Writing the Garden: A Literary Conversation across Two Centuries
Rogers is not only a garden writer and landscape preservationist but also a bibliophile. In putting together this artfully produced collection of knowledgeable yet “informal, engaging, and sometimes droll” British and American garden literature, Rogers drew on her own collection and that of the New York Society Library, reveling in the pleasures of rare books. Rogers does share colorful cuttings from the writings of 42 eloquent master gardeners past and present, but her mission is primarily biographical. In a book lushly illustrated with watercolors by Childe Hassam, plates from first editions, and photographs, Rogers vividly, wittily, and incisively profiles such narrating horticulture exemplars as Thomas Jefferson; Gertrude Jekyll, for whom “gardening was horticultural picture making”; William Robinson, who was “sometimes colorfully caustic”; nurseryman Andrew Jackson Downing; Celia Thaxter, a lighthouse-keeper’s daughter and a poet as well as a gardener; the “urbanely quirky, humorously serious” Katherine S. White; and Michael Pollan, who sees the garden as a middle ground, where nature and culture are both enriched. In all, a vital, delectable, and illuminating retrospective of an essential branch of letters. --Donna Seaman