Beatrix Potter's Gardening Life: The Plants and Places That Inspired the Classic Children's Tales Hardcover Author: Visit Amazon's Marta McDowell Page | Language: English | ISBN:
1604693630 | Format: PDF, EPUB
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Part of the charm and eye-delighting intricacy of Beatrix Potter’s beloved children’s books about such endearing and enduring characters as Peter Rabbit and Jemima Puddle-Duck are the precisely and vitally rendered illustrations of the English gardens, farms, and landscapes her characters so actively occupy. In this sumptuously illustrated “gardening biography,” horticultural consultant McDowell, who is fascinated by writers who garden (her first book was Emily Dickinson’s Gardens, 2004), fully illuminates Potter’s deep botanical knowledge and joy in cultivation. When publishers rejected her first attempt at a children’s book, Potter self-published The Tale of Peter Rabbit in 1902, launching a brilliant career. When she purchased Hill Top Farm in the fabled Lake District, she set out on the path that led to her becoming an intrepid gardener, savvy landowner, sheep breeder, and conservationist, ultimately leaving thousands of pristine acres to the National Trust. 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. --Donna Seaman
Review
“You may well want to buy a copy to keep and several to give friends... the book is a visual delight.”
(Valerie Easton
Pacific Northwest Magazine)
“Gardeners brought up on the mishaps of Peter Rabbit can now curl up with Beatrix Potter’s Gardening Life … This work brings Potter, as much as her garden, to life, as an energetic, sturdy soul with an uncanny understanding of animals.”
(Anne Raver
The New York Times)
“McDowell leads her readers on a virtual tour of the gardens that were important in Potter's life and provides season-by-season descriptions of the flowered landscapes the author created at Hill Top Farm and Castle Cottage."
(Mary Beth Breckenridge
Akron Beacon Journal)
“A volume rich with photographs and Potter's own enchanting sketches and watercolors.”
(Nara Schoenberg
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."
(Charlotte Albers
The American Gardener)
See all Editorial Reviews
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- Hardcover: 340 pages
- Publisher: Timber Press (November 5, 2013)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 1604693630
- ISBN-13: 978-1604693638
- Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 6.6 x 1 inches
- Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
A Review of "Beatrix Potter's Gardening Life"
The plants and places that inspired the classic children's tales
By Marta McDowell
Only rarely in a reader's life will a book come along a book that is so perfectly suited for the reader's character that it brings out the schoolgirl in her and perhaps a squeal of delight and a series of silly, wistful sighs.
Reader, that is what Marta McDowell's latest book has done for me. I admit I didn't exactly love her book on Emily's Dickinson's garden but perhaps it was just my lack of enthusiasm for Dickinson herself that underwhelmed me. What a contrast is this treasure before me now. Shall I tell you all the things I love about it?
The cover is what delights the eyes at once. Part of the wonder of Beatrix Potter was that she was an amazingly accomplished artist, even from a young age. The cover is beautiful and includes a watercolor of a sweet garden gate, another of a handful of adorable little guinea pigs busy at their vegetable patch (both done by Potter, of course) and a wonderful old black and white photograph of Potter herself looking young and radiant with a posy under her nose. The colors are charming in the way that all her watercolors are.
Of course that sent me, with schoolgirl squeals, diving into the book where I was happy to discover a most generous selection of photographs and examples of her art; watercolors, sketches and even maps of the places important in her life.
The book is organized into three main parts. The first is about her life in general and all the people and places that influenced her work and her gardening. The photographs of these people and places are the best collection of such that I've seen.
The second part is about "The Year in Beatrix Potter's Garden".
Marta McDowell's "Beatrix Potter's Gardening Life" is almost sure to delight all who lovingly remember the stories of Peter Rabbit, Squirrel Nutkin, and Jemima Puddle-Duck which readied us for meeting Mole, Water Rat, Toad, and Badger. Even better, if these admirers of Beatrix Potter are slightly mad about gardens and wander in their dreams among the dreaming spires of English foxgloves & delphiniums. (In this review, as in McDowell's book, Beatrix Potter is sometimes referred to as Beatrix, sometimes as Beatrix Potter, and after her marriage, sometimes as Mrs. Heelis. Hopefully, this won't be confusing.)
This richly created book offers on almost every page superbly reproduced water colors of landscapes, plants, and the small creatures of hedgerow and streams, or photographs of the more than 10 homes in which Beatrix lived and gardened. No one, not even Durer, has drawn bunnies like Beatrix Potter, bunnies with the softest fur, and on p. 106, the roundest tummies, as six lie together sleeping off the soporific effects of a lettuce orgy.
Part One of this three part tale describes Beatix Potter's life in McDowell's framework of a plant: germination, offshoots, flowering, roots, ripening, and setting seed (140 pages bursting with the child's precociously talented paintings through her final flowering as a conservationist who wills 4,000 acres of Lake District lands to the National Trust).
Beatrix was the only daughter of second generation wealth. To her supremely status-conscious parents, almost no one was good enough for her company or her love, making her early life lonely. She turned to drawing & botanical research.
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