The Perennial Post

Beverly Nichols’ garden escapades

If you like the pithy, slightly snobbish humor of Masterpiece Theater British comedies of a “certain era,” you’ll love writer Beverly Nichols’ garden escapades. Here are the antics of fictionalized neighbors, gardeners, visitors, and oh, did I mention CATS?

Though the books may be read in any order, it’s useful to know that they are loosely arranged into three trilogies. The first concerns a fifteenth century thatched “cottage” and the travails of a novice building a garden. Down the Garden Path, The Thatched Roof, and A Village in a Valley are respectively about the garden, the house, and the community. His second garden is Merry Hall, a Georgian mansion. The enterprise and “grand scheme” of reviving, often with more enthusiasm than expertise, this house and attendant garden are explored in Merry Hall, Laughter on the Stairs and Sunlight on the Lawn. His third and last garden occupy his later books, Garden Open Today, Garden Open Tomorrow and Forty Favorite Flowers (currently out of print.) Unlike the earlier chronicles, these are not quasi-novels with casts of local characters, but from a later time and era, when garden books were more informational about horticulture and design.

Nichols’ light, jabbing humor (and not always politically correct observations; he was born in 1898) is the main thrust of his books. Think Noel Coward — friend and contemporary. However, interspersed are some of the most beautiful prose poems about gardens that you are likely to find. These should be savored, not dashed through as the comic elements demand — and read while watching the sunset over your own garden or the bees in the orchard or a kitten in the shrubbery.

Timber Press has released two NEW titles in the Nichols library in 2006: A Garden In the City (about his pre-World War II London suburban garden) and Down the Kitchen Sink (his entrance into the culinary world.)