Eleanor Perenyi: A brief appreciation

A year ago yesterday, May 7, 2009, Eleanor Perenyi died at the age of 91. I gasped a bit when I saw the New York Times obit, even though I hadn't been entirely sure that she was still alive anyway.

Perenyi was a writer, editor and gardener, best known for her single book of garden writing: Green Thoughts: A Writer in the Garden, first published in 1981 and reprinted by the Modern Library in 2002. In my first year or two of gardening, I picked up a copy of the 1981 edition at a used bookstore for $3 and have been reading it ever since.

Green Thoughts is a book of essays, ranging in topic from Annuals through Evergreens and Herbs to Vegetables, Vines and Weeds. Interspersed are less traditional topics as well; there is an essay on Autumn, on Earthworms, on Invitations. on "Partly Cloudy" and on Toads. A few of the sections are quite brief. Here is the section on Mazes, in its entirety: "Should you ever find yourself lost in one, choose either the right or the left wall and follow its every turning. You can't fail to emerge."

A just slightly longer section--1 medium-sized paragraph--is on Seed Tapes and starts like this: "Many catalogues, notably Burpee's, offer these ridiculous devices designed for the gardener too stupid to sow seed by himself--and of course charge extra for them; and to put it plainly, they are a swindle. Anyone who can't scrape a shallow trench with a hoe, then walk down it scattering seeds from a packet, had better abandon gardening forthwith."

Perenyi, clearly, had opinions about things, and in this book the reader learns many of them. Its format makes it an ideal book to dip into. I took it out this week because I'm working (again) on (another) asparagus bed, and though I'd re-read the asparagus section in The Garden Primer and on Margaret Roach's A Way to Garden website, I wanted to check to see what Eleanor Perenyi had to say about it. (More about that later, when the asparagus bed is finished enough to write about it.)

I've re-read her sections on garlic and tomatoes and strawberries, on annuals and vegetables and mulch, on asters and blues and ivy. Like Beverley Nichols (though without his extensive literary output), Perenyi manages to be personable, whimsical and knowledgeable (and, of course, opinionated) all at the same time. She's really an ideal gardening companion.

Perenyi ends her brief introduction to the book this way:

"I am no horticultural expert and wouldn't want to pass myself off as one. All I can claim is some thirty years of amateur experience, which is to say that I know something about a lot of things and not enough to call myself a specialist in any way . . .

"Why, then, presume to write a book about gardening? The simplest answer is that a writer who gardens is sooner or later going to write a book about the subject--I take that as inevitable. One acquires one's opinions and prejudices, picks up a trick or two, learns to question supposedly expert judgments, reads, saves clippings, and is eventually overtaken by the desire to pass it all on. But there is something more: As I look about me, I have reason to believe I belong to a vanishing species. Gardens like mine, which go by the unpleasing name of 'labor intensive,' are on their way out and before they go, I would like to contribute my penny's worth to their history."

In this last paragraph, she's nailed down exactly why she's so ideal as a garden writer. But I also suspect that the way the future of gardening looked in 1981 is different from the way it looks now, and I'm glad Perenyi lived long enough to see that gardeners like her might not be a vanishing species after all.

Photo of the Day, and a mystery

On Wednesday afternoon, when I went to the Amherst College gym, I saw an unexpected sight on the hill near the Octagon:

Why were there enormous letters on the hill, I wondered, and why was Amherst misspelled? Was it a prank? An accident? The offering of a group of visiting Williams students?

Yesterday, when I returned, the letters were gone. No trace of them, and no explanation. For now, the mystery remains.

A few thoughts on British novelist Maggie O'Farrell

Back in March, in my long post about re-reading, I mentioned that I was looking forward to reading Maggie O'Farrell's newest novel, The Hand That First Held Mine. I've now read it and have a few thoughts.

First, the backstory. I've been a big fan of O'Farrell since her first novel, After You'd Gone, which I read in Varanasi in 2002, having bought it in the same book buying binge in Kathmandu that netted me Trapido's Noah's Ark (and perhaps 10 other books--very reasonable, as binges go). Reading After You'd Gone was a consuming experience, and, as with Noah's Ark, I read it over again immediately. (I really don't do this very often; it was probably a combination of those two particular books and the fact that I was somewhat starved for good fiction. While Varanasi has a fabulous bookstore in my friend Rakesh's shop, Harmony Books--now online, which is very exciting!--Harmony is more fully stocked in academic and India-related books (of which it has masses) and less in fiction.)

I was rather shocked that After You'd Gone was a first novel--it felt too accomplished for that. The story focuses on Alice Raikes, who, in the first few pages of the book, steps in front of a car at a traffic light and spends the whole book in a coma. The rest of the book shows us how Alice got to that point, and where she might end up. The point of view shifts, sometimes in Alice's voice, sometimes from Alice's third person point of view, sometimes from the point of view of her mother, Ann, her grandmother, Elspeth. The shifts happen quickly, sometimes from paragraph to paragraph, and along with the shifts in point of view, the story shifts in time as well, moving from Alice's childhood to her college years to her recent past, to her unconscious present. And yet, despite the frequent shifts, I didn't ever find myself lost. O'Farrell's narrative voice is so strong that it is easy to trust her as a writer.

After You'd Gone is a love story, primarily, but it's also a family story, the story of a woman, Alice's mother, who marries a man she doesn't love and spends her life in the small Scottish town where he grew up, living in his mother's house. And it's the story of three sisters, Kirsty, Alice and Beth, and tall, passionate, often angry Alice's place in her family.

I was so taken by After You'd Gone--recommending it right and left, giving copies of it away--that over the next few years, I asked friends traveling to Britain to bring back her next two books, My Lover's Lover and The Distance Between Us, which hadn't yet been published in the US. I was really disappointed in the former, and while I liked the latter, I didn't love it. Still, I trusted O'Farrell enough as a writer that I was eager to read whatever she wrote next. I thought she really hit her stride again with her fourth novel, The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox, which I found gorgeous and harrowing, so much so that I can't quite imagine reading it again. (This is not to say that I don't recommend it; I do, highly. I think it's stunning. I'm just not sure when I'll feel up for it again.)

And that brings me to her latest, The Hand that First Held Mine, just published in both Britain and the US to excellent reviews.

O'Farrell specializes in dual narratives and in secrets, especially family secrets. Her best books move with an urgency towards their conclusion, leaving the reader simultaneously exhausted and in awe of her narrative power. As in Esme Lennox, O'Farrell weaves together two strands, one historical, one set in the present. In one story is Lexie Sinclair, bright and ambitious with no patience for her family's provincial life. Her sudden acquaintance with Innes Kent, editor of a arts and culture magazine and man about town in 50's Soho, leads her to London, to a job at Innes' magazine and into his bed and his heart. In the present, we meet Ted and Elina, a young couple who are both traumatized by the birth of their first child--Elina because she nearly died during the delivery and Ted because the birth of his son seems to be causing flashbacks to his own early childhood, a return of memories he had no memory of, memories that make no sense in the context of the rest of his life.

The story's threads move along separately and then, as the book progresses, begin to intertwine, so it becomes evident, eventually, what the connections between these two seemingly disparate stories are. But the two stories, Lexie's and Elina's, are linked also by the themes of motherhood and art and loss. As in everything O'Farrell has written, the line-by-line writing is gorgeous, the details precise and telling.

I really enjoyed The Hand that First Held Mine, but still, I couldn't seem to help myself. This time, though, immediately upon finishing it, I went back and re-read After You'd Gone for the fourth or, perhaps, fifth, time. I thought The Hand that First Held Mine was a beautifully written, emotionally moving book. I don't want to take anything away from it. But when I went back to After You'd Gone, despite knowing all of the details of the story, I found myself captivated all over again, not to mention weeping steadily through the book's last quarter. (I'd also cried during The Hand that First Held Mine, but only at one key, heartbreaking scene.) The Hand that First Held Mine is perhaps a more accomplished book. O'Farrell clearly did a lot of research on Soho in the 50s, about the art scene, about life as an arts reporter, but she doesn't get bogged down in it. Her touch is light, and she weaves the two strands together surely and beautifully.

But even 8 years after my first reading, I found the power of After You'd Gone unchanged. Like its main character, Alice, the book is passionate and visceral and controlled but not at all contained. O'Farrell may have matured as a writer in the years since it was published, but something about that first book's rawness makes it especially compelling. A book that makes you cry on the fifth re-read has a lasting power that can't be denied (even if I am a bit of a softy).

I have no good way to end this except to say, Read Maggie O'Farrell. Whatever she writes, I will read, and I suggest you do the same.

If you want to know more, about O'Farrell or her most recent book, here are a few links. Caroline Leavitt was lucky enough to interview her on her blog, CarolineLeavittville. There's also an interview in the Daily Telegraph about some of the photographs that inspired the new novel. NPR has a nice review as do the Guardian and the Daily Mail. There's also a long(ish), thoughtful review at Bookreporter.com.

The Weed that Strings the Hangman's Bag: The Return of Flavia deLuce

In my year-end roundup of books last December, I created a special category for Alan Bradley's first Flavia deLuce mystery, The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie: "Best Audio Book I haven't finished listening to yet." A lame category title, admittedly, but I didn't want Bradley's first novel to go unrecognized (by me, at least). By the time I did finish it, in January 2010, I knew it would go on my best of the year list.

Bradley is a Canadian in his 70s, and Flavia is an 11-year-old chemistry fiend living in a dilapidated manor house called Buckshaw in Britain in 1950. No matter. In Flavia, Bradley has created a quirky and engaging narrator. At home, her father the philatelist is busy with his stamps, and her sisters are busy looking at themselves in the mirror (Feely) or burying their noses in a book (Daffy), and Flavia and her trusty bicycle Gladys are left to roam the lanes and fields around Bishop's Lacey at their leisure.

In the first book, the murder at the center of the story happens in Buckshaw's own cucumber patch. In the second, The Weed that Strings the Hangman's Bag, the murder is a just a bit farther afield. One day, while mooning around the graveyard at the church, pretending to be dead, Flavia comes across a beautiful woman weeping. Her name is Nialla, and she is puppeteer's assistant (and mistress) to Rupert Porson, of Porson's Puppets, whose van has broken down in Bishop's Lacey. At the urging of the vicar, Rupert and Nialla agree to perform several shows of "Jack and the Beanstalk" while their van is being fixed; Rupert, alas, does not survive both performances. From there, the story takes off, expanding to include, among other things, a secret crop grown in the midst of Gibbet Wood, the tragic death of a little boy some years earlier, and the story of a German POW who ended up in England because of his love of the Bronte sisters. Most of the main characters from the previous novel remain--Flavia's father and sisters as well as Dogger and Mrs. Mullet, who work for them at Buckshaw, along with Inspector Hewitt, with whom Flavia had previously tangled--but Bradley has expanded the circle outward so that we meet more of the residents of Bishop's Lacey--Gordon and Grace Inglesby, still mourning their lost son, Robin; Dieter Schranz, the handsome, Bronte-loving POW; land girl, Sally Straw; the absent-minded vicar and his battle-axe of a wife; and the spinster sisters who own the local tearoom, with its silver samovar named Peter the Great. And Flavia, as always, is at the center of it all.

Flavia may not always be the most plausible narrator, but she is always entertaining. I'm not sure I always believe that she's 11, but Bradley still walks the line gracefully, of what Flavia might or might not know. When she talks about Madame Bovary being one of her favorite books, it is because of the accurate portrayal of death by arsenic poisoning in the final scenes. At the same time, she feels the need to ask Dogger what "having an affair entails" because she's not quite sure of the specifics. I agree with the Material Witness blog review that one of the great joys of the first book was the sheer unexpectedness of Flavia as the narrator. The second book lacks the element of surprise, it's true, but that doesn't mean that Flavia still isnt' great company, whether she's in her chemistry lab devising a means to torment her sisters (who torment her in even crueler, though non-chemical, ways) or cozying up to various townspeople in order to wheedle information out of them or riding Gladys all over the countryside. Bradley has said that he would like to keep Flavia at 11, rather than having her age, and it's true that her status as a child allows her a freedom she would lack were she a teenager--not just the freedom to move around at will but also the ability to get away with snooping in a way that someone older couldn't. (At one point, when caught in the undertaker's back room, inspecting a dead body in a coffin for marks, Flavia pretends that she's been praying for his departed soul . . . and the undertaker believes her.)

Bradley is under contract to write 4 more Flavia deLuce novels, all of them, he says, dealing with some bygone aspect of British life. This second one shows that the first one was definitely not a fluke, and I'm only sad that we'll have to wait til next year for the third.

One final thing I should add; as with the first, I listened to this as an audio book, and it really works beautifully. Jayne Entwhistle is an excellent narrator, and the few small things that irritated me about her reading in the first book are mostly gone. (In that one, I thought, occasionally, that she made Flavia sound a bit smarmy sometimes, when Flavia was, admittedly, gloating over something or other. That's much reduced in this one.) Entwhistle flings herself into the role of Flavia with abandon, and it's a testament to both her narration and Bradley's skill as an author that Flavia comes to such mischievous, sparkling life. I think now that my best books of 2010 will have to expand to give Alan Bradley his very own category.

Reclaiming the paths

Last May, I wrote about reclaiming a garden bed, one in full view of my kitchen windows. In that case, I pulled out the weeds, covered the bed with cardboard, and covered the cardboard with compost and topsoil. Then, I planted annuals in the newly reclaimed bed. A year has passed since then, and the bed is weedy again, so I think that particular bed might require an annual reclamation.

Yesterday, though, I took the same approach to reclaiming the paths of my community garden. I love my spot at the community garden, especially the half that I've been tending since 1996. (The other, newer half is, at the moment, a 20' x 40' bed of weeds that makes me cringe and sigh whenever I look at it.) At its best, my community garden plot can be wildly and abundantly beautiful:

At the same time, all that wildness and abundance means that it is overgrown and weedy and hard to navigate. The plus side of letting things like corn poppies run wild is that for a few weeks or a month every summer, I have a glorious show of flowers. The down side is that the garden grows more and more crowded as the flowers and weeds spread from beds to paths and back again.

Even though part of me hates to tame the abundance, I'm taking a harder line this year. I've been weeding rather furiously, considering all kinds of things to be weeds that I would have spared in years past--heliopsis, artemisia, creeping thyme. I am treating them as if they were the dreaded mint and tossing them in the compost pile without a second glance.

Yesterday, a lovely afternoon once the humidity blew away midday, I took another step towards my path reclamation. Looking at the photo above, you wouldn't know that my garden had beds in it or paths. But it does, and I want them back. I didn't photograph the first stage, which was all that industrious weeding.

But here is one path, mostly weeded. The bed with the garlic in it is to the left, and the bed where the corn poppies and larkspur have trespassed is on the right.

Doesn't look like much, huh?

But I'd brought to the garden with me some old cardboard boxes as well as a bag of newspapers originally meant for recycling and then repurposed, and I put them down where I wanted the path to be:

And then I made multiple trips to the pile of wood chips and covered the paper:

Voila--a path. I'm not sure I like the wood chips, especially. I will not like walking barefoot on them, for one thing. But I don't want to put anything like black plastic down, and I know that straw doesn't do much on paths where weeds are determined to tread. And there's no shortage of old newspapers at my house, and no shortage of wood chips in the pile at the community garden, so that seemed the most logical combination.

I have a lot of newspapering and wood-chipping ahead of me, not to mention some paths that still need to be seriously weeded. But I feel better for having started this particular project, and I'm hoping it will pay off later on. I love my garden less the more weeds there are in it, and I'm not ready to give it up, so the only real solution is to institute a much firmer weed policy. We'll see how long I can keep it up, but at the moment, I'm feeling cautiously optimistic. I'll report back when Project Pathway Reclamation is further along.

Muffins on Mondays: The Best Blueberry Muffins

Last year during the blogathon, I used Mondays to write Meatless Monday posts. I may do this again at some point, but on this particular Monday, I want to write about muffins.

I took full advantage of having run yesterday morning to have an especially leisurely afternoon. I ate a bagel; I read the paper; I took a little nap; I read some more. (It was too hot to garden til later in the afternoon.) And then as the afternoon progressed, I decided to make muffins. Most of the time, I make muffins that are slightly virtuous--they have whole grain flour in them, and not too much butter, and maybe there's some wheat germ in there, or fruit, or something else wholesome. Yesterday, however, I went the other way, towards more dessert-like and decadent muffins.

It was partly that, now that May is here and blueberry season is in sight again, I don't need to dole out last summer's frozen berries quite so sparingly. But it was also that I hadn't made blueberry muffins in ages, and when I try to be virtuous with blueberry muffins, I'm never happy. It's one case where I'd rather have the real thing than healthy-it-up and be vaguely unsatisfied.

I first learned of these muffins from a muffin cookbook owned by my friend Emily. It's by Elizabeth Alston and called, simply, Muffins. I borrowed it from Emily multiple times and finally copied down the recipes for the blueberry muffins and the banana bran muffins (also delicious). Even though the blueberry muffin recipe is now available online, whenever I want to make these muffins, I still open the notebook where I wrote the recipe down, the purple ink now faded, the page splotched with butter stains and bits of flour.

The recipe is not complicated. The only unusual thing, really, is the addition of a half cup of mashed berries to the batter. Since my berries were frozen, I popped the half cup into the microwave for a few minutes to soften them up. The addition of the berries at that early point is rather dramatic, as the batter turns a lovely shade of purple once it's mixed together.



I suspect that if you use fresh berries, there will be less liquid (I probably left mine in the microwave a bit too long), and the batter will not be as purple. I kind of like the color, but if purple muffin batter is not your thing, then either use fresh berries or microwave them until they're just mashable but not runny.

Otherwise, the recipe is quite straightforward. There's the flour, butter and eggs, the blueberries, the flour and milk added alternately. The final step is to sprinkle the tops of the muffins with a sugar/nutmeg mixture. Even though the muffins are sweet enough as is, I wouldn't skip this step, as the sugar makes the tops crackly, and the nutmeg adds a nice echo of flavor.

I need to add here that I am a recent convert to muffin liners and now can't imagine making muffins without them. I've ruined more than one muffin tin by either using spray oil that eventually gets all gummy or by letting burnt bits bake onto them. Muffin liners (mostly) eliminate both problems. I feel rather dumb that it took me so long.

And whether or not you feel virtuous because you ran a 5K that morning, you should enjoy these muffins without guilt. Life is too short to eat mediocre blueberry muffins, and these are anything but.

The Best Blueberry Muffins

Barely adapted from Muffins, by Elizabeth Alston, reprinted many places

1/2 cup (1 stick) butter at room temperature

1 cup granulated sugar (or a bit less, depending on the sweetness of the berries)

2 large eggs

1 teaspoon vanilla

2 teaspoons baking powder

1/4 teaspoon salt

2 1/2 cups blueberries (fresh or frozen will work), ½ cup mashed

2 cups all-purpose flour (can substitute 1/2 cup whole wheat pastry flour, if desired)

1/2 cup milk

1 tablespoon granulated sugar, mixed with 1/4 teaspoon ground nutmeg for topping

Heat oven to 375°. Grease muffin pan or line with muffin liners.

In large bowl, mix butter until creamy. Add sugar and beat until pale and fluffy. Add eggs one at a time, beating after each. Beat in vanilla, baking powder and salt.

Mix mashed berries into batter.

With spoon or rubber spatula, fold in half of the flour, then half of the milk into batter; then flour, then milk again. (I use the lowest speed on my Kitchen Aid mixer for this step sometimes.)

Fold in remaining blueberries.

Spoon into muffin cups and sprinkle topping onto each muffin.

Bake 25 to 30 minutes, until golden brown and springy to touch.

Try to let cool for at least 30 minutes before removing from pan.

My second 5K!

So, this morning I ran in my second 5K, almost exactly 5 months after the first (which I wrote about here). Several things were different. It was about 50 degrees warmer, for one thing, and I wasn't on antibiotics for Lyme, for another. I remember the main concern in December was staying warm enough before the race and hoping to be done before it started snowing. Not an issue today.

The race was Derrill's Race, a local fixture in honor of an Easthampton police officer who died of leukemia in 2004, and most of the race was on the Easthampton bike path, otherwise known as the Manhan Rail Trail, where I often run. The money raised always goes to local causes; last year, it paid for a good chunk of the local money needed for the sinkhole repair. (See Sunk.)

In the years since I moved here, I've known the race was happening--although the race doesn't go on the section of the bike path closest to my house, I've often seen runners for whom 5K was just a warm up running on the road near my house, their race numbers flapping.

This year, I decided to join them. This race was smaller than the first one I ran, though there were still somewhere around 700 people participating. The walkers and runners all went on the same course, which meant that I was seeing people coming the other way for much of the second half of the race. There were definitely moments when I wished that I had also chosen to do it as a leisurely stroll, water bottle in hand.

But instead, I ran. My time was a bit faster than in the winter, though not as much as I would have liked. I blame the heat for that. The race started just after 10 a.m., and it was well into the 70s and sunny by then. Much of the course was in the sun, as well, which meant that cool moments were few. My goal, really, was to finish ahead of at least one of the firemen running in their overalls and boots. After I crossed the finish line, I saw one just ahead of me, but I also remember having passed at least one, so I consider the goal met. (If I was hot, in my shorts and tank top, I can only imagine how hot they were.)

By 10:40 a.m., I was done. Extremely sweaty, but done. I skipped the after party and the prizes and opted for home and a cool shower. I'm glad to have done another 5K and probably will keep at it, though it's unlikely I'll pick a mid-summer race. The best part, as a non-morning-exerciser, is getting to feel slightly virtuous for the rest of the day. It's not enough to make me want to exercise in the morning every day, but for today, I'm glad.