The Literary Gardener

A captivating celebration of gardening by luminous authors, this anthology gathers selections from diaries, letters, and other writings by classic writers on real gardens. It offers a surprising array of personal reflections by literary figures on the art and joy of horticulture. Virginia Woolf relishes her summer garden while her husband crushes snails; Emily Dickinson contemplates mortality while saving blossoms from the frost; and Nathaniel Hawthorne rhapsodizes over the bounty of a vegetable garden, which Gertrude Stein later deplores because it grows “nothing, nothing but vegetables.” Writers include Jane Austen on currants and gooseberry bushes, Ludwig Wittgenstein with unsolicited advice on the improvement of a public garden, and Marcel Proust on the garden as a colorist’s template. Witty, revealing, and in some instances previously unpublished, these passages depict gardening as a creative act, a source of self-discovery, an epiphanic pleasure, and an occasional cause for humility before nature’s whims. 

Ulrich Baer is University Professor at New York University and has been awarded Guggenheim, Getty, and Humboldt fellowships. Among his other books, he has written new introductions to Vita Sackville-West’s A Joy of Gardening, Elizabeth von Arnim’s The Enchanted April, Elizabeth and Her German Garden, and The Solitary Summer, and classic editions by authors including Woolf, Austen, Rilke, and Dickinson. He hosts the Think About It podcast.