A Time to Dig : ...

As surely as 1776 is the date of the Declaration of Independence, or 1850 is the year California joined the Union, so 1981 is the best year there has ever been for gardening books written by Americans. I don’t mean there was a record number of them that year. (There seems to be a record number every year.) I mean that two books of extraordinary quality were published.

Eleanor Perenyi brought out “Green Thoughts.” Henry Mitchell published “The Essential Earthman.” Not forgetting Katharine White, Roger Swain and many another fine gardening writers, these two are about the best we have.

“Green Thoughts” has stayed solidly in print since the day it was published. Literate gardeners (a group including, but not limited to, those who recognize the garden-poem allusion in her title) have had merely to stroll into a bookstore and buy a copy.

By some tragic miscalculation, however, “The Essential Earthman” was permitted to go out of print. But now, posthumously, it is back, in a fine new paperback edition. Not as fine an edition as it could have been, but still well worth getting.

Of these two writers, Perenyi has the more snob appeal. Strictly speaking, she is Baroness Perenyi. Born American, at 19 she married a Hungarian nobleman, and her first garden was at his castle. The second World War put an end to that, and since shortly after the war she has done her gardening in Connecticut.

As you can perhaps guess from his title, Henry Mitchell lived less glamorously. From his birthplace in Memphis, Tenn., and after college in Virginia, he first moved only as far as a cotton plantation. There he spent a “divinely happy” year working for 40 cents an hour. Forty cents? You think that has to be before California entered the Union? No, it was 99 years after.

Then it was on to Washington D.C., and most of his grown-up life he spent gardening, and writing about gardens warmer than Connecticut’s, if not quite so balmy as those in Southern California.

If I had the whole of this book section, or even half of it, it would be a joy and a treat to compare Perenyi and Mitchell in detail. In some ways they are quite alike. Both have strong views on garden paths, on zinnias, on tulips, on what kinds of trees to allow in or anywhere near a garden.

In others they are quite different. For example, though both are autocrats and line out general rules with superb aplomb, Perenyi keeps a certain aristocratic distance from her readers as she leads us down the garden path. Mitchell wraps a warm democratic arm around each of us as he propels us just as firmly along.

One of Perenyi’s liveliest essays is called “Woman’s Place.” In it, she has a lot to say about the very long period (in some places not over yet) where men kept most of the fun parts of gardening for themselves, but freely allowed women to do the weeding and other repetitive stuff. It is worth reading “Green Thoughts” just to hear in passing her account of the Hungarian farmer “who was the envy of the neighborhood on account of his 10 terrific daughters, who could and did get through twice the work of any male.”

Mitchell has no essay on men’s and women’s roles in gardens, but he does from time to time write very much as a man to other men, and the person he occasionally refers to as his “assistant” is clearly his wife. (To be fair, he doesn’t seem to expect her to weed; he just hopes to keep her from cutting all his tulips and taking them inside the house.)

But as I don’t have the whole section, I shall save the last few paragraphs entirely for Mitchell.

The first thing to say about him is that he has a wonderful sardonic humor. Suppose he wishes to convey the information that no gardener is ever entirely satisfied with his or her garden. Does he just blurt that out? Hardly. He says something like this. He has been describing the level of skill a new gardener reaches in about the fifth year, and the pride that gardener is apt to feel. Then he says this leads that person to try some more ambitious plantings, say, with peonies and iris. Now there’s trouble again.

That’s all right, he tells you. Just keep gardening another 40 years, and “all is at least in balance, and all is serene. The gardener is usually dead, of course. If he should live to 100, however, then needless to say it takes somewhat longer to achieve balance in the garden.”

Another wonderful thing is Mitchell’s complete avoidance of mystique. Never does he say that first the intending gardener needs to take soil samples and send them off to a lab, and after getting the results start ordering scientific quantities of topsoil and expensive fertilizers. No. He says, “By and large, whatever soil you have will grow anything it occurs to you to grow (and a great deal more).” Not that he’s claiming you can grow anything you want in the barren subsoil some developer left. He’s about to tell you about the need to dig really big holes, and put lots of leaf mulch in them. But he does it in such a comradely way that you never think, “Who, me? I’m totally inexperienced.” You think. “Sure. I can do that.”

I said this new (and sadly posthumous) edition was a fine one, but not as fine as it could have been. There are two flaws. One is that the publisher skimped on the illustrations. They are black-and-white cuts, and they are taken from the original 1981 edition. But unfortunately they’re reduced enough in size so that about half of them look like blots.

Second, on the cover the book is subtitled “An Expanded Edition of a Gardening Classic.” Some expansion. There’s a short well-written preface by Sarah Booth Conroy.Following that there’s a three-page essay by Mitchell himself--the last column he wrote before he died last fall. It is not up to the standard of the rest. From there on the expanded edition and the 1981 edition are identical.

Never mind. It is genuinely a classic, and it is glorious to have it back in print.

Noel Perrin also recommends: “Home Ground: A Gardener’s Miscellany,” by Allen Lacy (Houghton Mifflin) and “Second Nature: A Gardener’s Education,” by Michael Pollan (Dell).