Beatrix Potter’s Gardening Life by Marta McDowell

Beatrix Potter's Gardening Life

From the 2013 Timber Press edition of Beatrix Potter’s Gardening Life by Marta McDowell: If you’re one of the millions of readers who grew up on Beatrix Potter’s tales, then you know that her illustrations are filled with carefully observed flowers and gardens.

Yet this aspect of her life — one of the richest and most enduring sources of inspiration for her work — has received little attention until now.

In this engagingly written and delightfully illustrated book, Marta McDowell takes you on a personal journey, tracing the development and eventual blossoming of Beatrix Potter’s life as a gardener, from her childhood interest in plants, through her development as an artist to her final years as an estate farmer and naturalist.

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Excerpt from Beatrix Potter's Gardening Life by Marta McDowell

Image from Beatrix Potter’s Gardening Life
Learn more about Beatrix Potter
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You’re invited to follow Beatrix Potter through a year in her garden, learning what she was growing in each season — pansies and peas, foxgloves and pinks, roses and currants, and all the other old-fashioned cottages plants that fill her drawings.

The book also serves as a traveler’s guide to help you discover or rediscover Beatrix Potter’s Lake District, her garden at Hill Top Farm, and the many other gardens and landscapes that nourished her imagination.

By revealing this neglected aspect of her life, McDowell paints a more complete portrait that will deepen your appreciation of Beatrix Potter as a writer and artist.

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Excerpt from Beatrix Potter's Gardening Life by Marta McDowell

Beatrix Potter’s Gardening Life on Bookshop.org* 
and on Amazon *
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Garden quotes by Beatrix Potter

Yes, I have lots of flowers, I am very fond of my garden, it is a regular old-fashioned farm garden, with a box hedge round the flower bed, and moss roses and pansies and black currants and strawberries and peas…”

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“Spring is that wonderful if somewhat delusional time for a gardener when the sap rises and everything seems possible.”

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“It is anxious work to dig up a border, but … it has done good to most of the plants …”

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“I think I will post you a Japanese cowslip. I don’t know if they would grow in London, they like a damp corner.”

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“And when the sun comes out again … you should see my garden and flowers — roses and pansies — no noise except the birds and bees, and the lambs in the meadow.’ (from Johnnie Town-Mouse)

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About the author: Marta McDowell teaches landscape history and horticulture at the New York Botanical Garden and consults for private clients and public gardens.  Timber Press has published her recent books including The World of Laura Ingalls Wilder: The Frontier Landscapes that Inspired the Little House Books in September 2017. All the Presidents’ Gardens made the New York Times bestseller list in 2015 and won an American Horticultural Society book award.

Beatrix Potter’s Gardening Life won a 2014 Gold Award from the Garden Writers Association and is in its sixth printing. Marta’s books include Unearthing the Secret Garden, Beatrix Potter’s Gardening Life, The World of Laura Ingalls Wilder, Emily Dickinson’s Gardening Life, and All the President’s Gardens. Visit her at Marta McDowell.

MORE BY MARTA MCDOWELL ON THIS SITE

Emily Dickinson’s Gardening Life
Unearthing the Secret Garden
Beatrix Potter’s Letters to Children: The Path to Her Books
Laura Ingalls Wilder: Late-Blooming Author with a Passion for Nature

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