Most summers I’ve had a fruit and vegetable garden, but rarely has my summer reading included much about gardening other than nursery catalogues and seed packets and basic how-to articles. This year has been different. My Summer in a Garden by Charles Dudley Warner, first published in 1870, has had my attention, and it’s a book I’ve found hard to put down.
Warner lived in Hartford, Connecticut, in a veritable literary community. His immediate neighbors were Mark Twain and Harriet Beecher Stowe. As a writer, Warner didn’t achieve the fame of Twain or the influence of Stowe (whose Uncle Tom’s Cabin was the bestselling novel of the 19th century). Travel pieces he did for the Atlantic were popular. But My Summer in a Garden was the best thing he wrote. In 2002 the Modern Library reissued the book in its gardening series. It had been out of print for a century and a quarter.
The garden of the book’s title was, of course, Warner’s own, which took up a half-acre of his property. He had tended it over many summers—it was in his “sole care,” as he put it—while impressively maintaining his day job as associate editor and publisher of the Hartford Courant. In My Summer in a Garden the veteran gardener related what he knew, hoping that his readers would “find profit in the perusal of my experience.” The book was originally a series of columns published in the Courant.
A lawyer who left the practice of law only to sink into journalism, Warner was a churchman, though not a theologian, a Congregationalist, denominationally speaking. And he could assume his readers were at least nominally Christian and familiar with the creation stories of Genesis—of how man was made “from the ground” and “put” into a garden “to work it and keep it.”
Thus, My Summer begins with the assertion that gardening starts with man’s “love of dirt.” “Mud-pies gratify one of our first and best instincts,” wrote Warner, as though observing young children at play, enjoying their mess. This “fondness for the ground,” he said, never leaves the human species. For Warner, our love of dirt does not make every man or woman a gardener, but it explains why some people do garden.
Gardening, however, is not as easy as making mud pies. “Hardly is the garden planted,” wrote Warner, “when [the gardener] must begin to hoe it.” And weeds aren’t the only threat. “Nature” also uses “bugs, worms, and vermin . . . to make war upon the things of our planting” and then “calls in the fowls of the air, just as we think the battle is won, to snatch away the booty.”
When the season ends in early fall, the garden has the look of a scene of “combat,” indeed “a battle-field.” “Ground vines are torn, trampled, and withered; and the ungathered cucumbers, worthless melons and golden squashes, lie about like spent bombs and exploded shells of a battle-field.”
For Warner, however, more important than winning the “battle” of gardening was gardening well. (When did you last hear a version of that?) Indeed, the point of a private garden, he wrote, was not merely to give the gardener fruits and vegetables but to teach the gardener “patience and philosophy and the higher virtues,” such as calm in the face of “hope deferred, and expectations blighted.”
A garden thus is “a moral agent, a test of character, as it was in the beginning.” Warner counseled against quitting the “awful responsibility” of gardening. A gardener must not give in to the forces of nature but ever be vigilant, hoe at the ready: “I would not be without one for a single night.” Warner formulated what might be called the Gardener’s Vow: “I mean to have a moral garden . . . one that shall teach . . . the great lessons of life,” one that produces “a large crop of moral reflections.” Such as: “You can tell when people are ripe by their willingness to let go.”
Warner may be too preachy for some. But could he write. The voice is authoritative—he knew a lot about gardening, including its more arcane aspects, such as the utility of the toad “as a fly and bug trap.” He had a talent for crafting epigrams, as when, in a discussion about digging potatoes, he wrote: “What small potatoes we all are, when compared to what we might be!” And Warner was funny, often using exaggeration to good effect. “Pusley,” the weed he constantly campaigned against, obviously cannot be what Warner said it was—“the greatest enemy of mankind.” Yet that absurd thought is what makes a reader laugh, still today.
So I’m pleased to have discovered Charles Dudley Warner and My Summer. Especially since, in concluding his book, Warner lamented the agricultural and horticultural experimentation of his time, vowing “to cultivate only the standard things.” I think he could have written for a certain magazine.
