Early American Gardens: "For Meate or Medicine"
The gardens of the 17th century and the stalwart settlers who planted them are vividly recreated as one delves into the carefully researched pages of this scholarly volume.... To be savored in small servings, pondered and reread, this is a book for history buffs as well as inquisitive gardeners, and is one reference work not likely to gather dust on the shelf.(Boston Globe)The sense of continuity is a haunting quality of Ann Leighton's delightful book of the early gardens in seventeenth-century New England. Before our eyes, she not only makes the gardens grow again 'for meate or medicine' but brings to vivid life the gardeners as well.... In 10 chapters with some 70 prints for illustration, Miss Leighton has told a story at once fascinating and informative, the result of years of research and years of practical gardening to re-create for herself these wonderful gardens.(New York Times Book Review)What a perfectly enchanting book! Why has no one ever had the wit and imagination to combine a taste for gardening and seventeenth-century New England history until now? Because, I suspect, few people read as widely, garden as enthusiastically, or write as engagingly.(Walter Muir Whitehill)