In the garden with Vita

Today’s book is V. Sackville-West: The Illustrated Garden Book, an anthology edited by Robin Lane Fox.  It includes color photos, and new botanical watercolor illustrations by Freda Titford.  Paperback published 1989 by Atheneum.

From the back cover:

During her lifetime Vita Sackville-West‘s gardening articles for the Observer, collected in four anthologies and synthesized into V. Sackville-West’s Garden Book, did more “to change the face of English gardening than any other writing.”  The showpiece for her individual style of gardening was the grounds of Sissinghurst Castle, Kent, which she nurtured over thirty years and transformed into a place of beauty and tranquillity with her husband, Harold Nicolson.  Today Sissinghurst, owned by the National Trust, is the most visited garden in England, proving that enthusiasm for Vita’s style continues unabated.

This lavishly illustrated book will appeal to readers who loved V. Sackville-West’s Garden Book and will introduce a new generation of gardeners to the magical delights of the distinctive Sissinghurst style.  Robin Lane Fox, a well-known garden writer and designer, has returned to the original Observer articles to produce this new anthology.  The best of V. Sackville-West’s Garden Book is retained, but at least eighty percent of this volume is composed of new material, articles that have been out of print for twenty years or more.

Sackville-West was also a noted poet and novelist associated with the Bloomsbury group.  She had an affair with literary great Virginia Woolf, and remained her friend until Woolf’s death.

When I think of Sissinghurst, I think of its famous White Garden, ethereal and magical, with white-flowering specimens and plants with variegated or gray foliage.  I often see plants with Sissinghurst alba in their names featured in garden catalogues and magazines.  Photos and more information about the garden are available at the National Trust site.

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Also currently in stock at BrainiacBooks.com:

The Making of an English Country Garden

Who’s Afraid of Leonard Woolf?: A Case for the Sanity of Virginia Woolf

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If you are interested in more particulars about the Book of the Day or any of our other featured books, search our store at BrainiacBooks.com for the title.  If the book is still in our stock, you’ll be taken to the page for that title.

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Diggin’ the Beatles

Today’s book is The Beetless’ Gardening Book: An Organic Gardening Songbook/Guidebook, edited by Chris Roth.  Softcover published 1997 by Carrotseed Press.

What’s not to love about a book of organic farming songs set to Beatles tunes?  Here are some samples:

To the tune of “Love Me Do”:

Bug, bug me do
You know I love you
You’ll pollinate too
So please – bug me do.

Or, to the tune of “A Hard Day’s Night”:

I’ve got a hard, clay soil
And I’ve been working like a dog
To add humus so that when it rains
I’ve got a garden, not a bog.

And to the tune of “I Want to Hold Your Hand”:

Well I’ll tell you something
I hope you’ll understand
I don’t want no rototiller
I want to dig by hand
I want to dig by hand
I want to dig by hand.

Well tractors make me queasy
Their noise I cannot stand
Their fumes, they sure are stinky
I want to dig by hand.

Not singing along as you scan the tunes in this songbook/guidebook is the only challenge that you will be taking on in reading The Beetless’ Gardening Book. The lyrics in every song are amusing, educational and dripping with compost, while the music is compliments of John, Paul, George and Ringo. Various gardening tasks are explained to the tunes of Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds (Loosely Firm the Edges of Seedflats), Maxwell’s Silver Hammer (Maxwell’s Plastic Bucket) or you can dance in your garden singing out Mulch! to the music of Help! If you know any Beatles songs, you can probably find an organic cover of it in this guidebook. — Michelle Urso, Healing Currents Journal, 1997.

Also currently in stock at BrainiacBooks.com:

The Walrus Was Paul: The Great Beatle Death Clues

Liverpool Fantasy: A Novel

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If you are interested in more particulars about the Book of the Day or any of our other featured books, search our store at BrainiacBooks.com for the title. If the book is still in our stock, you’ll be taken to the page for that title.

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Recipes for summer’s garden harvest

Today’s book is The Great Book of Vegetables, by Antonella Palazzi. Published in 1993 by Simon and Schuster, it’s a large, coffee-table hardcover with more than 400 recipes.

Publishers Weekly offered this praise in 1993:

Great means big, in this case, and impressively intercontinental as Italian-born, globe-trotting Palazzi gathers all sorts of vegetables together for a summertime sortie, aptly illustrated with color photographs. There are good introductory advisories on preparing vegetables for cookery: photos and text tell how, for example, to carve out a flower from a radish, and how to ready a tomato for stuffing. The author also surveys, helpfully, sauces and bases (e.g., vinaigrette and ghee) and common techniques of cooking (deep-frying; steaming). Her recipes are worldly-wise and organized in chapters by vegetable type, with a sweeping range: under spinach, you’ll find nettle soup, spinach and rice Indian style, and spinach souffle, among others. Gatefold sections list recipes with prep and cooking time, difficulty rating and course. And finally, there are themed menus for an Indian dinner, an English afternoon tea, a Russian New Year’s supper and more; as pictured, all look lovely. The enormous book makes a claim to vegetarian authority, and it’s convincing.

The fresh vegetables of the season are becoming available, whether from one’s own organic garden, the local farmers’ market, the grocery, or roadside stands.  An authoritative, inspirational cookbook can help liven up the old standards in one’s menu, or broaden one’s knowledge about the preparation of less-familiar dishes.

Belle Pepper, by Sheryl Humphrey (click image for more info)

A  favorite vegetable-centered dish we enjoy is our own recipe for Grilled Vegetable Pasta. Red peppers, portobello mushrooms, tomatoes, onions, and yellow squash are brushed with olive oil and grilled to taste. Charred skins are then removed, and the cooked veggies are coarsely chopped. Fresh flat Italian parsley, oregano, basil, and a drizzle of extra-virgin olive oil are added, and all is mixed into just-cooked organic whole-wheat spaghetti from Italy (lately it’s been Luigi Vitelli brand). Served with fresh pepper and grated Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese, it is wonderful.

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If you are interested in more particulars about the Book of the Day, search our store at BrainiacBooks.com for the title.  If the book is still in our stock, you’ll be taken to the page for that title.

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