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New book crop inspires coming growing season By Rhonda Nowak Dec 11, 2022 12:30 AM A A 6 View all photos Recently, I presented my garden-related book list for 2023 to Talent Garden Club. I told the group the annual book lists have been useful to me for personal and professional reasons. Personally, the books on the list have allowed me to indulge in two of my passions — gardening and reading — at the same time. (I consider gardening in my mind an important part of the actual activity.) Professionally, the books have provided a focus and some stimulating quotes for my weekly gardening columns. Each year, the connections I make across the books as I read and write about them serve as a lens through which I view my gardens and gardening practices. A new year brings new books filled with new (and old) ideas from authors who inspire me to meet the challenges and joys of gardening for another growing season. Here is the second half of the Literary Gardener book list for 2023. See my Dec. 4, 2022, column for the first half of the book list. July: “Life in the Garden” by Penelope Lively (2017). Bestselling author Penelope Lively writes about time, memory and the garden as a physical growing space and metaphor. (I discovered this theme is carried across all 12 books on the 2023 book list.) Lively weaves in stories about the gardens of writers like Virginia Woolf and Gertrude Jekyll and connects them to her childhood gardens in Cairo and the gardens she tended later in Somerset and Oxford, England. Lively is the celebrated author of many prize-winning novels and short stories for adults and children. She received a damehood from Queen Elizabeth II in 2012 for her literary contributions. I’m eagerly anticipating a very British perspective in her book, which has been called a “philosophical and poet” memoir of her personal life and enduring professional career. I have two thought-provoking quotes from Lively: “It is becoming more and more apparent that gardens and all that is within them are never just themselves: They are allusive, evocative, and that is why they can be such fertile material for a writer.” "To garden is to elide past, present and future; it is a defiance of time." August: “The White Garden: A Novel of Virginia Woolf” by Stephanie Barron (2009). American author Francine Matthews writes historical mysteries as Stephanie Barron (her middle and maiden names). She is best known for her novels featuring Jane Austen as an amateur sleuth. This novel is about a landscaper who visits the White Garden at Vita Sackville-West’s famous Sissinghurst Castle for a client and uncovers a mystery about Virginia Woolf’s suicide that had occurred 60 years before. She also discovers her grandfather’s role in the events that took place at Sissinghurst, a role that led him to take his own life many years later. When I opened the box of garden-related books I had ordered this year and lifted out the volumes one by one, “The White Garden” was the book I set aside to read first. I love mystery novels, and I remember enjoying the first book in Barron’s Jane Austen series, “Jane and the Unpleasantness at Scargrave Manor” (1996). I was completely immersed in “The White Garden” from beginning to end. Here’s one of my favorite passages, which occurs when the landscaper/amateur sleuth uncovers Woolf’s diary and reads about Woolf coming up with the idea of a garden with only white flowers. Woolf wrote, “I glanced around. ‘You should have white flowers here. Nothing else. They’d rise in the dark like fairy lamps, lighting your way to bed.’” According to Woolf’s diary, Sackville-West was immediately enthusiastic about her friend’s idea and began to list all the flowers she would grow: “Lilium regale, white clematis, white lavender, white agapanthus, white double-primroses, white anemones …” Woolfe continued her entry, “I wanted to tell her she would never do it, with this constant maddening threat of war …” But she held her tongue because she knew how Vita (Italian for “life”) would respond: “But I must plant, don’t you see? I must continue to believe that things will grow. Spring comes, regardless of the Luftwaffe. Or whether I live or die.” September: “The Wild Braid: A Poet Reflects on a Century in the Garden” by Stanley Kunitz and Genine Lentene (2007). Kunitz (1905-2006) was twice selected as U.S. Poet Laureate. He also received the 1995 Nobel Prize for his collection of poems titled “Passing Through: The Later Poems, New and Selected.” “The Wild Braid” is a summation of conversations, none previously published, that took place in 2002-2004 at Kunitz’s seaside garden in Provincetown, Massachusetts. The book combines Kunitz’s personal recollections about gardening, the creative process and the harmony of the life cycle — whether human or plant. The title of the book was taken from Kunitz’s poem “The Snakes of September,” in which he wrote: “… I put out my hand and stroke/the fine, dry grit of their skins./After all,/we are partners in this land,/co-signers of a covenant./At my touch the wild/ braid of creation/trembles.” Here is what the poet wrote about gardens and his creative process: “I associate the garden with the whole experience of being alive, and so, there is nothing in the range of human experience that is separate from what the garden can signify in its eagerness and its insistence, and in its driving energy to live — to grow, to bear fruit.” Along with the prose and poetry, “The Wild Braid” is filled with poignant photographs of Kunitz in his garden taken by Marnie Crawford Samuelson. October: “Uprooted: A Gardener Reflects on Beginning Again” by Page Dickey (2020). After 34 years of gardening in her beloved garden at Duck Hill in North Salem, New York, garden writer Page Dickey made the heart-wrenching decision to move to Connecticut and create a new garden and a new life there. In “Uprooted,” Dickey takes readers through her transition: searching for a new home, learning about the landscape of her new property, planning and establishing the garden and learning how to be a different kind of gardener. This book has been sitting on my shelf since 2020. Now that I’m creating new gardens in Bandon and Medford, this is the perfect time to read about the unexpected pleasures that come with starting over. November: “My Wild Garden: Notes From a Writer’s Eden” by Meir Shalev (2020). Along with “Garden by the Sea” (Rodoreda, 1967), “My Wild Garden” is another book on this year’s list that was translated into English from another language, in this case, Hebrew. Shalev is a newspaper columnist and one of Israel’s most celebrated novelists. In this book, he takes readers into his garden, which is “neither neatly organized nor well-kept,” and offers what one reviewer called a “delightful memoir cum gardening guide.” Shalev lives in the ancient Jezreel Valley, Israel’s richest agricultural area, which is cultivated by two farming communities, the kibbutz and the moshav. One of my favorite quotes in the book occurs when Shalev explains he chose his house because the garden had an old lemon tree that reminded him of his grandfather’s orchard in Ukraine. One day not long after Shalev purchased the house, one of the village elders paid a visit and gave him an important lesson on pruning: Shalev wrote, “Now he brought with him a saw, telling me to remove all the dead branches of the lemon tree. ‘Take them all down! Don’t be afraid! It’ll all grow again. If only we could get rid of every dead thing inside our own bodies and souls!’ … “So I pruned and watered it and the lemon tree recovered. Its shriveled leaves unfurled and opened out, new leaves developed, it flowered and returned me a favor: an abundance of small lemons, uglier yet more delicious than any lemons I have ever tasted.” December: “Men and Gardens” by Nan Fairbrother (1997). During 2022, I focused on women’s contributions to gardens and gardening with my series “Celebrating Women’s Work With Plants in the Rogue Valley.” In 2023, I’ll highlight the influences men have had on the horticultural field through their garden designs and their writing. English landscape designer and garden writer Nancy Fairbrother provides readers with a fascinating history of gardening — from the humblest vegetable plots of the early Middle Ages to King Henry VIII’s topiary gardens filled with fantastic creatures and beasts, and then on to the romantic gardens of the Victorians and the gardening trends of the mid-20th century. Fairbrother’s classic of gardening literature will round out 2023 by illustrating in her straightforward style how the featured gardens mirrored the age to which they belonged, as well as the men who created them and wrote about them. I liked what author Charles Elliott wrote about the book in the foreword: “Unpredictable, discursive, underpinned with wit and a general sense of delight in the subject, “Men and Gardens” is less a history of gardening than an irresistible invitation to contemplate its whole amazing range of joys, achievements, eccentricities and obsessions.” Fairbrother sums up the appeal of gardens throughout history this way: “If gardens are good places for meeting welcome friends, they are just as good for avoiding unwelcome strangers, and gardeners in all ages have felt that to shut the garden gate is to shut out the whole world.” Rhonda Nowak is a Rogue Valley gardener, teacher and writer. For more on gardening topics, see literarygardener.com or email Rhonda at [email protected].