{"id":3265,"date":"2020-12-21T11:27:18","date_gmt":"2020-12-21T19:27:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/?p=3265"},"modified":"2020-12-21T11:27:18","modified_gmt":"2020-12-21T19:27:18","slug":"when-the-going-gets-tough-the-tough-read-henry-mitchell","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/when-the-going-gets-tough-the-tough-read-henry-mitchell\/","title":{"rendered":"When the Going Gets Tough, the Tough Read Henry Mitchell"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cGood sense has little to do with gardening.\u201d\u2014Henry Mitchell<\/p>\n

The Solstice approaches and with it, we will gain about one minute of additional daylight per day.\u00a0 I am convinced that even that extra 60 seconds will make a difference in the quality of life.<\/p>\n

Of course, dark days and snowstorms will still happen.\u00a0 In fact, in this part of the world, we tend to get more of them after the first of the year than before.\u00a0 Those dark snowy days call for a good dose of Henry Mitchell.<\/p>\n

Mitchell\u20141922-1993\u2014was one of the best, garden writers that America has produced since the first colonists landed here.\u00a0 He was a journeyman newspaperman for his entire career, culminating in a job at the Washington Post<\/em> from 1970 through 1993.\u00a0 He wrote about many things, but his weekly column, \u201cEarthman\u201d, about his Washington, D.C. garden and horticulture in general, was his claim to fame.\u00a0 He was loathe to gather columns into book form, but was finally persuaded to do so by his wife and others.\u00a0 Eventually three books of columns were published: The Essential Earthman, One Man\u2019s Garden, <\/em>and Henry Mitchell on Gardening.\u00a0 <\/em><\/p>\n

Mitchell was both a great gardener and an inspiring prose stylist.\u00a0 Almost every column contained something notable, quotable or grammatically delightful.\u00a0 A great example is his description of the Thompson and Morgan seed catalog\u2014\u201cone of the world\u2019s great compendiums of fantasy.\u201d\u00a0 His columns, which dealt with everything from roses to 17-year locusts, had a little of the \u201chow\u201d of gardening, and an awful lot of the \u201cwhy\u201d of gardening.\u00a0 This is especially relevant now.\u00a0 After all, anyone can go on the internet and find out how to grow a tomato.\u00a0 Henry Mitchell delves into why you might want to.<\/p>\n

Mitchell\u2019s scholarship was impressive, but he was never pedantic.\u00a0 In a single column, he could quote Marcus Aurelius while discussing his various dogs\u2019 penchants for digging up plants.<\/p>\n

He was perpetually developing ideas about garden improvements\u2014water features, pillars, changes of level, and horse troughs full of water lilies.\u00a0 Many of those ideas clearly came to fruition, though not generally in the original timeframe.\u00a0 Like all gardeners, he complained about maintenance chores, especially onerous ones like cleaning out that water lily trough.\u00a0 In the midst of those complaints, though, he also admitted that he didn\u2019t trust anyone else to take on those tasks.<\/p>\n

The columns captured in the books are arranged seasonally, so, if you feel like it, you can start out wherever you find yourself in the gardening year and read one column per week, as you would have enjoyed the original \u201cEarthman\u201d columns.\u00a0 I have no patience with that because Henry Mitchell is addictive.\u00a0 When I originally read the three books, I ploughed through in short order, reading them before bedtime to give me gardening inspiration and delightful dreams about masses of white roses or the lasting beauty of perennial weeds.\u00a0 Right now, I am repeating that process as part of my COVID coping strategy.<\/p>\n

Like all gardening writers, Henry Mitchell wrote about vegetables and shrubs and occasionally, trees, but his greatest love was flowers.\u00a0 Sophisticated and pseudo-sophisticated gardeners sometimes pooh-pooh flowers because of their ephemeral nature.\u00a0 Mitchell was an unabashed romantic, rhapsodizing about iris, roses, camellias and daffodils.\u00a0 His garden, which could not possibly have been as small as he claimed, was home to an impressive collection of climbers, ramblers and shrub roses.\u00a0 He embraced once-blooming varieties for their sheer beauty, only occasionally admitting that any rose had thorns.<\/p>\n

The mysteries and ironies of gardening, which plague us all, did not elude Henry Mitchell.\u00a0 When I read a line like, \u201cEvery spring a few \u2018Pickwick\u2019\u2014crocuses\u2014show up, not necessarily where I remember planting them,\u201d I think of the squirrel landscaping that happens every year in my garden.\u00a0\u00a0 The author has the ability to turn garden conundrums into poetry and\/or belly laughs, sometimes simultaneously.<\/p>\n

I think he sums it up well when he says, \u201c\u2026the gardener\u2019s life is not a perfect hyacinth bed, but a life of unexpected failures and sorrow, somewhat redeemed by unexpected and utterly accidental triumphs.\u00a0 Not that I have any to report today.\u201d<\/p>\n

So if you need a last minute gift for a gardening friend, or yourself, invest in one or all of Henry Mitchell\u2019s books.\u00a0 I promise that they will help you get through January.\"Mitchell\"<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cGood sense has little to do with gardening.\u201d\u2014Henry Mitchell The Solstice approaches and with it, we will gain about one minute of additional daylight per day.\u00a0 I am convinced that even that extra 60 seconds will make a difference in the quality of life. Of course, dark days and snowstorms will still happen.\u00a0 In fact, … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,6,2,3,5],"tags":[376,1053,601,1052,2429],"class_list":["post-3265","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fall","category-general-interest","category-spring","category-summer","category-winter","tag-garden-literature","tag-garden-writing","tag-henry-mitchell","tag-the-essential-earthman","tag-washington-post"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3265","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=3265"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3265\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3267,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3265\/revisions\/3267"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3265"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3265"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3265"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}