{"id":1994,"date":"2016-11-15T06:46:59","date_gmt":"2016-11-15T14:46:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/?p=1994"},"modified":"2016-11-15T06:57:18","modified_gmt":"2016-11-15T14:57:18","slug":"book-review-my-summer-in-a-garden-by-charles-dudley-warner","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/book-review-my-summer-in-a-garden-by-charles-dudley-warner\/","title":{"rendered":"Book Review: My Summer in a Garden by Charles Dudley Warner"},"content":{"rendered":"

Pity poor Charles Dudley Warner.\u00a0 Born in 1829, he was a lawyer, newspaper editor\/ publisher, prolific writer, confidant of numerous famous people and dedicated amateur gardener.\u00a0 Despite that impressive resume, he is best remembered; when he is remembered at all, as a close friend of Mark Twain.\u00a0 So close, in fact, that a phrase coined by Warner\u2014\u201cEverybody complains about the weather, but nobody does<\/em> anything about it.\u201d\u2014was appropriated by Twain and is almost universally attributed to him.<\/p>\n

Weather is among the topics discussed in Warner\u2019s one and only gardening book, My Summer in a Garden<\/em>, published in 1870 and reissued in 2002 by Random House as part of its Modern Library Gardening series, edited by Michael Pollan.\u00a0 The new edition boasts a twenty-six page introduction by author Allan Gurganus that serves to pad out Warner\u2019s rather slim, one hundred-page volume of wonderful writing.\u00a0 I skipped Gurganus and opened right to Warner, taking in the introduction after finishing the body of the book.<\/p>\n

My Summer in a Garden<\/em> is divided into nineteen chapters, one for each week in the growing season.\u00a0 Warner starts, as all gardeners do, with dirt and sings the praises of digging and hoeing in it.\u00a0 \u201cThere is life in the ground;\u201d he says, \u201cit goes into the seeds; and it also, when it is stirred up, goes into the man who stirs it.\u201d\u00a0 He does not separate ornamental and edible gardening, though the book leans towards edibles. The real harvest, though, is a delightful basket of horticultural wisdom, plus sly commentary on history, politics, science, art and literature.<\/p>\n

Weeds and hoeing are a recurrent theme, from the time plants go into the ground until the harvest comes in.\u00a0 Warner puts the existence of weeds\u2014the worst of which he often refers to as \u201cpusley\u201d–in the same theological category as Original Sin, inviting a couple of clergyman acquaintances to hoe his garden in exchange for permission to make that allusion in their sermons.\u00a0 He is dismayed when they decline.\u00a0 The author\/gardener clearly likes sleep, good breakfasts and moderation in all things, including gardening.\u00a0 He admits, however, that the garden\u2019s needs may win out over all of them.\u00a0 Worrying about bugs on his tomato plants, he observes, \u201cYou can\u2019t get up too early, if you have a garden.\u201d<\/p>\n

One of the best and funniest essays in the book describes the Eighth Week, when the garden is visited by a \u201cHigh Official Person\u201d.\u00a0 The person is President Ulysses Grant, who gets a guided tour of the landscape.\u00a0 Grant praised the garden generously, interspersing his observations with comments on geopolitical issues.\u00a0 Those who think crass commercialism is a modern affliction can take comfort in Warner\u2019s satirical aside, \u201cThat corn and those potatoes which General Grant looked at, I will sell\u2026at five dollars an ear, and one dollar a potato.\u00a0 Office-seekers need not apply.\u201d<\/p>\n

Warner takes pleasure in cultivating the earth even when summer temperatures soar, suffering the heat while he celebrates the sights and sounds around him.\u00a0 He digresses into the extreme fulfillment he finds in the company of his cat, Calvin, who is, apparently a paragon of feline virtue.\u00a0 Given that Calvin was formerly owned by author Harriet Beecher Stowe of Uncle Tom\u2019s Cabin<\/em>, fame, Calvin\u2019s virtue is no surprise.<\/p>\n

Just about the only garden-related activity that Warner does not like is applying fertilizer, to which he grudgingly devotes only one page.\u00a0 He recommends leaving fertilizer application to others, adding, \u201cIt is much pleasanter and easier to fertilize with a pen, as the agricultural writers do, than with a fork.\u201d<\/p>\n

Despite the cameo appearances by luminaries of Warner\u2019s time like President Grant and Horace Greeley, most of his observations are timeless and some could have been written yesterday.\u00a0\u00a0 He takes on the modern concepts of profit and value in the Sixteenth Week, discussing whether or not gardening \u201cpays\u201d and toting up the cost of raising potatoes on his property.\u00a0 According to his figures, the potatoes do \u201cpay\u201d, but only if the gardener\u2019s labor is not added into the expense column.\u00a0 Warner\u2019s take on this subject reminds me of another very funny contemporary book, William Alexander\u2019s The $64.00<\/em> Tomato.<\/em><\/p>\n

By the end of the growing season, in the Nineteenth Week, Warner is, like most gardeners, tired.\u00a0 Unlike many of us, he puts tiredness aside and tidies up his beds, the better to spend a peaceful winter.<\/p>\n

Warner succeeds in \u201cfertilizing with a pen,\u201d and does it so well that it surprises me that My Summer in a Garden\u201d <\/em>was out of print for over a century.\u00a0 Thank goodness you can still buy copies new or used, from major booksellers.<\/p>\n

Our times are as turbulent as Warner\u2019s and gardening is, as it always has been, a good antidote to that turbulence.\u00a0 As you ready your beds for winter, think of Warner\u2019s words\u2014\u201cThe man who has planted a garden feels that he has done something good for the world.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Pity poor Charles Dudley Warner.\u00a0 Born in 1829, he was a lawyer, newspaper editor\/ publisher, prolific writer, confidant of numerous famous people and dedicated amateur gardener.\u00a0 Despite that impressive resume, he is best remembered; when he is remembered at all, as a close friend of Mark Twain.\u00a0 So close, in fact, that a phrase coined … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1998,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,6,2,3,5],"tags":[1525,1523,643,63,1053,1524,1522,58],"class_list":["post-1994","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-fall","category-general-interest","category-spring","category-summer","category-winter","tag-alan-garganus","tag-charles-dudley-warner","tag-garden-books","tag-garden-essays","tag-garden-writing","tag-mark-twain","tag-my-summer-in-a-garden","tag-summer-gardening"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1994","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1994"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1994\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1995,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1994\/revisions\/1995"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1998"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1994"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1994"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1994"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}