[.uk] My Summer in a Garden

Only read Warner:
I was intrigued by the title and sold by the exerpt. Charles Dudley Warner is fun. But skip the opening 30 pages or so. It's not that the other gentlemen don't write well, but they're not exactly fun. Besides, I didn't buy it to read a discussion of his more boring, 'professional' work in all those pages numbered with tiny Roman numerals. So go directly to Warner's first essay (which is the exerpt) on page 11.

Philosopher's Garden:
Nicely written and witty book about the pleasures of gardening and its relationship to other aspects of life.

Behold the onion....:
Charles Dudley Warner appears to have lived an enviable life. He was educated when most men did not have an opportunity to become educated. He was editor and publisher of the 'Hartford Courant' and lived in Hartford next door to Samuel Clements. Warner was not only a neighbor but a good friend of Mark Twain with whom he co-authored THE GILDED AGE, and with whom he seems to have shared a sense of humor. Warner's writing is insightful and funny, but not always politically correct according to 21st Century U.S. standards. Allen Gurganus introduces the book with an overly long essay. In MY SUMMER IN A GARDEN Warner shares 19 weeks of life in his garden (one growing season). His garden is located in Hartford at the edge of a game preserve. During the course of the summer, President Grant is in Hartford and stops by for a visit. As the men sit in Warner's yard, Grant says he can hardly wait to retire to his own garden as he is fed up with politics. Warner has been fighting pusley in his garden and he and Grant discuss the advantage of inviting immigrants who eat pusley and would soon rid the country of both problems. Warner has various encounters with: hunters tracking quail who stray from the game preserve, one of whom claims he is looking for a lost chicken; small boys who eat berries from his vines and gather nuts from his trees; birds who attack his pea pods, the neighbor's hens who range too freely until he is looking for one to fill a pot; and the owner of a cow pastured in his yard. In spite of drought, theft, and green worms, at the end of the summer Warner is able to put aside enough vegetables to feel he has accomplished something and then his wife Polly takes credit for the work. Of interest to me is that more than 100 years after Warner published his book, U.S. gardeners can still complain about some of the same things Warner complained about--and more. Most gardeners know that the U.S. has been infested with a whole array of pests and diseases that were not around when Warner gardened. For example, three new plagues including the Varroa mite have attacked American honey bees since the 1980s. Partly these attacks are owing to the introduction of containerized shipments that cannot be inspected and may hold verboten materials (plants, animals, insects). Partly these problems are owing to flagrant violations by individuals who believe U.S. laws concerning the transport of "foreign" plants do not apply to them. Warner's worries about green worms in his celery, witch grass in his potato hills, and pulsey seem mild in comparison.

Not Your Usual Garden Book:
MY SUMMER IN A GARDEN is a slim volume in a series of neglected gardening classics being reprinted by Modern Library, however, to suggest the subject of the book is limited to gardening is to do it a great disservice. In the guise of a week-by-week account of one summer in his garden Charles Dudley Warner waxes philosophical on religion, society, animals, schoolboys, hunters and neighbors as well as plants. Its style will feel familiar to readers of the later literary garden-musings of E.B. White and Elizabeth Von Arnim. Although Warner died in 1900 his language is remarkably fresh and the complaints and joys of gardening familiar. The side comments on women's suffrage only remind one with surprise that in spite of the similarities he was living in a very different time. I found the book when tracking down the following Warner quote, "Regrets are idle; yet history is one long regret. Everything might have turned out so differently!" and in reading the book discovered other gems such as, "Nothing shows one who his friends are, like prosperity and ripe fruit. I had a good friend in the country, whom I almost never visited except in cherry-time. By your fruits you shall know them." It is the gentle humor and subtle wisdom of his observations that elevate Warner's book above the ordinary. Being, at present, a city dweller transplanted from childhood gardens, I found reading the book a great comfort.