"The Solitary Summer" by Elizabeth von Arnim

I didn't realize until I started reading it that this is a sequel to Elizabeth and Her German Garden.  Imagine my delight when I discovered that was the case!  It was published a year after Garden and has a similar playful, refreshing feel.  And it shares the fact that it's written as if it is nonfiction, but is actually highly fictionalized.  

Elizabeth decides she wants to spend a summer in solitude, which her husband (always referred to as the Man of Wrath even though he comes off as fairly genial in a stoic German sort of way) thinks will be a disaster.  By "solitary," she doesn't mean she wants to be entirely alone all summer.  She just means she doesn't want to invite people out to stay at their German manor all the time.  She wants one summer with only her husband and children and servants around, to enjoy their home life, basically.  

The bulk of the book is her funny and insightful musings throughout the summer (and into the fall) about books, solitude, nature, gardening, and family life.  I didn't love this quite as much as Garden thanks to an extended section about the immorality of village young people, which felt more snide than funny.  But it's definitely a book I'll be rereading.  It did make me laugh aloud repeatedly.  I tried to read it entirely outside, mostly on my swing in our back yard, though I also read it on a bench outside my daughter's ballet studio a few times.

Elizabeth von Arnim was the pen name of Countess Mary Annette von Arnim-Schlagenthin, an Australian who married into the German aristocracy and used a pen name so as not to scandalize her in-laws.  While the character of Elizabeth is loosely based on herself, just as Elizabeth's husband the Man of Wrath is loosely based on Count von Arnim-Schlagenthin, and the children described here are presumably based on their children.  But what she recounts in the book is pretty much fiction presented as fact.

Particularly Good Bits:

...how can you make a person happy against his will?  You can knock a great deal into him in the way of learning and what the schools call extras, but if you try forever you will not knock any happiness into a being who has not got it in him to be happy.

Books have their idiosyncrasies as well as people, and will not show me their full beauties unless the place and time in which they are read suits them.

What a blessing it is to love books.  Everybody must love something, and I know of no objects of love that give such substantial and unfailing returns as books and a garden.

I believe a week of steady drizzle in summer is enough to make the stoutest heart depressed.  It is to be borne in winter by the simple expedient of turning your face to the fire, but when you have no fire, and very long days, your cheerfulness slowly slips away, and a dreariness prevailing out of doors comes in and broods in the blank corners of your heart.

And was there every such a hopeful beginning to a day, and so full of promise for the subsequent right passing of its hours, as breakfast in the garden, alone with your teapot and your book!

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It: PG-10, mainly for the aforementioned part about immoral villagers who go around getting pregnant out of wedlock and getting married later and seem to think this is fine.  It's not salacious at all.

This has been my 31st book read and reviewed for my fourth Classics Club list, and my 23rd from my TBR shelves for the 2024 Mount TBR Challenge.

"Stuff Every Gardener Should Know" by Scott Meyer

Let us be clear: I did not read this book cover-to-cover.  I skipped swaths of it that had nothing to do with the kind of gardening I do right now.  I gave up growing tomatoes when the local groundhogs got spiteful one night, climbed over and through my layers of fencing, and took one bite out of each tomato.  Rude!  The ground around here isn't great for vegetables anyway, without loads of enrichment.  We do have an asparagus bed, but that's my husband's baby.  Me, I tend a couple of rose bushes and azaleas, and random rings of daffodils around the yard, but my main gardening focus is my container flower garden on our deck.

So, I skipped the sections in this book about food and concentrated on the sections about flowers and landscaping and problem-solving.  Those had lots of good nuggets of wisdom, and I have added a couple of lemon balm plants to my flower garden in hopes that they really do help cut down on mosquitoes like lavender does.

This is really more of a book you consult when you're having a question about gardening, and it's filled with lots of good tricks and tidbits.  I knew some of them, I learned others, and I will go back and learn more in the coming years, I'm sure!

"The Vanderbeekers and the Hidden Garden" by Karina Yan Glaser

As much as I loved The Vanderbeekers of 141st Street, I loved The Vanderbeekers and the Hidden Garden even more.  I very much enjoy gardening myself, especially growing flowers, so I had a great time reading about the Vanderbeeker kids and their efforts to create a community garden.  

The kids want to make a beautiful garden in an empty lot down the street as a special surprise for their upstairs neighbors, Miss Josie and Mr. Jeet.  Miss Josie always has plants and flowers growing in their apartment, and when Mr. Jeet has to spend a lot of time in the hospital, the kids want to cheer both their beloved friends up with this special plan.  Along the way to accomplishing it, they make some new friends, thwart an enemy's plans, and learn some good little lessons about property, kindness, and hope.

I've read some criticism of this series for being about kids who do things without their parents' permission or knowledge.  And, it's true, they don't ask their parents if they could surprise their aging neighbors with a beautiful garden in an abandoned lot down the street.  But... they're trying to make this a surprise for their parents, too.  Kind of hard to have something be a surprise, but also tell the people you're trying to surprise all about it.  They DO ask permission to use the lot from the pastor of the church that is next to the lot and owns the land, and they get tacit permission to use it.  In fact, they get more permission to use it for a garden than a certain adult gets who wants to use it for something else.  Later, they don't ask before they take something their friend says isn't needed or wanted where it is, and they face real consequences for that.  

Taking-without-asking is not treated lightly here, and it's made clear that that's not the same as keeping a secret.  It's not a secret about someone doing something wrong, or a secret they're keeping so they don't get into trouble.  So I really don't see this as a problem.  I had plenty of secrets from my parents.  I don't ask my kids what they're doing every minute of the day.  I'm not saying anyone who has concerns about this issue with regard to these books is a helicopter parent, but I don't see the Vanderbeekers as sly or deceitful, just in love with the idea of surprises.

ANYWAY!  Totally loved this book.  Already looking forward to when I'll have time to read the next one.

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It: G!  No bad language, scary situations, or questionable behavior.

This is the second book I've read off my TBR shelves for #TheUnreadShelfProject2022.

"Elizabeth and her German Garden" by Elizabeth von Arnim

I loved this book!  Oh, it was so refreshing and fun.  I am well on my way to being a firm fan of Elizabeth von Arnim -- in fact, I have bought a couple more of her books already.  I love how she makes me laugh!

This is really a journal in which she talks about her efforts to create the perfect garden in the home she shares with her German husband and their children.  Her garden is her retreat, her pet project, and her creative oasis for several years.  She has grand plans for it, but her series of German gardeners never quite seem to either approve of or understand those plans.  Still, she loves her garden.  I love to garden myself, and even though I don't have to deal with intractable gardeners, my little flower garden never quite does what I want it to either.  Gardens foster patience, I think.

But don't think that this book is boring because it's about an Australian who likes flowers and is married to a German.  It is hilarious.  Witty, wry, friendly, salty -- just altogether marvelous.  It reads like a series of letters from a sarcastic and yet kind friend, and I loved getting to read it in the springtime when my own flower gardening is underway.

Particularly Good Bits:

Sometimes I feel as if were blest above all my fellows in being able to find my happiness so easily (p. 15).

A woman's tongue is a deadly weapon and the most difficult thing in the world to keep in order, and things slip off it with a facility nothing short of appalling at the very moment when it ought to be most quiet (p. 25).

Well, trials are the portion of mankind, and gardeners have their share, and in any case it is better to be tried by plants than persons, seeing that with plants you know that it is you who are in the wrong, and with persons it is always the other way about (p. 57).

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It: PG for some very pointed wit indeed.

This was my 20th book read and reviewed for my third Classics Club list, and my 23rd book read off my TBR shelves for #TheUnreadShelfProject2021

Top Ten Tuesday: It Might as Well be Spring

This week's TTT prompt from That Artsy Reader Girl is "Top ten books on your spring TBR list."  Here we go!

The Birthday of the World and Other Stories by Ursula K. LeGuin

Death Comes to the Archbishop by Willa Cather

Enchanted by Alethea Kontis

A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War by Joseph Loconte

Loving Isaac by Heather Kaufman

MatchUp edited by Lee Child

A Pioneer Woman's Memoir: Based on the Journal of Arabella Clemens Fulton

Prelude for a Lord by Camille Elliot

The Problim Children by Natalie Lloyd

The Story Girl by Lucy Maud Montgomery

What's on your spring TBR list this year?  Have you read any of these?

(All photos are my own.  They're all from my Instagram account.)

"Whimsical Gardens" Coloring Book by Alexandra Cowell

Yes, it's true:  I am an Adult Coloring Enthusiast (ACE).  And I've decided to start reviewing my adult coloring books, sharing what I do and don't like about them and so on.  Today, I'm going to review the very first adult coloring book I ever bought, Whimsical Gardens, artwork by Alexandra Cowell.

I bought this sometime in 2015.  I'd been intrigued by the adult coloring books I kept seeing in the bookstores, but never found one that really made me want to color it.  Finally, I found this one, and knew it would be fun.  I love gardening and flowers, and so many pictures in this one were cute without being tedious.  Here is the very first picture I colored in it:

I was using the colored pencils I've had since I was a teen, when I took art classes for several years, and I wasn't very happy with how faint they were -- I wanted my coloring to be bright and vibrant!  So I invested in a new set of 24 colored pencils.

I've been pretty happy with these Prismacolor pencils.  The next page I colored was more vibrant:

But I came to the conclusion that the paper in this book isn't going to give me really bright colors with colored pencils -- it doesn't take the color especially well.  So I tried using fine-tipped markers:

Vibrancy at last!  However... markers bleed through the paper, so it's a good thing that there's only one picture per sheet in this book.  I have to be sure to have a sheet of other paper between the one I'm markering and the next picture.

I've gone back to colored pencils for this book, now that I've gotten more new colors.  After trying out a smaller pack of the Sargent Art colored pencils, I splurged on a set of 50, and now have plenty of different shades to choose from!

I've colored a few more pages in this book, but still have lots of fun ones to come, like these:  

I'm not a huge fan of "mandalas" and the purely pattern-oriented sorts of coloring images.  I want to color pictures of people and things, not just patterns.  This does have a few pages like that, such a this garden:

For the most part, though, this book has pretty pictures of plants and birds and flowers and various garden settings.  The paper doesn't take all brands of colored pencils very well, but overall I really like this book.

That's it for today!  Are you an ACE too?  Do you have any favorite books you'd like to recommend?  I've got several, and will definitely review more soon.