Down the Garden Path Book

So this is my review of Beverley Nichols' Down The Garden Path. The reader already knows I really, really liked it because of the rare 5 star rating. I haven't tossed one out there in ages. I haven't even considered it. This book, for me, is the beginning of a friendship, even though the other guy is long gone. I can say this because I've already searched Amazon and Goodreads and learned there is much more of this comical, curmudgeonly garden enthusiast's work out there just waiting for me. Sigh. Life IS good after all. People often refer to any book written by an Englishman that is funny as something that readers of Wodehouse would like. I didn't like Wodehouse, found it vacant, soulless. This funny curmudgeonly Englishman, Nichols, is funny though, and more than that, he has soul.
By the way, I am not only a curmudgeon myself; I'm also a cheap tightwad. I never pay full price for anything and almost never buy a book I can borrow from the library. But this book broke all the cheapskate rules I've made for myself. I paid almost 15 bucks for it. ON Kindle. I don't have anything to gaze at fondly and leave lying on the secretary here with a ribbon tied around it fondly and I'm okay with that. That's how good it is. Here are a few bits I highlighted as I read.


"I believe in doing things too soon. In striking before the iron is hot, in leaping before one has looked, in loving before one has been introduced. Nearly all the great and exciting things in life have been done by men who did them too soon. It was far, far too soon for Columbus to set out on his crazy trip to the New World. The ether was not ready for Beethoven when he began a symphony on a dominant seventh. Shelley, long before the appointed time, unloosed, with trembling fingers, the starched ribbons which bound the dress of Poetry."
So yeah, that's how Mr. Beverley Nichols begins his little book about how he began his first proper garden. Even before reading that bit of perfect loveliness I knew I'd like this book but couldn't be sure I'd love it. By the way, one needn't be a gardening enthusiast to enjoy this book. I'm sure anyone with a pulse will laugh out loud reading this. I did. It's hard to get a smirk out of me, I am hard to amuse. I see everything coming. This Nichols, chap, though, he's genius. Anyway, see here for yourself, you doubter.
"I have a horror of those leaden cupids who illustrate, so gruesomely, the ultimate horrors of Bright's disease in many suburban pleasaunces." (Heeehee- he means fat cupid statues that appear swollen like a person with kidney failure!)
"I am depressed unutterably by those horrible little German manikins which some people scatter over their properties…grouping them oh! So archly…popping out of rhododendrons, or lifting their horrid heads from a lavender hedge." (He would roll over in his grave perhaps if he knew garden gnomes had made such a comeback. I have tiny ones myself popping out of plants just like he writes here!)

"I shall probably go bankrupt, with my tastes. But I would rather be made bankrupt by a bulb merchant than by a chorus girl."
"Every gardener has a strange and romantic tale to tell if you can worm it out of him…of blue flowers that came up yellow, or of a white lily that sinned in the night and greeted the dawn with crimson cheeks."
"It seemed incredible that goldfish should have black children. Had a black fish got into the pond, and had something unholy been going on?"
"But I feel that the trees are my friends, that I could wander naked among them without hurt, and sleep unharmed among their sturdy roots." (Trees make good friends, they don't judge, they just give.)
"Up till now I knew practically nothing about trees. I had only old scraps of miscellaneous information. For example, I knew that ash buds were black in March. But I knew it not from observation but from Tennyson, and I knew it not from reading Tennyson but from reading Cranford." Gotta love a guy who read and loved Cranford.
" Was she to be killed? Or was she - in the words of the Sunday newspapers- on the point of being 'interfered with?'". He is so funny with those little insertions about how things are translated for the Sunday papers.
"To go the greenhouse when the weather is wild, to close the door, to stand and listen to the wind outside, to the rain that slashes the frail roof, to see, through the misted glass, the black, storm-tossed branches of distant elms, to take a deep breath, to savour to the full the strange and almost uncanny peace which this frail tenement creates…to me this is one of the truest joys which life has given." ( Yeah, so now I want a greenhouse. Yeah, I live on the gulf coast but we do get a couple of nasty 40ish degree days in winter.)
"When I look at the cyclamen on my desk, with petals of the palest ivory…a cyclamen that looks like a flight of butterflies, frozen for a single, exquisite moment in the white heart of Time…then I try to think back from the petal to the bud, from the bud to the curling stem, from the stem to the first, fan-shaped leaf, and from that leaf to the tiny seed. And I cannot realize it." And he goes on… "Oh…these were cyclamen, without any doubt…they held themselves sturdily against the fawning weeds…there was a fine flourish about them, which set them apart from the rank usurpers of their place." Usurpers? Ha!
Regarding women being too dainty to plant daffodils: "It needs a man to plant daffodils. An enormous man with bulging muscles, large nostrils, few morals and absolutely no pity. He has to be as callous as a mathematician, as orderly as a sergeant-major, and as cynical as a political agent."
About one of his favorite flowers, snowdrops: "Why should one want to go out to dinner when one can stay home with the snowdrops, and enjoy them in solitude? It took a few million years to make a snowdrop. Surely one is justified in spending a few hours in studying the results?" After reading that bit, I suddenly remembered a lovely potted Amaryllis I had seen this week at the grocery store of all places. Amaryllis thrive at my house,indeed, hundreds of them had been planted 2 owners back and I add more every year. They do well here in our hot humid climate. So I suddenly thought how perhaps I shouldn't wait for the price to come down on them because, horrors!, maybe they would all be bought before I next went shopping? I threw some shoes on and grabbed the rugrat and made haste to the grocery store. There, to my great relief, I found one, beautiful perfect white amaryllis was left. It was overpriced, but so perfect. We greeted each other with such smiles as people hardly get from me, as , after all, I am a curmudgeon. I took her home and admit to being enraptured enough to move her about the house so that she is always in view. She adds such an elegance to every room she graces. I believe I shall name her Grace. This spring she shall be plopped into the garden in a place suitable for her.