I first came across the name of Henry Mitchell several years ago in some of the garden blogs I keep up with. He was a newspaper writer but I don’t think his columns were distributed out where I live. I never have been much of a newspaper reader so it’s altogether possible that they were distributed here and I just missed them.

Anyway some of these bloggers raved about his garden writing and it stuck in my mind.

So one day while I was in a store I happened to see one of his books and added it to my basket. If I remember right I was doing Christmas shopping at the time. I seem to always buy a lot of gifts for myself when I am Christmas shopping. I took The Essential Earthman home and put it on the shelf which is where it sat for the next two years.

Then last week I noticed that several garden bloggers had got together and formed an online book club. And the first book they had chosen to read and discuss was none other than The Essential Earthman. I realized that if ever I were going to read that book this would be the time.

I have almost ten feet of shelf space devoted to books on gardening and plants. Most of them however are quite different from The Essential Earthman. They are mostly catalogues of plants, how to identify them, what to do with them, tips on how to make them grow, things like that. I also have some books with pictures of pretty landscaping. But mostly my books are all what you would call reference books, not literature.

I have only two or three other books like this one that are written in the first person. This one seems to be a collection of his newspaper columns grouped into chapters by subject matter.

It took me a while to get into his writing. A good bit of it consists of which variety of this plant or that plant is best. I took to skipping over most of this. Even if I could find the recommended variety it would last about two days out in my arid southwest climate before it dried up or was eaten by deer. Mr Mitchell describes himself as a Southern gardener somewhere in the book but his south is Tennessee and Washington City, which is my north.

The good parts come when he writes about his personal struggles with the garden and with plants. He has a nice attitude about it all, a kind of good-natured fatalism. This experience transcends place and is recognizable by anybody who has ever had a garden.

I think I would have enjoyed these columns more if I had read them one at a time as they had been written, instead of plowing through a whole book of them in one weekend. I am going to leave it on my bedside table where I can browse it more leisurely. Maybe I will start to like it better. I am glad I read it but right now I am not sure I would buy another one of his collections.

By the way one blogger has accused me of not really being a gardener. In fact I have to confess that I don’t actually have a garden. I used to have a garden before I moved a few months ago. Now I just have a collection of plants, some of which are in the ground and some of which are still languishing in the greenhouse.

Enough of this. It’s 82 outside. I’m getting out and enjoy it while I can. By Thursday it’s going to be in the 20’s they say.