylish voice. When I read these essays, I feel as though I am in her Sissinghurst garden.

In the pages of By Pen and By Spade, I was introduced to the writing of Mirabel Osler and was so thrilled by it that I purchased her book A Gentle Plea for Chaos: The Enchantment of Gardening. After the seductive title, she offers reflections on wildness, abandon, and her garden in Shropshire: “A mild desire for amorphous confusion which will gently infiltrate and, given time, will one day set the garden singing.”

Across the country, in the Pacific Northwest, Daniel Hinkley created a nursery business, Heronswood, in 1987. His catalogs were my first introduction to his corny humor and his delicate, descriptive observations of plants. His book The Explorer’s Garden: Rare and Unusual Perrenials is an amazing travelogue of his passionate pursuit of new plants around the world, as well as an instructive manual about plant care and propagation. “When all is said and done, it will forever be the garden that sustains me and provides my purpose.”

Plot 29, A Memoir by Allan Jenkins shows the healing power of gardens through an examination of the author’s life, with the backdrop of an allotment garden in London. Allan delves into memories of his childhood in foster care while finding solace digging in the earth of his garden. “So, I sow nasturtiums because they are tangled like bindweed with thoughts of the boy I was, the boy I became, the brother I lost, perhaps the father I’ll never know.”

The Wild Braid: A Poet Reflects on a Century in the Garden by Stanley Kunitz, with Genine Lentine, is a contemplation in the poet–gardener’s voice. Through interviews, the Pulitzer Prize winning poet speaks about life, his Provincetown garden, writing, and his one-hundred years. This book offers insight into the creative process, showing the commonalities between gardening and poetry. “At my touch the wild braid of creation trembles.”

Onward and Upward in the Garden is a collection of fourteen essays by Katharine White, which were first published in The New Yorker between 1958 and 1970. Sophisticated and intimate, these are compelling period pieces of another time. Accompanying an endnote, her husband, E. B. White, added a photo of Katharine’s childhood garden on Bridge Street in Northampton, which she was writing about when she died.