Green Thoughts

"Eleanor Perenyi was an American writer , and this is one of the first gardening books that I read as literature. It is a book of her short essays – each piece is only about 1,000 words – which started off as articles and were published together. She writes about things like why her beans were so wonderful this year. Even though she wrote it 20 years ago and is now dead, I still find this book inspiring and thought-provoking. What I really love about her, and what inspired me, is her low key seriousness. She felt that these things were important and worth writing about well. The book isn’t just a manual, it is her experiences. As a writer she is very encouraging. There is a British view of gardening which tries to show off how much you know about it. But Americans just talk about gardening as a wonderful thing which is part of life. I also like the fact that she is a woman, because I think women make better gardeners."