Product Description

Warner was an American essayist in the late 1800's. This volume contains two works. In My Summer in a Garden Warner strays from the usual how-to book. He gives helpful gardening advice, but his humor and serious talk about plant life gives the reader lessons in daily living. Calvin was a character in this book and a short memoir is added showing what an exemplary life he led and how his humble life is an example for us.

Product Details

• Published on: 2007-09
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 84 pages

From Library Journal
Modern Library expands its scope into gardening with these two titles. Published in 1981, Perenyi's text offers a collection of essays on topics from annuals to wild flowers and everything in between. The practical information is laced with anecdotes and historical tidbits about gardens and gardeners. Reaching back to 1871, Warner's volume also offers helpful advice along with much humor and even drama as he uses plant life to draw lessons for daily living. A nice break from the straightforward how-to books.
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From the Back Cover
“Warner’s book might have been written last week. The language feels timeless, direct to the point of seduction.” —Allan Gurganus

“The love of dirt is among the earliest of passions. . . . Mudpies gratify one of our first and best instincts. So long as we are dirty, we are pure.” —Charles Dudley Warner

About the Author
Charles Dudley Warner was born in Massachusetts in 1829. After practicing law in Chicago, he moved to Connecticut and became an associate editor and publisher of The Hartford Courant. In addition to writing travel essays for the Courant and for Harper’s magazine, as well as several novels, he collaborated with Mark Twain on The Gilded Age. He died in 1900.

Michael Pollan is the author of the New York Times bestseller The Botany of Desire, and Second Nature, named one of the best gardening books of the twentieth century by the American Horticultural Society. He is a contributing editor to Harper’s magazine and a contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine. Pollan chose the books for the Modern Library Gardening series because, as he writes, “these writers are some of the great talkers in the rich, provocative, and frequently uproarious conversation that, metaphorically at least, has been taking place over the back fence of our gardens at least since the time of Pliny.”

Customer Reviews

Not Your Usual Garden Book
MY SUMMER IN A GARDEN is a slim volume in a series of neglected gardening classics being reprinted by Modern Library, however, to suggest the subject of the book is limited to gardening is to do it a great disservice. In the guise of a week-by-week account of one summer in his garden Charles Dudley Warner waxes philosophical on religion, society, animals, schoolboys, hunters and neighbors as well as plants. Its style will feel familiar to readers of the later literary garden-musings of E.B. White and Elizabeth Von Arnim. Although Warner died in 1900 his language is remarkably fresh and the complaints and joys of gardening familiar. The side comments on women's suffrage only remind one with surprise that in spite of the similarities he was living in a very different time.

I found the book when tracking down the following Warner quote, "Regrets are idle; yet history is one long regret. Everything might have turned out so differently!" and in reading the book discovered other gems such as, "Nothing shows one who his friends are, like prosperity and ripe fruit. I had a good friend in the country, whom I almost never visited except in cherry-time. By your fruits you shall know them." It is the gentle humor and subtle wisdom of his observations that elevate Warner's book above the ordinary. Being, at present, a city dweller transplanted from childhood gardens, I found reading the book a great comfort.

You'll love it
If you like Jackson McCrae's THE BARK OF THE DOGWOOD-A Tour of Southern Homes and Gardens, you'll love this book as well. Within the framework of a "garden" Charles Dudley manages to give us a wonderful tale about not only his garden, but the lives of those that he comes in contact with. I'm truly surprised this book is not more read than it is. A real treasure!

Also recommended: "The Bark of the Dogwood"

Behold the onion....
Charles Dudley Warner appears to have lived an enviable life. He was educated when most men did not have an opportunity to become educated. He was editor and publisher of the 'Hartford Courant' and lived in Hartford next door to Samuel Clements. Warner was not only a neighbor but a good friend of Mark Twain with whom he co-authored THE GILDED AGE, and with whom he seems to have shared a sense of humor. Warner's writing is insightful and funny, but not always politically correct according to 21st Century U.S. standards. Allen Gurganus introduces the book with an overly long essay.

In MY SUMMER IN A GARDEN Warner shares 19 weeks of life in his garden (one growing season). His garden is located in Hartford at the edge of a game preserve. During the course of the summer, President Grant is in Hartford and stops by for a visit. As the men sit in Warner's yard, Grant says he can hardly wait to retire to his own garden as he is fed up with politics. Warner has been fighting pusley in his garden and he and Grant discuss the advantage of inviting immigrants who eat pusley and would soon rid the country of both problems.

Warner has various encounters with: hunters tracking quail who stray from the game preserve, one of whom claims he is looking for a lost chicken; small boys who eat berries from his vines and gather nuts from his trees; birds who attack his pea pods, the neighbor's hens who range too freely until he is looking for one to fill a pot; and the owner of a cow pastured in his yard. In spite of drought, theft, and green worms, at the end of the summer Warner is able to put aside enough vegetables to feel he has accomplished something and then his wife Polly takes credit for the work.

Of interest to me is that more than 100 years after Warner published his book, U.S. gardeners can still complain about some of the same things Warner complained about--and more. Most gardeners know that the U.S. has been infested with a whole array of pests and diseases that were not around when Warner gardened. For example, three new plagues including the Varroa mite have attacked American honey bees since the 1980s. Partly these attacks are owing to the introduction of containerized shipments that cannot be inspected and may hold verboten materials (plants, animals, insects). Partly these problems are owing to flagrant violations by individuals who believe U.S. laws concerning the transport of "foreign" plants do not apply to them. Warner's worries about green worms in his celery, witch grass in his potato hills, and pulsey seem mild in comparison.