One Mans Garden
by By Mitchell, Henry
Category: Gardening , Essays

For twenty years, Henry Mitchell has been delighting readers of the Washington Post with his wide-ranging adventures in his small city garden. The best of his columns, collected here, reflect an uncommon zest for gardening, along with more good advice than you can find in a dozen how-to books. In fact, as he says, "If gardeners spent less time running about doing things they think they are supposed to do and more time contemplating the beauty of the world's plants, they'd get more out of their gardens and be less of a pest to the civilized world."Whether he is being serious ("Tea Roses: The Secrets of Success") or hilarious ("Before You Bring In the Plants, Make Sure Your Rugs Are Clean"), Mitchell deftly deals with the likely and unlikely decisions a gardener is called upon to make every day. While rationing a precious Christmas gift of fertilizer, he observes that horse manure, like youth, goes all too quickly."When you first start to garden," he writes, "you usually have no idea what the real delights are going to be." Henry Mitchell shares both his delights and his agonies, whether he is happily hoarding pickle jars for growing seedlings or agitating over which plants to uproot and toss out of his garden.