Gardening for Love: The Market Bulletins - Best Gardening Tools & Supplies for Home Gardeners | Perfect for Backyard Planting, Landscaping & DIY Projects
Delivery & Return:Free shipping on all orders over $50
Estimated Delivery:7-15 days international
People:27 people viewing this product right now!
Easy Returns:Enjoy hassle-free returns within 30 days!
Payment:Secure checkout
SKU:49339779
Product Description
Elizabeth Lawrence occupies a secure place in the pantheon of twentieth-century gardening writers that includes Gertrude Jekyll and Vita Sackville-West of Great Britain and Katherine S. White of the United States. Her books, such as A Southern Garden (1942) and The Little Bulbs (1957), remain in print, continuing to win praise from criticis and to delight an ever-widening circle of readers. In Gardening for Love, Lawrence reveals another world of garden writing, the world of the rural women of the South with whom she corresponded extensively from the late 1950s into the mid-1970s in responce to their advertisements for herbs and ornamental perennials in several market bulletins (published by state departments of agriculture for the benefit of farmers).It was Eudora Welty who awakened Elizabeth Lawrence's interest in this fascinating topic by putting her name on the mailing list of The Mississippi Market Bulletin, a twice-monthly collection of classified advertisements founded in 1928 and still published today. Lawrence soon discovered market bulletins from the Carolinas and other Southern states, as well as similar bulletins published privately in the North. She began ordering plants from the bulletins, and there ensued a lively exchange of letters wit the women who sold them.Gardening for Love is Lawrence's exploration of this little-known side of American horticulture and her affectionate tribute to country people who shared her passion for plants. Drawing on the letters she received, sometimes a great many of them from the same persons over many years, she delves into traditional plant lore, herbal remedies, odd and often highly poetic vernacular plant names peculiar to particular regions of the South, and the herb collectors of the mountains of the Carolinas and Georgia. She focuses primarily on the Southeast and the Deep South, but her wide knowledge of both literature and botany gives Gardening for Love a dimension that transcends the category of regional writing.
Customer Reviews
When I was a very young child, the chief family joke was the absolute necessity of assuring my maternal grandmother received her weekly copy of the LA Market Bulletin from the post office each Saturday. Creeks might rise and schools close. But the Market Bulletin had to arrive at her sprawling place in the country on Saturday of every week. Since she did not drive, that meant someone had to deliver it.Our parents, her children, smiled knowingly to one another and shook their heads when the subject of of the Mkt. Bulletin came up. But the grandchildren could not in any way understand why in the world anyone---let alone our busy grandmother---would want to read a folded sheet of paper covered only in black print. Even the newspapers had pictures. Not so the Market Bulletin. It was all print, sometimes small print at that. And yet it claimed our grandparent's full attention as little else could do.Years later, when I was beginning to garden, a colleague in the department where I taught, a Texan, asked me how he might subscribe to the LA Market Bulletin. He had a boundless curiosity about plants and everything else, and he simply had to have a copy. So I scrambled to see if the old bulletin was still in print. It was, but it was no longer free to non-farm owners. We had to pay a $3 annual fee.When my first copy arrived, I dripped a cup of coffee and sat down to read the uninviting bulletin that had been a necessity in my grandmother's life. Then I understood why she had saved a part of her Saturdays to pore over its classified ads in quiet. Everything from ox yokes to chicks to "good brown eggs, the kind you used to get" were available for purchase through the mail from residents all over Louisiana. Peafowl, good black-walnut lumber, goats, birdhouse gourd seeds --- truly a market place and not at all black-and-white. Very colorful.But it was the plants and seeds that most interested me. Old-fashioned plants no longer available in seed catalogs could be had for 50 cents. All sorts of bulbs, guaranteed to flower, were available for bargain basement prices, for almost nothing really. Their descriptions evoked country and small-town women who wore aprons when they gardened and whose bounteous home gardens brought in pin money even in the early seventies. Women like my grandmother.Their world and words are the substance of this book by Elizabeth Lawrence. Eudora Welty, a regular reader of the bulletins that for some reason were produced only in states of the South, had called Miss Lawrence's attention to them. It must be noted that to subscribe to these sheets meant that one had to be prepared to enter into correspondence about the plants and seed advertised for sale. Lawrence, a botanist in her own right and always curious about plants, entered into a series of correspondences that sometimes spanned years. One woman from MS wrote, "I love to work with flowers, advertise, and get letters from people, Some people write letters when ordering, some send free seed along. I give good measure and free seed too. I turn my flower money back into more flowers." "I am still in the mud with sick folks, so I am late again answering your letter," wrote another, who signed herself "A True Flower Lover." Only in the novels of Eudora Welty can one find such a true picture of this busy, productive, and positive sub-culture. For anyone who wants to know about women in the American South, this book is a good place to start. It certainly beats all those "Tara novels" for an honest depiction. What good reading! The Internet of a quieter time.Of course, there are ads for other things as well. One of my favorites is a farmer's ad for a family to work cotton and help milk forty cows. He offers a comfortable home to a small family of cotton pickers, but, he says, "People who live here must be happy." A beekeeper is needed who must not be afraid of bees or work; wages will be determined on worth.And then there is the ad offering "beer seed." Eudora Welty ordered some and found they were not seed at all, but round, sticky pellets that were supposed to be placed in water for several days, after which the resulting sweet ("refreshing") drink may be drunk. A few seed provided many glasses of pleasure. Welty sent them to her NY agent who replied that he had planted them and anticipated a good crop. "If you will send a Bourbon plant, I shall trouble you no more," he wrote.Much correspondence was required to ascertain that beer seed were the droplets left in a cane syrup cooker after the syrup had been poured off. They produced inexpensive sweet beverages in an era and place where money was tight.This book is "delightful," special fun if one is a gardener and interested in the traditional names of plants, but fun for anyone who cultivates people as well. Such tenderness and strength is lodged between its covers.This is also a fine gardening guide for those who collect and grow native plants and old-time cultivars whose owners know only their popular names. Elizabeth Lawrence never fails.Published posthumously from Miss Lawrence's unfinished manuscript, "Gardening for Love" should be on every southern gardeners bookshelf.
