An Iowa Garden

Kathy Purdy of Cold Climate Gardening (herself one of the better writers in garden blogdom), has a piece on Eleanor Perenyi's classic garden book, Green Thoughts. Kathy points out that it is disappointing that Perenyi never wrote another garden book. I read Green Thoughts some twenty years ago, and also waited for a follow-up, to no avail. Admittedly, Perenyi was 63 when she wrote her garden book, and did have a few other things on her plate (earning a living, writing books on other subjects, perhaps trying to reclaim her husband's former castle in Hungary, which was seized by the communist government).
I would suggest, though, another possibility explaining the lack of a second gardening book: perhaps Perenyi had written about everything in her flower beds the first time around. If you look at the photo of her sitting in her garden on the book's dust jacket, it is easy to imagine that there is a full chapter in her book on nearly every plant in her garden (I may be imagining this, but I'm fairly sure I once saw a picture of her yard taken from the tower of the church seen in the background of the dust jacket photo, and her flower garden was pretty compact; she did also have a vegetable garden). I have a garden that meanders up and down hill, and around the corner, yet there are days when I think this blog could stand one more picture of our cats doing something cute.
I will say, though Eleanor Perenyi's book is certainly one of the classics of American garden writing, she does at times slip into the "cranky gardener" mode of writing, which I'm not fond of... this is a style of garden writing that is pervasive and not easy to avoid in your own writing (God knows, I am the poster boy for this: I start out telling about a lovely little primula blooming by the pond, and end up whining about the weather or something). Still, if you have some time for reading when the snow starts blowing this winter, Eleanor Perneyi's book is a good place to start.

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