Becoming a Gardener: What Reading and Digging Taught me About Living by Catie Marron 2022

It’s summertime, the garden is bursting with vegetables and flowers, so what better time than this to read garden books.  This one was recommended by the Sunday NYT Book Review and a fine one it is.

It’s one of those books that alternately drove me crazy and enthralled me.  The latter characteristics included a fine presentation with heavy, cloth covers and a beautiful photo of her garden on the front cover, thick crisp paper, beautiful water color renditions of the garden by a group called All the Way to Paris, spectacular color photos of the garden (a  Connecticut vegetable/flower/herb creation that measures about 50×50), and tons of quotes from some of my favorite authors including Diana Athill, Penelope Lively, W.S. Merwin, E.B. White, Michael Pollan, Oliver Sacks—in fact each chapter begins with an epigraph by a famous garden writer which is eminently quotable (e.g.”Half the interest of a garden is the constant exercise of the imagination” by Alice Morse Earle) and a few reproductions of Ellsworth Kelly’s flower drawings topped it off.

The aspect of this book that drove me crazy were the way overabundance of quotes, which you will recall was one of the things I loved about the book.  Ambivalence?  Great quotes but too many of them and perhaps the problem is that the spaces between the quotes, i.e. Marron’s own writing, is rather pedestrian.  My guess is that this former investment banker at Morgan Stanley, contributing editor at Vogue, and Board chair for both the High Line and the New York Public Library underwent less editing than the random author.

Here are a few of my favorite quotes:  “Gardeners get to multiple doses of pleasure: They enjoy the garden in its present form while also imagining what it will become three months hence while simultaneously reminiscing about its past.  In this way, memory and imagination are inextricably linked—to themselves and to the garden”  And a favorite from that Charlottesville gardener, Thomas Jefferson: “But tho’ an old man, I am but a young gardener.”  This one about planting trees spoke to me because we have planted a tree for each of our grandchildren’s births: “There can be nothing casual about planting trees.  After today, the place will never again look the same. We shall have changed the shape of the landscape.” from Clare Leighton a wood engraver and writer of garden books from the 1930’s.  And my favorite during this summer of drought from another British writer, the contemporary novelist, Charlotte Mendelsohn who wrote “When you look outside at a downpour, do you think, “Oh hooray—good for the garden?”….Do you, when you notice that the downpour has passed quickly, feel a sense of disappointment?  Then you are a gardener: the highest point to which humankind has evolved.”

On balance, as you can probably tell, I really liked this book and recommend it as a fine way to spend a rainy (or a sunny) day.