Tangled Branches: Cultivated
happenings in and around my zone 6b gardens in northern Virginia and in central Virginia
Thursday, November 29, 2007
Green Thoughts
When I first opened the cover of Green Thoughts by Eleanor Perényi my heart sank. Approximately 270 pages of small type, no illustrations, very little white space, and no coherent story to draw me along - just a series of essays arranged alphabetically by topic. How on earth was I going to finish this in time for the Garden Bloggers' Book Club November meeting? We still hadn't had a freeze when I began reading, so there was lots to do in the garden plus the holidays coming up....
But I pressed on and I'm glad I did. It's a marvelously dense book, and I mean that as a compliment. Open it to any page and you'll find something interesting, useful, or just opinionated (but learned and well-considered opinions).
A few examples.
Have you read The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon? Have you heard of it? I hadn't. It's very interesting and now on my wish list. Ms. Perényi quotes extensively from it in the essay titled Seeing Eye.
Did you know that in Italy in the sixteenth century trees were pruned and trained to form treehouses? That's really interesting. I wonder how long it would take to grow a good treehouse. An illustration would have been nice here, and she had an engraving in front of her as she wrote.
To me, the most useful tips were in her long section about herbs. I've always been skeptical about putting fresh herbs in the freezer, but she says "Dill...freezes well, especially the fall crop with bulkier foliage. I freeze the stalks in bunches and when I need a tablespoon or two, remove the whole thing and clip from the end..." I can tell you that this works because I tried it after reading about it. Last night's baked potato was topped with fresh-frozen dill. On the subject of the nomenclature and identity of oreganos and majorams, she ends up as uncertain as I, but certain that the plant sold as oregano in the US does not taste like pizza.
A good deal of the book is given over to opinion. Many of these read like blog rants and take the form of "Why can't we....
- ...find skillful gardeners for hire?
- ...have clover in the lawn?
- ...procure seeds of better vegetables?
- ...find precise instructions for pruning and grafting?
She likes her gardens more formal than I do, but she uses her preference to make the point a garden is a human rearrangement of nature and the skills needed to create a formal garden are vanishing from disuse.
When it comes preferences and opinion, she's particularly vehement in her dislike of Miss Ellen Willmott. I hadn't known much about Miss Willmott before reading this book other than that she has serveral cultivars of various plants named after her. Ms. Perényi begins thusly "...the grand, somewhat tragic, more than a little hateful woman whose garden at Waverly Place...was famous throughout Europe and America..." She goes on to describe Miss Willmott's accomplishments, and then gets right back to dishing the dirt. "It is nevertheless apparent that she was an insufferable woman... She was spiteful, and a terrible, pretentious snob." All this was under the essay titled Two Gardeners, the first part of which is devoted to praising Hidcote and its owner - Lawrence Johnston.
There's humour here too, if a bit subtle. Her story of smuggling French fingerling potatoes into the US, and then finding them for sale in the Gurney's catalog, made me smile.
In short, I liked this book, and if well-written gardening essays are your thing, I think you'll like it too.
8 Comments:
I'm glad you pressed on and enjoyed the book. What I liked about it was that each essay did stand on its own, more or less. She certainly wasn't afraid to voice her opinions!
Thanks for joining in with the book club again. The virtual meeting post will be out late tomorrow.
Carol, May Dreams Gardens
How interesting! You know... on reading in your review how Ms. Perenyi rather viciously describes Miss Willmott, I swear I could hear my Mom saying in my ear: "If you can't say anything nice about someone, don't say anything at all..." :)
That's very good to know re: your dill experiment, btw. I am now thinking that I should have frozen some of my basil, too... I dried it, but drying basil doesn't do much for me. It was just kind of a last-ditch effort since I knew I didn't have time to make pesto to freeze.
Carol: Thanks for hosting! I started reading the book in bed, but found that I wanted to keep notes. Not a bedtime book - at least not the first time through.
Blackswamp Girl: The whole "Miss Willmott" section really made an impression on me, but I probably should have said that she was trying to make a larger point that Hidcote (which was made by a nice person in her estimation) still endures, while Miss Willmott's gardens, which were huge and contained incredible collections, have vanished.
Basil is the herb that I'm really skeptical about freezing, although I keep reading that it can be done. I just can't see how it could work when it shows cold temperature damage even before there's a frost. I suppose I should try it - maybe I'll be surprised. But the dill worked well - the snipped leaves darkened up when they hit the hot baked potato, but the flavor was still good. Maybe not quite as strong as fresh, but nicer than dried.
Nice review of Green Thoughts. One of the things I love about the book is that Perenyi, like me, is a fan of clover in the lawn. The crabbiness towards Miss Wilmott...well, we all have crabby streaks by times, and I just chuckled and carried on.
Oh, I think I can help about the basil! What I can't do is remember WHERE I learned this little trick, but it works nicely. Lay out a sheet of waxed paper, and lay some basil sprigs, or just leaves on top of it. Pour a little good olive oil on the leaves--enough to get them covered. Roll them around a bit to make sure they're covered. Then fold, or roll, the waxed paper up into a small packet or roll, and put it in a freezer bag, (I like the zip top heavy duty ones) and pop it in the freezer. The basil will turn a bit darker but not black, and you just unroll the paper, chop up what you want off the end, and refreeze the rest. Some people puree basil with oil and freeze it in cubes, but I find that might be a bit too much for my purposes. (there are only two of us, and I don't use huge quantities of basil at a time; just a teaspoon or so.)
I hope this helps!
Jodi: Thanks so much for that tip! The olive oil must be the magic trick? I'll try it next summer.
And I like clover in lawns too, but if I wanted to drive my husband mad, I could just sow some and watch him go crazy trying to get rid of it. Oh well.
"Marvelously dense" is a perfect description of Green Thoughts, Entangled, so please consider it a compliment if I swipe that phrase from you!
We both need to read the Pillow Book, I think - if you get to it first will you post about it?
As to Eleanor's words on Miss Wilmott, did you ever hear what President Teddy Roosevelt's oldest daughter Alice Roosevelt Longworth was supposed to have on her sofa pillow? "If you can't say something good about someone, sit right here by me."
Ooh - I like Jodi's basil tip, too, and will try to remember it next year.
Annie at the Transplantable Rose
I enjoyed this book - funny what I remember is the author's rant about the lack of good varieties of gooseberries grown here. I think I remembered this because I wanted to get some gooseberry bushes this past summer. Funny sometimes what sticks in our minds.
My view of Ellen Willmott differs slightly because of reading a novel that talked about her from a much different perspective (and her work with roses and some personal stuff). Anyone who scatters seeds about has to have some redeeming qualities, I figure!
Your review was great, btw!
Annie: I wonder if the Pillow Book would read better as a browsing book than as something to read straight through? I'll let you know if I get to it before you do.
I knew the saying "If you can't say anything nice...", but didn't know where it originated. Now I need to learn more about Alice Roosevelt Longworth.
Kate: I'm actually in sympathy with Miss Willmott on the scattering of seeds. I've been tempted to do that so many times in my neighbor's yard, although I don't think I'd do it to anybody's borders. My neighbors just have a bare patch of dirt. What was the novel you mentioned?
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