{"id":495,"date":"2012-08-14T07:18:01","date_gmt":"2012-08-14T15:18:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/?p=495"},"modified":"2015-11-24T07:32:32","modified_gmt":"2015-11-24T15:32:32","slug":"helen-morgenthau-fox","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/helen-morgenthau-fox\/","title":{"rendered":"Helen Morgenthau Fox"},"content":{"rendered":"

Browsing through a local antiques\/secondhand shop the other day, I came upon an edition of the classic book The Fragrant Garden<\/em> by Louise Beebe Wilder.\u00a0 The book’s forward contains a wonderful quote:<\/p>\n

“There are many gates into the world of reality and gardening is one of them”<\/em><\/p>\n

The author is Helen Morgenthau Fox and the quote made me curious about her.\u00a0 A bit of research confirmed that she is one of “the” Morgenthau’s.\u00a0 Her father, Henry, was a distinguished financier and politician.\u00a0 Her brother, also named Henry, served as Secretary of the Treasury under Franklin D. Roosevelt and had a celebrated public service career.\u00a0 Her nephew, Robert Morgenthau, served as Manhattan District Attorney for a record 34 years, retiring in 2009.<\/p>\n

However, Helen Fox deserves to be something more than a footnote in biographies of her distinguished male relatives.\u00a0 She was well known during most of her long life (1884-1974) as a writer and scholar, particularly on horticultural subjects.\u00a0 She graduated from Vassar in the first decade of the twentieth century, a time when the vast majority of American women had no college education.\u00a0 She wrote for the New York Times<\/em> and many other periodicals and authored a number of books.\u00a0 The range of book topics is far reaching and includes herb gardening, the life of the great French landscape architect Andre Le Notre and the diaries of nineteenth century French cleric and botanist Abbe David.\u00a0 She translated major works from French to English as well.\u00a0 Like many other noted horticultural authors, then and now, she also lectured extensively.<\/p>\n

When she wrote the introduction to the Wilder book in 1932, Fox lived at “Foxden” a house (presumably with wonderful garden) in Peekskill, New York.\u00a0 Later she lived at “High Low Farm,” a property in Bedford, New York that was eventually acquired by New York designers Stephen Sills and James Huniford, the subjects of a winter gardening piece that Anne Raver wrote for the Times<\/em> in 2004.\u00a0 Fox died in Mount Kisco, New York in 1974.<\/p>\n

In her introduction to the Wilder book, Helen Fox makes reference to the garden path, a metaphysical and sometimes actual route that all gardeners travel.\u00a0 I want to pursue the path of her life and career.\u00a0 I think I will start with a book that she wrote towards the end of it, Adventure in My Garden<\/em> (1965), to get a good perspective and perhaps work my way backward from there.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Browsing through a local antiques\/secondhand shop the other day, I came upon an edition of the classic book The Fragrant Garden by Louise Beebe Wilder.\u00a0 The book’s forward contains a wonderful quote: “There are many gates into the world of reality and gardening is one of them” The author is Helen Morgenthau Fox and the … 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":[6],"tags":[203,200,199,202,201,205,204],"class_list":["post-495","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general-interest","tag-female-garden-writers","tag-helen-fox","tag-helen-morgenthau-fox","tag-herb-gardening","tag-louise-beebe-wilder","tag-morgenthau-family","tag-twentieth-century-garden-writers"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/495","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=495"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/495\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":496,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/495\/revisions\/496"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=495"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=495"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=495"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}