Down the Garden Path by Beverley Nichols

Talk about being led down the garden path.Ĭhristin Geall teaches creative nonfiction at the University of Victoria and is an avid Oak Bay gardener.Down the Garden Path has stood the test of time as one of the world’s best-loved and most quoted gardening books. This week, when I should really be home digging in the garden, I’ll be in England digging through used bookshops for more Nichols. Thirty-five dollars later, I set off down the avenue with my hardcover, one that will undoubtedly lead to a very pretty little shelf if not a manor. Nichols writes from another time and place, but his stories about becoming a gardener have kept his books in print for over 70 years. If you have a new home or garden, read him. A kitchen garden, fields, an orchard and statuary – gardener’s Narnia.ĭown the Garden Path is the first book in Nichols’ thatched cottage trilogy after which 10 more books about homes and gardens follow, not to mention novels, mysteries, travel writing and more. “And look at the endplates.”Ī hand-drawn aerial map of a garden unfolded before me. The lupins…he made it sound positively dramatic collecting seed.”

I felt I had to explain myself.Ī lark? (A Nichols word if there ever was one!) I don’t really even know what lark looks like. Shirley had only just called and there I was, practically panting. I ordered Nichols’ book, Down the Garden Path, first published in 1932, from Ivy’s Bookshop and was at the shop within the hour of its arrival.

And the next in the series, and the next… until I needed to start on his earlier work with a copy of my own. A walled kitchen garden? Deep rich soil left from annuals past? Don’t even get me started on laburnum walks, pools, potagers and pergolas. I don’t know about you, but chances are if you’re reading a gardening column, you might have harboured just such a restoration fantasy. The story, I learned from the back flap, was about an English bachelor restoring a Georgian manor and its garden in the late 1940s. The title, apt to cheer anyone, was Merry Hall. There I stood one drizzly January day and plucked a vintage-looking novel-sized hardcover from the gardening section. But I didn’t have Nichols.Īnd I might have gone my entire life never owning a book by Beverley Nichols if it weren’t for the Oak Bay library.

Glossy photo books, diaries, and more ‘year-in-garden’ books than years I have left to read them. I own books on shade and foliage and roses. I have the usual field guides, garden guides and perennial guides, plus oodles of niche gardening books the likes of which are rarely if ever opened – Baskets from Nature’s Bounty, A Weaver’s Garden, and Chicken Gardening among them. I’ve been gardening for most of my adult life and have not one, but two decent-sized bookcases devoted to natural history and gardening.

Down the Garden Path by Beverley Nichols