Make room on your bookshelves, sink deep in your coziest chair. Four classics from the great books of garden writing are back in print, just in time for some preseason page-turning.
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Random House Inc., the New York-based publisher, thought it high time to bring back some of the best musings about the garden ever printed. So, under the Modern Library imprint, Randon House turned its plot over to Michael Pollan as editor of the series.
Here, you can almost hear Pollan say, this is one you must read, as he hands you a copy of Eleanor Perenyi’s “Green Thoughts: A Writer in the Garden,” the set of alphabetical essays (from “Annuals,” Page 3, to “Woman’s Place,” Page 259) that, years ago, turned Pollan on to all that was really unfolding in the garden–from sexual politics to class struggle to culinary fashion.
Even though one of Pollan’s pickings dates back 125 years (Charles Dudley Warner’s “My Summer in a Garden”) and another is being published in America for the first time (British garden writer Margery Fish’s “We Made a Garden”), and a third (Czech playwright Karel Capek’s, “The Gardener’s Year”) was first published in Prague in 1929, the quartet makes for up-to-date harmony, compressing time and geography.
Sometimes hilarious, often ripe with wisdom, and always sharp in the writing, each title, says Pollan, offers “a still-vibrant voice in the back-fence conversation gardeners have been conducting at least since the time of Pliny.”
Published in paperback ($13.95 each), with covers that look like old seed packets, the series is the perfect antidote for a gardener’s late-winter itch.