The Saturday Morning Post (No. 198)

 

THE SATURDAY MORNING BOOK REPORT

This week we have another suggestion from Jen's Reading Life channel. This one is a novel about gardening.

My reviewer criteria. I like light, entertaining novels. I like smaller scale stories rather than epics. I like character focused novels featuring pleasant characters, with a minimum number of unpleasant ones. I greatly value clever and witty writing. I like first person, or close third person narratives. I dislike a lot of "head jumping" between POVs and flashbacks. I want a story, not a puzzle. While I am not opposed to violence, I dislike gore for the sake of gore. I find long and elaborate fight, action, and battle sequences tedious. Plot holes and things that happen for the convenience of the author annoy me. And I fear I'm a born critic in that I don't mind pointing out what I don't like in a story. However, I lay no claim to be the final arbitrator of style and taste, you need to decide for yourself what you like or dislike in a book.

Your opinions are always welcome. Comment below.

Old Herbaceous by Reginald Arkell  B

This a short "Novel of the Garden." It is the life story of Bert Pinnegar, who, as a newborn, was left on the doorstep of the Mrs Pinnegar, a kindly soul and a cowman's wife. She, with six children of her own figured, "one more didn't matter," and took him in. 

He grew up loving and learning all about wild flowers at the side of the local teacher, Mary Brain, who would fearlessly cross farmer's fields in a quest for wildflowers while Bert, on the other hand, was terrified of farmers, since they would yell at him from across a ten acre field if they found him looking for wildflowers on their land. Thus, he collected most of his flowers along the disused canal. One year, at the Annual Flower Show he was awarded first prize by the young fiancée of the Manor house for his wild flower arrangement submission, because he picked waterflowers, instead of any old flowers put together in any old way. Several years later, when it came time for the local vicar to assign the students their jobs for the rest of their lives - mostly in farm work because that was all they had been educated to do, Bert refused farm work. He still hated farmers and farm work. Luckily that young fiancée, now Mrs Charteris, the lady of the manor, was present when the vicar was interviewing him, and remembering him from the show, offered him the chance to work in her garden. And thus began a lifelong relationship with the lady of the manor and her garden.

In the early years she taught him the Latin names of all the flowers, while he, under the tutelage of the head gardener, learned the trade from the ground up. Because he loved the work, he often worked after hours, which impressed Mrs Charteris, who, when the old gardener retired, promoted him to head gardener. 

This short novel tells stories of his life as he mastered his craft and built a garden that was the showpiece of the district over the course of nearly 80 years, from the 1870's to 1950. In addition, it chronicled the wider changes in society from the age of Victoria to the Cold war. The author was about the same age as his character, so that he too traveled through those days, and the story no doubt reflects his authentic reactions to those changes.

All in all, it is a quiet, lovely little story, told with humor, some sadness, and an enduring passion for the garden.