Gardening for Love by Elizabeth Lawrence

I’m lucky to stumble across books in a myriad of ways. A Book Barmy follower from England, has become an email pal over the years. She lives in a picturesque area of England, is an avid reader (natch), and a gardener. A subscriber to Slightly Foxed quarterly, she read about an American book, Gardening for Love and wrote me about it. I searched and found this nice used copy on Ebay.

Eudora Welty put Ms. Lawrence’s name the mailing list of The Mississippi Market Bulletin, a twice-monthly collection of classified advertisements founded in 1928. Our author soon discovered market bulletins from the other Southern states, as well as similar bulletins published privately in the North. She began ordering heirloom plants from the bulletins, she began a lively exchange of letters with the gardeners who sold them, took trips to acquire plants, and met a cast of fun and interesting characters. Thus sparked Ms. Lawrence’s interest in this fascinating topic and the compilation of this book filled with gardening lore and snapshots of the gardeners she befriended in the 1950s and 60s.

Before the internet, avid gardeners sold seed and plants through classified ads in state agricultural bulletins. Tiny, small print classified ads that farmers and gardeners would pore over. Often the ads did not involve money, but trading of seeds and plants.

Here’s a sample of just some of the ads:

“Anything I have for three wandering Jews.”

One woman from Mississippi 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.”

“Come to my place for pretty flowers cheap, have so many.”

Much of the correspondence back and forth digs into the southern regional folk names of various plants and the lore behind the species.

The dogtooth violet is called wild peanut because the bulbs are edible and have a taste of green peanuts. Bluets are the southern name for forget-me-nots. A shrub now called butterfly bush, but if anyone asked the name, they’d answer kiss-me-and-I’ll-tell-you. Grape hyacinths are known as blue bottles or blue jugs.

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.”

As you can probably ascertain, Gardening for Love is a quirky, charming, very niche gardening chronicle that brings back simpler times in American gardening.

I found it is not a book to read in order or even in one sitting. I kept it out to dip into when I had a few moments here and there. Best enjoyed in snippets throughout a long winter.