Day 134 Down the garden path

I happened to pick this book  up while at work in the library yesterday.  I was drawn to the old fashioned cover.  

It is a new book, a reproduction of Beverley Nichols 1932 delightful 'Down the garden path'.  When I started to read it, I soon became  hooked.  Beverley inherits an old thatched cottage with a mess for a garden. This is the story of how he managed to make that garden into a masterpiece.  The funny thing about the book is that Beverley gets so easily distracted, and he keeps drifting off the plot, and getting disturbed by some hilarious characters.  He is not always politically correct, one wasn't in those days, but he does insult people so eloquently. 

I am so enjoying this book, so much so that I have been doing  little research on Bev, and intend to read all his other books.

From Amazon.....

Down the Garden Path has stood the test of time as one of the world's best-loved and most-quoted gardening books. Ostensibly an account of the creation of a garden in Huntingdonshire in the 1930s, it is really about the underlying emotions and obsessions for which gardening is just a cover story. The secret of this book's success — and its timelessness — is that it does not seek to impress the reader with a wealth of expert knowledge or advice. Beverley Nichols proudly declares his status as a newcomer to gardening: "The best gardening books should be written by those who still have to search their brains for the honeysuckle's languid Latin name ... " As unforgettable as the plants in the garden is the cast of visitors and neighbors who invariably turn up at inopportune moments. For every angelic Miss Hazlitt there is an insufferable Miss Wilkins waiting in the wings. For every thought-provoking Professor, there is an intrusive Miss M, whose chief offense may be that she is a 'damnably efficient' gardener. From a disaster building a rock garden, to further adventures with greenhouses, woodland gardens, not to mention cats and treacle, Nichols has left us a true gardening classic.

Comments

[horse care courses]

Oh I loved this book, so politically incorrect now but so funny and true.