Literary gardens

Looks like Prairie Tide and I have a book in common in our garden libraries: The Literary Garden: Recreating Literature's Most Beautiful Gardens in Your Own Backyard. This book combines garden-related excerpts from classic literary works with illustrations, history and how-to information for the plants, flowers and garden creatures featured in the works. I picked up this book about a year ago (in the bargain section of the very same bookstore chain mentioned in Laurie's post) and have enjoyed it too. You can open this book to almost any page and be fascinated by the words of Proust, Fitzgerald, Cather, or Turgenev, just to name a few...but I have a quirky fancy for L. Frank Baum, whose The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is excerpted for the scene where Dorothy, Toto and the Lion are felled by the sweet scent of a vast field of scarlet poppies.

There's another literary garden on the web these days at ever so humble, where you'll find photos, quotes and impressions artfully spotlighting some of our favorite garden friends. Enjoy a leisurely stroll and pick yourself a bouquet of honeysuckle, blue flag iris, daisies, chives, and phlox.

The Literary Garden: Recreating Literature's Most Beautiful Gardens In Your Own Backyard. Duncan Brine (introduction), Lea Richardson and Jesse Kaplan (illustrations). Berkley Books, 2001. ISBN 0-425-18341-6.

Newly blooming: David Austin English rose 'Graham Thomas'; Anagallis arvensis (pimpernel—Baroness Emmuska Orczy's The Scarlet Pimpernel is featured in The Literary Garden, although what I'm growing is a blue-flowered variety); Papaver somniferum (breadseed poppy—Surrender Dorothy!).

Comments

[Amy]

Thanks for the link. My June theme is flowers, so pick those bouquets while you can.

[miladagoff]

The Literary Garden sounds like a book that I want for my collection.

The content reminds me a book I own, about real life Canadian gardens going back to the 1780s.

Garden Voices, edited by Edwinna von Baeyer and Pleasance Crawford (Random House of Canada/1995), is "an anthology of Canadian garden writing ... from every decade since the 1790s".

It includes stories and diary entries of gardens and gardeners from every one of Canada's provinces and territories. It is a great, and at times amusing read.

[Stefanie]

I have never heard of this book, but now it is at the top of my must buy list!

[Chan S.]

Amy, it's a lovely theme--thanks for the "bouquets".

Mia, "Garden Voices" sounds like a book I'd like to add to my garden reading too--thanks for the lead.

Stefanie, I think there's much for you to like in this one. If there's a B&N in your vicinity, they might have it in their gardenbook bargain area (I've seen it stocked at the store here even very recently).