Reading in the Garden

The Weaver and the Waif Silas Marner by George Eliot  is a classic novel that was first published in 1861. There are a couple of things right off the bat that may be misleading.  First off, author George Eliot is not a man.  Eliot is the pen name of Mary Ann Evans. Mary Ann Evans is an English novelist, who besides  Silas  Marner , wrote several classics including  Adam  Bede ,  Middlemarch,  Daniel Deronda,  and The Mill on the Floss , among others.  Secondly, Silas is not a big albino who likes to beat himself.  Wrong book.  That’s in The Da Vinci Code  by Dan Brown. This Silas is a weaver wrongly accused of theft.  Disgraced and dumped by his fiancée he leaves town to make a small life for himself in the countryside.  Being the early nineteenth century he has nothing to get his mind off his problems—no Pinterest, no  Netflix, no video games.  So, he sets about weaving and weaving...

The Secrets of Shangri-la Lost Horizon by James Hilton recounts the adventure of Hugh Conway in a strange and distant land in the '30s. A plane crashes in the mountains of Tibet. Three men and a woman survive, are rescued, and led to a private monastery.  The residents of this monastery live in a beautiful setting surrounded by mountains overlooking a rich and abundant valley. This breathtaking place is a sort of Utopia—a Xanadu minus Olivia-Newton John. It is Shangri-la.  It’s the ultimate get-away. In this day and age people would pay big bucks for such a remote peaceful setting that has all the modern amenities.  They would pay even more if they knew that time almost stands still there. The inhabitants of Shangri-la age very slowly; some are well beyond their golden years and don’t look a day over twenty-nine.  I wonder if my sister has been there?  She has claimed to be twenty-nine for about a decade.    The four new comers soon find...

Hooked on Classics—Blame Mr. Haynes Narrator, Nick Carraway, recalls how he met a mysterious stranger in an upscale Long Island neighborhood.  Nick rents a small rundown cottage right next to a mansion, an “imitation of some Hotel de Ville in Normandy, with a tower on one side, spanking new under a thin beard of raw ivy, and a marble swimming pool, and more than forty acres of lawn and garden.” [1] Owner,  Jay Gatsby, is a wealthy man who likes to throw wild and glamorous, alcohol-filled parties in the days of prohibition.  It’s the best bash in town.  People come in droves, most not even invited.  They dig into the expansive tables of catered food, dance into the night to the full orchestra, and drink until they fall over.  Oddly, Gatsby doesn’t drink nor does he mingle much with the guests. He’s an enigma and rumors swirl around him like a dust devil: he’s killed a man; he’s a bootlegger; or he’s a German spy, but who cares?...

Extreme Gardening Mommy, where do monkey puzzle trees come from? Or how about the Douglas fir or Clematis Montana var. rubens ?  Have you ever considered where all our plants came from (other than a catalog)?  The Plant Hunters: Two Hundred Years of Adventure and Discovery Around the World by Toby Musgrave, Chris Gardner, and Will Musgrave explores the lives of brave men who scoured the world over to bring back those lovely plants that thrive in your garden. Their quests to find plant specimens often put them in perilous situations.  In this fascinating book you’ll find out how Ernest “Chinese” Wilson, the prolific plant hunter, got his “lily limp.”  You’d never guess this mild-mannered looking man was actually a daring Indiana-Jones type who faced treacherous rapids on the Yangtze River and narrow mountainous trails with dangerous landslides.  And speaking of Indiana Jones, Frank Kingdon-Ward was also terrified of snakes, but that didn’t stop him from con...

Gardening with Gusto The $64 Tomato by William Alexander is a humorous account of a gardener battling to start and maintain a whopping, über-sized 2,000 square foot kitchen garden!  For a professional man and his physician wife to even strive for such a large garden in their spare time is either insane or they have to have a good sense of humor.  Well, he definitely had a good sense of humor—this book was funny.  About being insane, I’m not qualified to comment. In this book William Alexander calls gardening a “blood sport” for a good reason. He battled everything from clay soil, to garden designers, landscapers, weeds, numerous bug infestations, squirrels, and even groundhogs, or more specifically “Superchuck.”  One of the most amusing episodes was his battle with Superchuck.  Superchuck was woodchuck, aka groundhog, who somehow bypassed the electric fence to sneak into the kitchen garden and took bites out of prized Brandywine tomatoes. And in his sup...

Gardening French Style In a few days it will be spring. In these parts of the Inland Northwest, we’re not quite ready to plant.  The snow is gone but the temperatures are in the 40s.  The good news is that tulip and daffodil bulbs are starting to poke their heads out of the ground, and that's enough to get excited about. It's time to order plants from the catalogs that have been teasing us for months. It's time to gear up for gardening! This week I want to look at some gardening books for inspiration and insight.  French Dirt: The Story of a Garden in the South of France by Richard Goodman is short book about a great undertaking in France.  American Richard Goodman and his Dutch girlfriend decided to move to a small village in France for one year.  The town had a population of 211 people.  Not only did this scant number of inhabitants not warrant a movie theater, there was also no post office, no grocery store, no butcher, no gas station.  Th...

Cooking Up a New Life in Ireland Pomegranate Soup by Marsha Mehran is a tale that melds the flavors of Persian food and memories best left forgotten with a quaint and rainy Irish village. Three sisters move to a small Irish town and open the Babylon Café.  Town bully, Thomas McGuire, who owns half the village is not happy about the “darkies.”  They have settled in the building that he’s been trying to acquire for years.  He wants to open a disco there—a boogie-woogie bully with a dream.  Despite his best efforts the café begins to gain customers and the girls begin to develop friendships.  Majan is the oldest. There is something about her cooking that in some ways revives patrons’ past dreams and aspirations, and keeps them coming back for more.  Bahar is the petite, skittish middle sister, and Layla the beautiful young 15-year-old.  As they cook away, they stir up old, sometimes harrowing memories of the Iranian Revolution which they escape...

Fighting for His Kids Tea and Green Ribbons is a memoir by Evelyn Doyle based on the true struggle of a father attempting to get his kids back from the church-run industrial schools in Ireland during the 1950s.  Dessie’s wife ran away with her lover, leaving him with six small kids.  Who knows, maybe she suffered from ephebiphobia, a fear of teenagers. Maybe she was a planner, and decided to get out while the going was good before the real suffering started.  Left with no other options, Dessie temporarily placed the kids in state-run convents so he could find work.  The convents were alternative care facilities designated for orphaned kids or kids whose parents were unable to care for them.  Dessie then went to England in an effort to find work so he could raise money to support his kids. Months later he returned to a position back in Ireland, but when he tried to claim his daughter, he was told he could not legally take her out of the convent.  ...

Luck of the Irish? St. Patrick’s Day is coming and I cannot wait to eat corned beef and cabbage as we do every year. I’ll raise my glass and throw in an Irish toast. “ Thirst is a shameless disease so here's to a shameful cure. ” I’ll turn on some U2 along with some Irish Pub tunes and think of how I’d love to visit Ireland one day.  And with St. Patrick’s Day in mind, I thought we’d look at three books set in Ireland this week.  Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt is a memoir about a poor boy growing up in Limerick, Ireland during the 1930s and '40s. His father is a drunk who spends his money on alcohol instead of providing for his family.  Frank’s mother, Angela, makes do as best as she can.  Together they deal with starvation, unimaginable living conditions, and the tragic loss of three of Frank’s siblings.  At one point they live in an apartment where eleven families use the restroom that’s located next to the building. And I complained that I...

The Love That Binds Us If you’re looking for a book about the power of friendship, The Persian Pickle Club by Sandra Dallas is the book for you.  Don’t let the name fool you. It’s not set in the Middle East.  The story takes place in Kansas during the Great Depression and drought of the 1930s. A Persian pickle is a paisley, and the club is a quilting bee. The women of the Persian Pickle Club dress up and meet regularly to quilt and socialize. They love nothing more than trading fabric scraps and finding new patterns with names like Better Times, Nine-Patch, Wandering Foot, and Road to Californy. When new comer, Rita, joins the group, they try to welcome her even though she doesn’t quite fit in. She’s a college girl who doesn’t know how to sew a stitch. She has a hankering for bourbon and a yearning to be a journalist.  She would prefer to read rather than sew, which is something Queenie just can’t understand.  The story is told by Queenie, a kind and sensi...

Florentino’s Fierce Love for Fermina Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez was all everyone was talking about when this book came out, so I was happy to have the opportunity to read it. It’s a love story, with a twist of obsession and a hint of loco. Florentino falls madly, deeply in love with Fermina. She shares his passion, but their love is not to be.  She ends up marrying a nice local doctor.  Fermina’s family is happy, the good doctor is happy, and Fermina, well she’s good with it too.  Florentino, however, is devastated.  Fermina was THE one for him.  Florentino doesn’t know what to do.  Soon, he finds a way of handling his loss. Florentino buries his sorrows between the bedroom sheets—many, many sheets.  In an effort to forget one woman, he sleeps with hundreds. He becomes a man-whore. Everyone deals with problems in their own way. Mucho, mucho years later life gives him one more opportunity. Undaunted by the pa...

Of Marriage and Mansions Keeping the House by Ellen Baker is about a newlywed who moves into a new town where her husband opens a car dealership with an Army buddy in 1950. Dolly beings her married life there and starts to make friends while trying to please her husband, which is not always so easy. Byron is a veteran of WWII who continues to build a wall around him that Dolly has a difficult time penetrating. With the help of popular magazines such as the Ladies' Home Journal ,  she strives to make her marriage work with tips like:    “Take an interest in his appearance.  Keeping his clothes in order is your job; encouraging him to look his best and admiring him when he does should be your pleasure.” [i] As amusing as this suggestion may be, it was sound and serious advice for the times, but it is still not quite doing the job in making their marriage work. As Dolly becomes more disillusioned with her husband, she also becomes more intrigued with the big ...

Singer Sargent’s Sexy Scandal I Am Madame X  by Gioia Diliberto revolves around the life of Virginie Gautreau, the woman who posed for John Singer Sargent’s infamous painting, Madame X .  To the current-day eye the portrait is of an elegant woman wearing a beautiful, sleek black dress. The waist is small and defined. The deep V-neckline, almost modest for today, revealed a lot of skin in the 1800s. But more shockingly was the fact that one strap was dangling off her shoulder in a come-hither attitude.  Gasp. That “slutty” picture ended up causing a lot of strife. Later, a repentant Singer Sargent moved away from his scandal in Paris and the strap was repainted more respectably on her shoulder. This novel, however, doesn’t focus on that painting; it is centered on the life of the woman in the painting.  Virginie Gautreau moved from a Louisiana plantation with her mother  and sister to Paris in the 1800s.  While the Civil War raged at home, Virgini...