Beatrix Potter's gardening life The plants and places that inspired the classic children's tales

DECEMBER IS, OF COURSE, the holiday season, but for gardeners it's also the reading season. In the garden, we play out fantasies, desires and longings, and the ensuing tussle with nature - sometimes gentle, sometimes violent - is for a beauty we can make. Like sex, quite a lot of gardening happens in the mind. This season, a few books that look back to the past may well stir your imagination. Marta McDowell's Beatrix potter's GARDENING LIFE: The Plants and Places That Inspired the Classic Children's Tales (Timber, $24.95) is a biography written through plants. Potter, as we know from her charming illustrated children's books, invented enormously lovable characters, from cheeky mice to naughty bunnies, all of whom inhabit a pastoral paradise that seems as vibrant as the creatures themselves. Throughout her life, Potter found not only solace but literary inspiration in Britain's fields, pastures and country gardens. During bouts of loneliness in her youth, McDowell tells us, Potter found solace "with her paintbrush and her pen." While her art was wonderfully mature even then, her life wasn't really her own until middle age. Less than two months after the death of her fiancé and just past her 39 th birthday, she bought her first house, Hill Top Farm, in the Lake District, and made her first garden. In time she found a new and lasting love. As the years passed, she became an estate farmer and an early land conservationist. In creating her country life, Potter finally inhabited the world of her children's books, a world largely free of status and class. For herself, she chose not the grand sort of garden she knew from childhood holidays but a modest cottage garden, a sentimental, neighborly sort of place where flowers sprout up among the vegetables and between the paving stones, and plants are often gifts from neighbors or "pinched" on walks. McDowell suggests that even mean Mr. McGregor, the nemesis of the veg-pilfering Peter Rabbit, isn't the owner of the kitchen garden in Potter's book. He's just a laborer struggling to do his job, wearing humble clothes as he kneels down to plant cabbage seedlings - on a footing equal to Peter's own. Beatrix Potter's studious dedication to the natural world is matched by Queen Marie-Antoinette's fantasy attachment to the same realm. The Petit Trianon, the neoclassical chateau given to his teenage wife by Louis XVI, was the ultimate richgirl fantasy: a pleasure house in which to escape the golden chains of court life. In FROM MARIE-ANTOINETTE'S GARDEN: An Eighteenth-Century Horticultural Album (Flammarion, $49.95), by Élisabeth de Feydeau, we are told that Louis was "a noted connoisseur of female flesh" who while "preferring the delights of hunting and fine food ... was a man besotted with his young wife, nonetheless." Either because he was besotted or because he wanted her out of the palace, he set her up in this house to spend her days in a milk maid's fantasy among her flowers. De Feydeau's book is organized like a herbarium, a collection of botanical paintings of the specimens found in the queen's gardens, even though Marie-Antoinette never commissioned such a project. The result is a hodgepodge of illustrations along with a grab bag of accompanying information, some of it useful, much of it not. De Feydeau is a well-known expert in the field of perfume who has previously written a book on the Versailles court perfumer. It's no surprise, then, that the most interesting tidbits are olfactory rather than horticultural: his noting, for example, that the crushed dust from iris rhizomes was used to color and scent the hair of the court's ladies. We also learn that Marie-Antoinette had bearded irises planted on the thatched roofs of the Hamlet, her faux French village built on the grounds of the chateau, an early and very attractive form of green roofing. The sleeper hit of the season is the story OF KEW GARDENS IN PHOTOGRAPHS (Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew/Arcturus/University of Chicago, $25), by Lynn Parker and Kiri Ross-Jones. The development of photography and that of the Royal Botanic Gardens happened at roughly the same time, making it possible to use this new technology to document the process by which Kew passed from royal hands to public ones, beginning in the 1840s, eventually becoming one of the most important scientific institutes and pleasure grounds in the world. Instead of presenting Kew merely as an obligatory stop on the English tourist itinerary, these photographs reveal the importance of the plants within the gardens and the global importance of Kew itself - through the prism of colonialism, trade, industry, medicine, warfare and even the values of Victorian England. Kew is a wonderful collection of, well, collections : an idiosyncratic array of buildings and follies, of characters both human and animal, of books and art and photography - and, of course, plants. It even houses a collection of opium balls, boxes to store opium and pipes with which to smoke opium, but perhaps no opium itself. Among the architectural treasures at Kew are the largest surviving Victorian glasshouse in the world as well as Sir William Chambers's chinoiserie pagoda and a rustic country-house folly that once housed exotic animals like kangaroos. In a pseudocolonial Indian red brick house are more than 800 paintings by the intrepid Victorian plant hunter Marianne North. One fascinating chapter shows how Britain's colonizing efforts opened routes for the dissemination, importation, study and cultivation of plants to and from locations as distant as Australia, Africa and India. One Kew emissary collected cinchona plants and seed in Ecuador, which were then sent to India, where they were planted and used to make quinine to treat malaria. The botanists and plant hunters of Kew were involved in the production of hemp in Africa, rubber in Singapore, coffee in Jamaica and tea in South Africa. (A remarkable illustration presents Chinese laborers carrying 300 pounds of tea bricks on their backs en route to Tibet.) AND THERE IS A FREAK SHOW of fabulous plants, like the 26-foot-high agave that had to be cut lest it damage the ceiling, and the giant coco de mer seed, which can push the scale upward of 66 pounds, collected in 1852 but not successfully germinated until the 1990s. And the gargantuan water lily species, named for the large queen herself, Victoria amazonica. Parker and RossJones give us a wonderful photograph of a young girl floating apprehensively on an eight-foot lily pad. Established at a time when leisure and nature were thought to be good influences on the working classes, the garden was seen as a useful venue for furthering the social good. Yet its director tried to keep out "pleasure or recreational seekers ... whose motives are rude rompings and games" by not permitting public facilities on the premises. Fortunately, he lost this battle. England (and the world) is the richer for it. DEBORAH NEEDLEMAN is the editor in chief of T: The New York Times Style Magazine.

Part of the charm and eye-delighting intricacy of Beatrix Potter's beloved children's books about such endearing and enduring characters as Peter Rabbit and Jemima Puddle-Duck are the precisely and vitally rendered illustrations of the English gardens, farms, and landscapes her characters so actively occupy. In this sumptuously illustrated gardening biography, horticultural consultant McDowell, who is fascinated by writers who garden (her first book was Emily Dickinson's Gardens, 2004), fully illuminates Potter's deep botanical knowledge and joy in cultivation. When publishers rejected her first attempt at a children's book, Potter self-published The Tale of Peter Rabbit in 1902, launching a brilliant career. When she purchased Hill Top Farm in the fabled Lake District, she set out on the path that led to her becoming an intrepid gardener, savvy landowner, sheep breeder, and conservationist, ultimately leaving thousands of pristine acres to the National Trust. With wit and expertise, McDowell highlights the stamp of Potter's horticultural know-how on her indelible books and chronicles a year in her exuberant gardens to create a visually exciting, pleasurably informative appreciation of Potter's devotion to art and nature.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist

Preface First, a confession. I did not read Beatrix Potter as a child. In fact, I learned about Peter Rabbit from a knockoff of sorts. The spoiled youngest of four, I would steadily pester my mother for books on outings to Woolworths, and one day she bought me a shiny-covered Golden Book called Little Peter Cottontail by Thornton W. Burgess. Its naughty rabbit cavorted in wildflowers and visited a farm, but never found Mr. McGregor's garden. My introduction to Beatrix Potter came much later in life. In 1981, at a shower celebrating my upcoming nuptials, someone gave me a large cookie jar in the shape of a bonneted, apron-bedecked "porcupine" holding an iron. Wedding showers are awkward at best, particularly for learning about famous characters from childhood literature that one has somehow, in two-plus decades of life, managed to miss. What did I say when opening this gift in front of a sizeable, entirely female audience of friends, family, and future relations? That memory is lost. I have also repressed the identity of the gift-giver. Neither the Mrs. Tiggy-winkle cookie jar (a hedgehog, if you please) nor the marriage lasted long. Fast-forward to 1997, when I set off with my second (and last) husband and two aged parents for a tour of Scotland and the Lake District. William Wordsworth was on our agenda. His homes, Dove Cottage and Rydal Mount, are both near Grasmere and not far from Windermere, where we were staying. And what of Beatrix Potter, that children's author and artist? Our visit to Hill Top Farm, Miss Potter's beloved home on the other side of Windermere, turned out to be a highlight. For one thing, the sun came out that afternoon after a week of Scotland in the rain. (My mother, who had brought only one pair of shoes--my father would blow dry them for her every night in our B&B--was especially grateful.) The Hill Top garden was at its August peak; the tour was engaging. I learned that day that Beatrix Potter was a gardener. I garden, though some days I feel that I do most of my gardening at the keyboard. I am intrigued by writers who garden and by gardeners who write. The pen and the trowel are not interchangeable, but seem often linked. Emily Dickinson, poet and gardener, has long been an obsession of mine. Edith Wharton interests me, and Jane Austen, both novelists with a gardening bent. I once read all of Nathaniel Hawthorne, winnowing his words for horticultural references. Gertrude Jekyll and Vita Sackville-West also oblige. And now there was Beatrix Potter. So Beatrix Potter and the idea of her garden simmered quietly at the back of my mind. Over the years I saw some of Potter's marvelous botanical watercolors at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and the Morgan Library & Museum in New York. Miss Potter , a Hollywood film, came and went. An adroit article by Peter Parker appeared in the gardening journal Hortus . But one day at the New York Botanical Garden shop, two books lay side by side on a display table: a new edition of Potter's The Complete Tales and Linda Lear's biography, Beatrix Potter: A Life in Nature . The simmer turned to a boil. A few explanatory notes. You may be relieved or perturbed, depending on your druthers, that I have avoided botanical names in most of the book. Beatrix was not impressed with gardener's Latin, so I have bowed to her feelings on the matter. For those of you who are looking for these particulars, you will find lists of the plants she grew, wrote about, and illustrated, including their proper nomenclature, at the end of the book. Her grammar, punctuation, and spelling were loose, particularly in her letters, but they are reproduced as she wrote them. I would encourage you to have copies of her Tales at hand. The stories with their illustrations are a joy to read. They will increase your understanding of both Beatrix Potter and her gardens. Part One is a gardener's biography of Beatrix Potter. In terms of her own name, I must beg her pardon on two counts. First, for taking the liberty of referring to her by her Christian name, I plead twenty-first-century customs. Second, during her married years I have generally stuck to her maiden name rather than switching to her preferred "Mrs. Heelis." As she continued to use Potter professionally throughout her life, she would, I think, understand that it is by that name that we continue to know her best. Part Two follows Beatrix Potter through a year in her gardens. When she lived with her husband at Castle Cottage, it is not always clear whether she and her correspondents are discussing the garden there or across the road at Hill Top Farm. So in describing the progress of her gardens through the seasons I hope I will be forgiven for smudging the lines a bit, as her efforts and enjoyment encompassed both. Part Three is a traveler's guide, intended as a lure to discover or rediscover Beatrix Potter's Lake District and the other parts of Great Britain that influenced her. The gardens at Hill Top Farm alone would merit a visit, and there are many other gardens and landscapes that still have echoes of her.   Excerpted from Beatrix Potter's Gardening Life: The Plants and Places That Inspired the Classic Children's Tales by Marta McDowell All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.