Focuses on Beatrix Potter's life as a gardener, exploring the origins of her love of gardening and plants and how this passion came to be reflected in her work, and creating characters such as Peter Rabbit, Jemima Puddle-Duck, and Benjamin Bunny.

“Stir your imagination. . . . a biography written through plants.” —The New York Times Book Review

“With wit and expertise, McDowell highlights the stamp of Potter’s horticultural know-how on her indelible books and chronicles a year in her exuberant gardens to create a visually exciting, pleasurably informative appreciation of Potter’s devotion to art and nature.” —Booklist

 “A loving portrait.” —Better Homes and Gardens

“You will be charmed by this book.” —Gardens Illustrated

“A richly illustrated exploration of Beatrix Potter’s evolution as an author-illustrator, gardener, sheep farmer and land preservationist.” —Shelf Awareness

“Rarely does a gardening book blend such a rich love of nature, literature, home, and the magic of growing so beautifully. If you have a gardener in your life, this is the perfect holiday gift.” —Encore

“In her new book, Beatrix Potter’s Gardening Life, Marta McDowell expands our knowledge of Miss Potter horticultural expertise and background, explaining what she grew and where. There are photographs here that I have never seen before of Beatrix and her gardens, and delicious watercolors of rose hips and violets, clematis and honeysuckle, snapdragons and waterlilies—with and without rabbits, frogs and guileless ducks.” —The Telegraph

 “A volume rich with photographs and Potter’s own enchanting sketches and watercolors.” —The Chicago Tribune

“McDowell brings to light a delightfully different side of the celebrated author. . . . The book recounts Potter’s life through a gardening lens and is copiously illustrated with her sketches and watercolors of plants.” —American Gardener

“McDowell’s book is beautiful in every way. The fascinating narrative is liberally illustrated with both photographs and Potter’s original artwork, which includes botanical prints and paintings of gardens in addition to her iconic collection of children’s illustrations.” —Cape Codder

“This is not an historical novel with a plot, but neither is it a mere documentary of facts. It is the perfect blend of both.” —Alaska Airlines Magazine

“You may well want to buy a copy to keep and several to give friends. . . . McDowell’s well-researched book (including plant lists) is nearly as good as a visit to the farm. From a watercolor of Jemima Puddle-duck hiding from a fox among the foxgloves, to sepia photos of Potter strolling the garden paths on a frosty morning, the book is a visual delight.” —The Seattle Times

Vorwort
Richly illustrated and filled with quotations from her books, letters, and journals, Beatrix Potter's Gardening Life is essential reading for all who know and cherish Beatrix Potter and her classic tales.

Autorentext

Marta McDowell

Klappentext

“Yes I have lots of flowers, I am very fond of my garden, it is a regular old fashioned farm garden, with a box hedge round the flower bed, and moss roses and pansies and black currants and strawberries and peas. . . . I have tall white bell flowers I am fond of. . . . next there will be phlox; and last come the michaelmas daisies and chrysanthemums. Then soon after Christmas we have snowdrops, they grow wild and come up all over the garden and orchard, and in some of the woods.” —Beatrix Potter

Beatrix Potter’s characters—Peter Rabbit, Jemima Puddle Duck, and all the rest—exist in a charmed world filled with flowers and gardens. Beatrix Potter’s Gardening Life is the first book to explore the origins of Beatrix Potter’s love of gardening and plants and show how this passion came to be reflected in her work. Richly illustrated and filled with quotations from her books, letters, and journals, it is essential reading for all who know and cherish Beatrix Potter’s classic tales.

Leseprobe
Preface
First, a confession. I did not read Beatrix Potter as a child. In fact, I learned about Peter Rabbit from a knockoff of sorts. The spoiled youngest of four, I would steadily pester my mother for books on outings to Woolworths, and one day she bought me a shiny-covered Golden Book called Little Peter Cottontail by Thornton W. Burgess. Its naughty rabbit cavorted in wildflowers and visited a farm, but never found Mr. McGregor’s garden. My introduction to Beatrix Potter came much later in life.

In 1981, at a shower celebrating my upcoming nuptials, someone gave me a large cookie jar in the shape of a bonneted, apron-bedecked “porcupine” holding an iron. Wedding showers are awkward at best, particularly for learning about famous characters from childhood literature that one has somehow, in two-plus decades of life, managed to miss. What did I say when opening this gift in front of a sizeable, entirely female audience of friends, family, and future relations? That memory is lost. I have also repressed the identity of the gift-giver. Neither the Mrs. Tiggy-winkle cookie jar (a hedgehog, if you please) nor the marriage lasted long.

Fast-forward to 1997, when I set off with my second (and last) husband and two aged parents for a tour of Scotland and the Lake District. William Wordsworth was on our agenda. His homes, Dove Cottage and Rydal Mount, are both near Grasmere and not far from Windermere, where we were staying. And what of Beatrix Potter, that children’s author and artist?

Our visit to Hill Top Farm, Miss Potter’s beloved home on the other side of Windermere, turned out to be a highlight. For one thing, the sun came out that afternoon after a week of Scotland in the rain. (My mother, who had brought only one pair of shoes—my father would blow dry them for her every night in our B&B—was especially grateful.) The Hill Top garden was at its August peak; the tour was engaging.

I learned that day that Beatrix Potter was a gardener. I garden, though some days I feel that I do most of my gardening at the keyboard. I am intrigued by writers who garden and by gardeners who write. The pen and the trowel are not interchangeable, but seem often linked. Emily Dickinson, poet and gardener, has long been an obsession of mine. Edith Wharton interests me, and Jane Austen, both novelists with a gardening bent. I once read all of Nathaniel Hawthorne, winnowing his words for horticultural references. Gertrude Jekyll and Vita Sackville-West also oblige. And now there was Beatrix Potter.

So Beatrix Potter and the idea of her garden simmered quietly at the back of my mind. Over the years I saw some of Potter’s marvelous botanical watercolors at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and the Morgan Library & Museum in New York. Miss Potter, a Hollywood film, came and went. An adroit article by Peter Parker appeared in the gardening journal Hortus. But one day at the New York Botanical Garden shop, two books lay side by side on a display table: a new edition of Potter’s The Complete Tales and Linda Lear’s biography, Beatrix Potter: A Life in Nature. The simmer turned to a boil.

A few explanatory notes. You may be relieved or perturbed, depending on your druthers, that I have avoided botanical names in most of the book. Beatrix was not impressed with gardener’s Latin, so I have bowed to her feelings on the matter…