Book Report - Beverley Nichols

"To achieve an elegant informality in the garden always costs the earth."

Hi Friends!

If you saw my living room in a previous post, you already know I'm a book lover/fanatic. From time to time I'd like to share a favorite author. Since we are beginning the gardening season and are in the midst of the Etsy Cottage Style Garden Party, it's an appropriate time to introduce him to you.

Beverley Nichols (yes, a man), was a celebrated English author who wrote over sixty books, as well as plays, articles and other books. His gardening books are informative, witty and often hysterical. Out of print for many years, they are now being reprinted and can be obtained from Amazon.com

Mr. Nichols on the Chelsea Flower show: "One wanders around in a state of mounting palpitation, ordering dozens of this and hundreds of that, to the great satisfaction of the bronzed young man behind the ropes. Then one goes home, and looks around, and there is nowhere, but nowhere, to put them."

And overcome with his garden, he lapses into poetry: "Oh, that clematis! It is like a silver fountain that springs from a dark green bowl, and hangs on the summer air with a mist of stars."

"The drawback to having too many lilies is that they insist on a party being given for them, and since they are so grand and elegant you have to try to be grand and elegant too, and that means dinner jackets, and hiring masses of very ugly silver, and it is all inclined to be rather expensive."

"I was going through a period of acute fuchsia intoxication . . . and indeed still am. Fuchsias are among my ninety-nine most favorite flowers . . ."

"They were delicately carved in lead, and on the sides of each urn four heads were embossed . . .Whatever they cost, they had to be mine. Repairing the roof could wait mending the cracks in the ceiling could wait; the peculiar smell in the woodshed could, and almost certainly would, wait. I had to have those urns."

He also liked cats and several made their homes with him:  "Well-established clumps of heather are in great favour with equally well-established felines, who like to lie in it, dabbing at the bees and pretending to be lions."

"On warm May mornings, (my first Siamese) would wander to the shadow of an old wall, and dispose himself most elegantly upon the hyacinths. If reproached for squashing the flowers, he merely blinked; the blue eyes and the blue flowers, mingling together, were so beautiful that nothing could be done about it."

So look up Mr. Nichols - several books are in series of three. I think you will enjoy and reread them as I have.

"All great gardeners, are also great ramblers; they spend the happiest and most significant days of their lives prowling and poking about and going around in circles."

Have a garden day. Love, Linda