Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: [distributed by Random House], Knopf
Date Published: 1973
ISBN-13:9780394480749ISBN:0394480740
Description: A wonderful copy with some minor edgewear to the cover. Dust Jacket may have chips and close tears. Book has tanning or browning due to normal aging process. -, Hard Cover, Very Good / Good. read more
Description: Good. Shows some signs of wear, and may have some markings on the inside. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf Books for Young Readers, New York, NY, U. S. A.
Date Published: 1973
ISBN-13:9780394480749ISBN:0394480740
Description: Very Good in Very Good jacket. Very Good in Very Good jacket Very Good in Very Good, Price Clipped jacket8vo-over 7¾"-9¾" tall. GI512063. read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Knopf; [distributed by Random House]
ISBN-13:9780394480749ISBN:0394480740
Description: Very Good. 0394480740 clean flat pages, tight spine, has dust jacket books may have some minor wearhouse damage. Stickers may be on spine or covers. read more
Publisher: Knopf; [distributed by Random House]
Date Published: 1973
ISBN-13:9780394480749ISBN:0394480740
Description: Good. First edition; dfust cover worn and edges; this book has been inscribed. Every heavytail order includes with a sweet! We carefully hand clean and reinspect each and every item we ship. Our quality control process ensures items to be in the condition described or better. Heavytail is determined to earn your repeat business through old fashioned customer service. We love international orders. read more
"Thalassa Cruso is one of the most brilliant garden writers I've ever encountered -- the horticultural equivalent more to M.F.K. Fisher than Julia Child. It's to Horticulture's great detriment that since Ms. Cruso's heyday in the 1960s she's fallen into relative obscurity -- not even a Wikipedia entry to her name!
After reading this beautiful book (which I bought used for one measly cent!) I'm convinced there needs to be a Thalassa Cruso revival. PBS should remaster and release the complete WGBH-TV 1966 to 1969 run of her weekly television program 'Making Things Grow.' She wrote the gardening column for the Sunday Boston Globe for 22 years, of which the years 1979-1983 are accessible through that paper's online archive and which are brilliant in their own right and would make their own terrific bound volume. In the foreword of this book, she writes that many of the essay contained within have appeared in condensed form in the Globe and in McCalls.
Here is a woman who lived fully and enthusiastically, writing here with equal vigor of the thrill of trespassing on land as a child as to paying sensitive and profound tribute to "John," an old, tormented sailor whom she employed as a handyman for twenty years. Here is the quick wit of a literary woman, passionate about horticulture and gardening with the instinct to connect the her of gardening to a larger context. To show an example at random, in the chapter "October" Ms. Cruso -- who was English by birth -- writes about the changing leaves of her adopted New England in the essay "The Extravaganza,"
"The Early settlers turned their backs deliberately and determinedly upon their homeland; they sailed away from it with few regrets. But homesickness is a curious thing; it has a habit of creeping silently and unexpectedly and overwhelmingly you like a wave when triggered off by sight, smell, or sound. I wonder whether the older folks may not have suffered that sudden flame up like a glittering candle against a sapphire blue sky and recalled the quieter colors they had left behind."
She concludes the section by hoping that the emerging conservation movement may preserve the region's colorful seasonal displays and makes a dry aside about the New England Puritans own apparent lack of enthusiasm for the autumn trees,
"Or could it be that they distrusted all foliage color after an initial contact with poison ivy?"
The 1973 edition, which I own and which is shown here, is itself a beautiful object. Jacketed in a heavy matte illustration by Margaret Hathaway, the book is an embossed hardcover with heavy, creamy paper stock. The book is organized much like the Julius Work Calendar, according to months, and similarly illustrated with outstanding wood engravings of medieval gardens and gardeners.
Ms. Cruso's passing away in 1997 after many years of struggling with Alzheimer's makes this book all the more poignant. Though her television appearances and newspaper column continued into the 80s, this book was her last and is, I think, the culmination of her brilliant life as a gardener."
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