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From the Archives
Archive for November, 2007
This is What Garden Writing Should Be: Eleanor Perenyi’s “Green Thoughts”
My copy of Green Thoughts finally arrived from my library co-op two weeks ago. It’s a modest looking little book. You get the sense from the cover (I had a 2002 edition) with its demure-looking botanical drawing, that this is a gentle, pleasant little read. What you find instead is one of the most enthusiastic, opinionated, in-depth treatises on gardening I’ve ever read.
Perenyi had me from the closing lines of her foreword, in which she states:
“As I look about me, I have reason to believe I belong to a vanishing species. Gardens like mine, which go by the unpleasing name of ‘labor intensive,’ are on their way out and before they go, I would like to contribute my penny’s worth to their history.”
I would love to believe, 26 years after the publication of Green Thoughts, that we organic, ‘labor intensive’ gardeners are merely ahead of the curve; that the rest of the world is on the verge of seeing the folly of waging chemical warfare on the garden and will be joining us momentarily. As much as I’d like to believe that, the fact of the matter is that I’m the only one in my immediate neighborhood with a compost pile. My neighbors and family don’t understand why I don’t just whip out the ol’ Weed-n-Feed to make my grass look perfect, and, while we’re at it, why the hell do I let my lawn turn brown every summer?
Besides her devotion to organic gardening, her obvious enthusiasm, and strong opinions about all matters regarding gardening, the thing that drew me most strongly to Perenyi’s writing is her ability to tie gardening into the very heart of our culture. Throughout the book, she makes connections between gardening and a wealth of other disciplines, including history, art, politics, the environment, and women’s rights. I’ve said before that for those of us who find bliss digging in the soil, gardening becomes so much more than just plunking plants in dirt and watching them grow. It becomes our love, our religion, our meditation, and, eventually, the filter through which we view the rest of the world. It is obviously so for Perenyi. That much is abundantly clear throughout Green Thoughts.
I was reading Kris from Blithewold’s excellent review of Green Thoughts yesterday. Kris states that she thinks Perenyi would have fit in perfectly with the garden blogging community. I couldn’t agree more. The same passion and intelligence that I loved in Green Thoughts are mirrored every day in the postings of my favorite garden bloggers. We are nothing if not opinionated and passionate!
Finally, I was pleased to find Perenyi as wonderfully quotable as our good friend Henry Mitchell. A few gems from Green Thoughts:
“You can’t work among plants for long and remain altogether an unbeliever: it is too obvious that something is going on.”
“I can’t resist them (asters, in this case) and invariably let optimism get the better of judgment, which come to think of it may be the first principle of gardening.”
“It takes a while to grasp that a garden isn’t a testing ground for character and to stop asking, what did I do wrong?”
Thanks, Carol, for organizing all of us garden bloggers. Knowing that so many others are reading Green Thoughts made the reading even more enjoyable!
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