The long unbroken stretches of time for reading and ruminating (which one promises oneself as a kind of consolation prize for winter) never quite materialized for me this season. But I finally treated myself to a cover-to-cover read of Frederick McGourty's The Perennial Gardener, which had been sitting for too many months in the holding pen of my bookshelf. This book's renown as a modern-day garden book classic is wholly deserved. It makes garden design intelligible even to the (ahem) spatially dyslexic, along with providing exhaustive coverage of plants and planting ideas. (Now I've got to try sweet cicely, Myrrhis odorata, which is the plant that gets perhaps the most repeated mention in the book.)
Obtaining all this Knowledge from the book is well and good, of course, but it's always the voice and the attitude of the writer that seal my affection for a good garden book. And, sometimes, a flash of recognition that the writer is just my kinda guy:
Three or four times a year I am dragged, kicking and screaming, to a cocktail party by a wife who accuses me of becoming a hermit. I am not very good at such affairs and usually retreat to study a bookcase if I think I can get away with it. No one bothers a bibliophile, especially one who reads books. Every so often there is no bookcase, and I have to stand by the brie talking with someone whose eye reaches beyond my shoulder as soon as I answer her question about my occupation — a horticulturist. Not surprisingly, the conversation turns to cheese and I remark about my fondness for brie, even when it is heated and has almonds on it, which seems increasingly the case in this complicated age. At the last bash this brought a swift retort: "But it's so common. Nobody serves it at the better parties anymore. Everyone's into chèvre now, with shredded macadamias on top." I almost spilled my Campari and soda.
(And how is it that I never get to run into a fellow like this at these things, when I'm flopping about like a fish out of water.)
Frederick McGourty. The Perennial Gardener. Houghton Mifflin Company, 1989. ISBN 0-395-45373-9.
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