Instead of tips about how to grow plants, Elizabeth and her German Garden is about the joys of gardens and it is delightful.
On a horrible day recently I abandoned my plans to play in the garden all morning and instead took myself to a favourite chair with a favourite garden book.is not strictly a gardening book. You get no tips, and there’s not a single explanation of how to do things.
Instead you get the joy, fun and saving graces of gardens – as well as the frustrations Elizabeth felt at not being able to do the gardening herself, manual work being unsuitable for a Pomeranian countess in 1896.Elizabeth von Arnim was born Mary Annette Beauchamp in Kirribilli. She married Count Henning August von Arnim-Schlagenthin and fell in love with his family’s rural bolthole in Pomerania, where she discovered her love of gardening.
Her first book is a desultorily kept diary of her first few years there, part satire on conservative Lutheran and aristocratic life, part paean to nature. It was published anonymously and so madly successful that it was reprinted 20 times in its first year. I first read it as a guest at a country house I had gone to see because its garden was designed by Edna Walling. My hostess had put her own copy by my bedside and I stayed up way too late reading it.
Elizabeth would have loved the wildness and surprise of that Edna Walling garden. Walling was by no means Australia’s first woman garden writer and designer – Mrs Rolf Boldrewood had writtenin 1893, making her just as famous as her husband, author of
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