Customer Reviews

Down the Garden Path

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

A wonderful narrative about this man's first garden in England in 1932 and his various experiences with it and the people around him. A rare combination of eloquent writing and down to earth humor left me chuckling throughout the book. Wonderful language and very entertaining. Besides the charming style, there is real gardening information to satisfy the plant-person. I got it at the library, and am here to buy it for my mother, who will love the tongue in cheek, English humor. Would recommend it as a feel-good book to curl up with, with your cup of tea!

Nothing much happens in Beverly Nichols book.No sex, no crimes, just the miracle of growth,of life in a cottage garden.A witty,charming book that makes you look at your own garden with different eyes.

A thoroughly charming book with a lovely pre-war atmosphere. It is about gardening yes, less about the technical than about the wonders. That weird, ratty vine you chopped down to get rid of, which bloomed like the Dickens two months later, the neighbor who knows everything, has a perfect garden, and seems to stop by just when a mystery fungus has claimed your best plants during the night. It's that kind of gardening book, about the joy of success and the deceit of garden catalogues.

Beverly Nichols bought his house for the garden he thought was there. He knew nothing about gardening. He learned through trial and error, and the man was enthusiastic and thought big. He wanted flowers in his garden in winter, and searched until he found them. He wanted to grow mushrooms. He wanted a wood in his field. You get the idea.

The writing is what makes this book. His description of the gardening books he found: "They were mostly in wrappers which showed women in obsolete hats standing with guilty expressions by the side of immense hollyhocks. They had terrible titles too..." Or perhaps about gardeners themselves, "People think that the gardener is a placid man, who chews a perpetual cud... a man whose mind moves slowly... Such ideas are very wide of the mark. A gardener is a wild and higly-strung creature, whose mind trembles like the aspen and is warped by sudden frosts and scarred by strange winds..."

Well worth a winter read!

This is not just a gardening book, it's a light-hearted, funny and entertaining Masterpiece Theater kind of account of a very English batchelor's attempt to create a garden paradise. I loved it and was inspired for my own attempts.

These books may be old but I can see why they are still in print!

This is a lovely book. It gives a lot of garden advice, just between the lines.
I will read this over and over.

The author states that this work is a floral autobiography in which nothing very much happens and from which reading of its 28 chapters the reader will gain practically nothing towards a knowledge of gardening.

To have such a book exist without the helpful standard qualities of plot or instruction then, the author needs must rely upon personality and charm in the writing, and there was much charm and personality in the writing here.

Yet while charm -- indeed, as well, humor -- existed, there was an insufficient amount of either to get through all 290 pages without the feeling that a prolixity (which the author himself blatantly admits to before the book ends) has entered the book by the time the last 80 pages are needing to be read.

Even so, this reader discovered that, despite the flaws, absences or drawbacks described above, anyone, perhaps even contrary to the author's own opinion, will learn appreciation, if he or she doesn't already possess it, of Nature's beauties: flowers, all kinds of flowers.

The author gushes and rhapsodizes over certain flowers with words put down in such a manner of subjectivity that -- the memorability of his "transports" aside -- it would have been a truly helpful improvement on this mere reproduction of the facsimile of the original text for the book (first published in 1932) to have had vibrant colored photographs added -- of those very specific flowers over which Beverley Nichols particularly expressed his poetic enthusiasms: the winter aconite, the Pimpernel, Chionodoxa, cyclamen, clematis, foxgloves, crimson flax -- especially since colored photographs would wonderfully contrast to the stark black and white print of the book and its accompanying black-and-white decorations by Rex Whistler.

While the author's words about flowers are inspirational and certainly touching, it was disappointing, as I say, to learn that they were and are hardly descriptive of what these gorgeous flowers actually look like. In the book there was no discernment in the writing of what variety of flower the author actually prized.

The weight, size, shape, and jacket of this book are all positively gorgeous. The jacket has a glamorous, move-star quality photograph of the author on the back, and the print inside the book is clear, clean and highly readable. These decorations from the original by Rex Whistler are adequately reproduced and add a lovely, old-fashion charm as well.

Every effort by Timber Press, it seems, has gone into ensuring that this book continue as a "timeless classic" about gardening, but the typos that were in the 1932 original publication were not eliminated for this modern edition and they marred the artful remaking of the book for me, underscoring, in this way, that this "timelessness" is, after all, debatable or, perhaps, negotiable. "Dispoged" appeared on page 153 where the word should have been "disposed" and there was the confusing "Pullyana" on page 183 instead of "Pollyana" where the typo itself seemed to serve as some kind of unintentional, accidental humor or self-critical irony.

As stated earlier, the writing for this floral autobiograph was, indeed, charming, flirtatious, witty, silly, gushing and diverting for the length of more than a good half of the book, and these positive personality traits made the work a genuine pleasure to read -- just before the writer's reed kept strumming the same familiar tunes a bit too long by Chapter XIV where, suddenly, we've all become tired and the ending pages seemed inevitable filler. The passion behind the flowers began to fade like a time-worn flower.

Though the author discussed the creation of his greenhouse for the remaining quarter of the book, I think a little pruning would have made the petals of his paens to flowers much more magical, or at least, more lasting. Too, an earlier chapter on "the Professor" was not so very delicious or amusing as it might have been in yesteryear, particularly since the author unabashedly admitted he could not quite capture how the professor spoke in real life as it was. Several incidents with "Mrs. M." were repetitive and irritating when not downright nasty, and the author's general opinions about women felt sexist now well after the Sexual Revolution of the Sixties; the same went for the author's (dated) notion of the "modern girl."

All in all, though, it was a pretty darn good book for those who want to be able to appreciate flowers and enjoy the lesson.

The book arrived in condition as described and delivery was extremely fast, sooner than I expected since it was during the holidays - very nice since the book was a gift.