Recently read: Beverley Nichols’ Down the Garden Path

This book, written in three weeks in 1932, is MAGNIFICENT. Nichols was a well-known writer who hobnobbed with the other British and American literary elites of the 1920s and later. He wrote a lot—from magazine articles to novels (six of ‘em), children’s stories, memoirs, plays, and six books detailing his adventures creating gardens in his homes in England.

This is the first of his gardening books, and it describes a cottage garden that a king would covet. Now, this is not an ordinary book about composting and getting plants to winter over. Nichols has a wonderful, witty sense of the ridiculous, a sensitive appreciation for the important things in life, and is a master of the written language. Reading his description of how he greeted his garden each weekend upon his return from the workaday world in London, and his discussion about planting hundreds of bulbs, literally changed my way of viewing chores. Nothing in Nichols life was a chore as long as he had a garden. I’m no gardener, but as is the case with all good writers, Nichols’ writing transcends the topic and provides inspiration beyond himself and his subject.