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Beverley Nichols

© Kirk Johnson

Last year a local librarian asked me if I had read any books by the garden writer, Beverley Nichols. I had never even heard the name before, so I wasn't sure if Beverley was male or female.

I have discovered that Beverley Nichols (1898-1983) was an Englishman who wrote some 60 books on a broad range of subjects, as well as many articles for magazines. It isn't too surprising that I hadn't read his gardening books, because they had been out of print for many years. I am very grateful to Timber Press for republishing some of them.

Nichols wrote a dozen gardening books. So far, I have only read four of them: Green Grows the City, Merry Hall, Laughter on the Stairs, and Sunlight on the Lawn. I am looking forward to reading Down the Garden Path, A Thatched Roof, and A Village in a Valley, but they seem to be out of print at the moment. I may have to order them as an interlibrary loan.

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What really impressed me about the four books that I have read is that, while Nichols obviously was a knowledgeable gardener, these books are fictionalized autobiographical novels. They are very much in the tradition of the Jeeves and Wooster novels by P.G. Wodehouse.

I have become a bit bored by typical gardening books. I actually find most gardening books to be almost unreadable; I just look at the pretty photos and skim through the text to see if there is any information that I don't already know. When the librarian first suggested that I read Nichols' books, I thought "Oh, no, she is going to want to know what I think of these books and they will probably bore me". I was in for a delightful surprise.

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The central figures in these novels are Beverley and his manservant Gaskin. Those characters are barely fictionalized, he even used their real names, but the other main characters are much more loosely based on real individuals. My favorite characters are Rose Fenton and Miss Emily Kaye, who are both based upon personality types rather than individuals. I am the president of a local garden club; right at the moment I am one of two males in the club and there are about 50 female members. I am very familiar with the personality types that "Our Rose" and Miss Emily represent, so I found their squabbles hilarious. "Our Rose" is a successful floral designer with a large ego who is known for chopping the heads off flowers and impaling them on pin holders. I have become involved with standard flower shows and I found the segment in Laughter on the Stairs where Our Rose and Miss Emily were putting on a flower show especially amusing. While the Merry Hall trilogy was written in the 1950s, floral design hasn't progressed much, so Nichols' lampooning of the flower show world is as accurate now as it was then. Award winning floral designs still tend to be more striking than beautiful (I should know, I have won quite a few blue ribbons for my designs).