Gardening for Others

Categories: Local Interest , Home & Gardening , Fiction

A hilarious epistolary novel showed up in the second-floor display area last week, Bonnie Thomas Abbott's Radical Prunings: A Novel of Officious Advice from the Contessa of Compost.  If you've ever had mean thoughts while listening to a gardening person provide predictable opinions about square tomatoes, this is the novel for you.  The letters seek advice from Mertensia Corydalis, a gardening expert with a syndicated column and strong positive opinions about labor-intensive gardening.  The advice is similar to what you'll see in Eleanor Perenyi's Green Thoughts: A Writer in the Garden. 

Reading between the lines in the answers that appear in her column, readers come to know quite a bit about Mertensia--that she's recently divorced from a fellow gardener who's now married to a floozie.  Mertensia herself seems kind of interested (if you get my drift) in the young man who helps out with the garden (or why would she insist at least twice that he remove his shirt)?

The gardening advice, if you're into it, seems sound--I particularly recommend her comments on keeping Venus Flytraps alive.

Here is a list of some other contemporary epistolatory novels.

I was happy to note that Bonnie Thomas Abbott's book was published by Emmis Books in Cincinnati, and that the writer is older than I am (so there's still hope for me).  Fortunately for her, she lives in Columbus--too far away for me to drive north and stalk her garden.