I'm going to read all her novels and you can't stop me!
This was another wonderfull book about this lovely, witty woman from a hundred years ago who writes lovely stuff about learning to garden. Fluffy, pretty prose that is also smart and fresh as tomorrow. Not dingy or sweet, sometimes sarcastic but in a funny way. If i were rich I would buy all her books and hole up somewhere to read them.

3.5 stars

“… I don’t love things that will only bear the garden for three or four months in the year and require coaxing and petting for the rest of it. Give me a garden full of strong, healthy creatures, able to stand roughness and cold without dismally giving in and dying. I never could see that delicacy of constitution is pretty, either in plants or women.”

A beautiful, verdant garden would be a welcome place to sit with a book right now, while our normal lives are on hold for an indeterminate length of time. There are a few obstacles to doing this right now, however. First, my thumb is not the least bit green. Second – this damnable weather! We’re already past the midway point in April, yet snow has decided to make an uninvited appearance nearly every day for the last several days. As I write, the wind continues to howl outside my bedroom window. The tulips that during a decent year I am barely accomplished at keeping alive are struggling to show their faces. My lilac bushes will likely not bloom when they should. The trees are bare, and brown seems to be the reigning color. So to cheer me up a bit, I decided to grab Elizabeth von Arnim’s semi-autobiographical novel off my shelf. Yes, it did the trick!

“The people round about are persuaded that I am, to put is as kindly as possible, exceedingly eccentric, for the news has travelled that I spend the day out of doors with a book, and that no mortal eye has every yet seen me sew or cook.”

Elizabeth was a woman a bit ahead of her time, and one after my own heart! This memoir of sorts, written in a rather loose diary format over the period of just over a year, was published in 1898. Yet, Elizabeth was not your typical housewife and mother of the time in which she lived. What she adored most in life were her books, her garden, her three little girls, and solitude. Her husband, whom she refers to as simply the “Man of Wrath”… well, you’ll have to decide for yourself what her intentions were with this irreverent nickname. Perhaps she could have done without him altogether?!

With much charm, Elizabeth depicts the progress of her lovely garden, the beauty of the surrounding forest, and the various sounds of nature’s creatures. What I most admired was her sharp wit – that tongue in cheek humor I appreciate so well. She writes about visitors to her home, and more often than not she is happy to see them walk back out the door! It’s nice to have guests now and then, but how often can we relate to that sigh of relief when our home becomes all our own once again?!

“I should like my house to be often full if I could find people capable of enjoying themselves. They should be welcomed and sped with equal heartiness; for truth compels me to confess that, though it pleases me to see them come, it pleases me just as much to see them go.”

I admit one thing got on my nerves a bit – Elizabeth’s somewhat patronizing attitude towards those of a lower social class – namely her gardeners and her house servants. I suppose this notion was a product of the times; still, it rankled. There is a section when she has two visitors – one more welcome than the other. The two seem to gang up on the third and this section is where she lost me a little more. I know the intention was to be humorous, but I was ready to get away from all three women and back into the garden, alone! Other than that, I was pleased with the lovely distraction from looking at the same walls of this same house day after day. Whether you enjoy gardening yourself or simply delight in the gorgeous creations of those that do, then this book might prove a welcome diversion for you as well.

“What a resurrection of beauty there is in my garden, and of brightest hope in my heart!”

I love Enchanted April, and I was torn between "What if all her books are that good?" and "You know it will only lead to heartbreak" when deciding whether or not to sample another of her books. Heartbreak won, in this instance.

While there were beautiful descriptions of the flowers in her garden, and I smiled every time she referred to her husband as The Man of Wrath, I couldn't get past her descriptions of dealing with servants and gardeners. Not that she's actively cruel to them. There is, though, an attitude of natural superiority, and detached amusement at their troubles. At one point she mentions that hired men in that region receive a small wage plus "all the boiled potatoes they can eat", and vinegar mixed with water to drink. (I think that goes a long way toward explaining the staff turnover rate, but the author seems to think it's a great perk.) She mentions that frequently the hired help would go work for a non-noble house, because they paid more.

There was a stunning speech from The Man of Wrath about women, delivered, of course, to three women. Spoiler alert-- he doesn't think much of them.

I think my mistake was reading something from a much earlier period than Enchanted April. When I've recovered, and maybe read a history of workers' rights in Europe at the turn of the twentieth century, I'll try one of her later novels.

This story is available for free at http://www.math.cornell.edu/~hatcher/...

It began with the statement: May 7th - I love my garden..

Well, so do I.

The story was first published in 1898 but the years soon melted away. Her memoir was loaded with those funny long sentences containing plenty of commas, semi-colons and dashes that were in fashion back then. It covered one year in the life of Elizabeth von Arnim. The moral to this story? Truth is often stranger than fiction.

Elizabeth married a widower twice her age and referred to her first three children as the April baby, the May baby and the June baby. Her husband was called the Man Of Wrath. Elizabeth was considered by the villagers to be an eccentric because *gasp!* she could spend her day out of doors with a book. Apparently, during this era, reading was an occupation for men; for women it was a reprehensible waste of time. Shhh, don't tell anyone but I have been guilty of this.

Like Elizabeth, when I am outside, my thoughts sometimes drift to my childhood. For her it was about daisies and daffodils and her eleven o'clock bread. Her father whom she passionately loved, her grumpy grandfather and her enchanted years between two and eighteen.

In her garden she reminisced about happy frogs, owls having conversations and roses. In my garden you could find a murder of crows, a knot of toads and some gopher tortoises digging holes. With some beetles, crickets and spiders.

I loved the author's first lesson on buying (too much) seed and trying to grow morning glories. The invention of cabbage salad and the superiority of the Teuton (her husband?) and 'the music he makes after eating his meal'. And her quick explanation of the dejected gardener who walked around with a spade in one hand and a revolver in the other. He went mad and was sent to an asylum. Fortunately no one was shot. Or buried.

The utter randomness of Elizabeth's semi-autobiographical memoir may turn off some readers. She begins her tale in the present but regresses to the past roughly halfway through. She blends family and flowers, weather and food. Then she witnesses the treatment of women by their laboring husbands and was lectured by the Man Of Wrath on the acceptability of beating your wife. These women accept their beating with a simplicity worthy of all praise, and far from considering themselves insulted, admire the strength and energy of the man who can administer such eloquent rebukes. Further, the story goes on, with the politics, prejudices, vanities and weaknesses of the German people at the turn of the century. I am not sure what happened to that happy garden and when the diatribes became commonplace.

Sadly, I don't have a housekeeper, handmaiden, workmen, painters, a gardener and his assistant, a cook, maids, nurse and someone to brush my hair in the evening but my garden is still a far-away corner in my kingdom of heaven. I am at peace.

This took me a long time to finish, because a lot of it consists of lists of flowers, in long, run on sentences, and because much of it is atrocious socially. Elizabeth von Arnim wrote this in 1898 and so you may say, well, it's of its time. I beg to differ.

Other women were writing before and after this in a much more forward thinking and enlightened way; for example, although she is enamored of her garden and it's beauty, she didn't lift a finger to make it. Her husband, one of the Prussian nobility and a very wealthy man, paid for slave labor from Poland and Russia to work for him. These men and women were watched over by armed guards to make sure they didn't escape. If they were lucky enough to get away, peasants in the area would pay them more to work for them. Also, the women were expected to have a baby in the morning and get back to work in the afternoon. She also has a discussion with her husband about how it's okay for the local peasants to beat their wives and mothers to beat their children and staff.

Towards the end of the book, she has two guests come to her huge, country estate. Elizabeth and her female friend despise the English woman who is her other guest. They continually bully her throughout her stay, as does Mr. von Arnim. I can't understand why they denigrate her, it isn't made clear. All in all a very unpleasant garden party and one I wouldn't care to attend.

I loved her book, The Enchanted April, so this was very disturbing.

I had never heard of Elizabeth Von Arnim before. Just when you think you’re starting to get a hold of a certain period of literature, some gem like this pops up and send you reeling down some new pathway of literary wonder.

This is a relatively short story, written in a diary format that centers on the reflection of a woman in relation to life, family, and often using her garden as a foil for her religious sentiments. You learn a lot about the position of women in German society in the late 1800’s, and you learn a lot of women’s relations to one another, their families, and church. It’s distinctly different from English women. That alone makes is interesting, but it’s so much more.

It’s witty. Terribly witty. It’s so whimsical. Elizabeth’s reflections and observations are wry and hilarious; you can imagine the woman sitting in front of you cracking jokes with a straight face until to break into a large smile moments later. You can feel her intelligence and good humor seeping through the text into you. She frequently made me laugh. I feel like she really got me.

On top of that her descriptions of her garden are nothing less than poetic It really wants you want to go lay in the grass outside. It will give you a new appreciation for breathing in the sweet heavy scents of flowers in bloom, and the feel of the sun on your skin. Thank god it’s spring!!

I really could have read another several hundred pages and been happy. I love discovering a new author and will definitely look forward to downloading her other works from Gutenberg.

Beware of reading the books you treasured a long time ago: it is often the occasion of disillusionment. So it was for me with Elizabeth and Her German Garden. I adored this book in my twenties and recalled it as being different from what I find it to be now.

Fans of The Diary of a Provincial Lady might enjoy this book, as well as passionate gardeners. Written in diary form, it recounts a semi-autobiographical version of the author’s own life as the young wife of a German aristocrat, living in the boonies of Pomerania. In the edition I have, a beautiful 1900 Macmillan hardcover with hand-cut pages, the illusion is reinforced by photographs of the author’s real house and garden tipped in to the text.

How truthful the version of her life might be is an intriguing question, especially when it comes to her husband—for she refers to him throughout as the Man of Wrath, which her real husband can’t have appreciated. Nor is his characterization appealing: he is invariably cranky, self-satisfied, distant, and patronizing. The narrator responds on occasion by being coquettishly naughty but mostly she ignores him and leads her own separate life. It’s hard for me to imagine that the real husband appreciated this public portrayal on any level. Maybe when I first read this I saw more between the lines than I do now and found her situation poignant; this time I simply found the narrator a bit spiteful and their life together dreary.

I was much more of a gardener at the time I first read the book, so I enjoyed the author’s descriptions of her horticultural successes and failures, and perhaps her descriptions of her young children charmed me. And in those days I was much more inclined to take classism in stride; this time around I was appalled by the callousness with which servants were used, and their description as being like “children or animals.” In my youth I knew people who held such attitudes, who were otherwise charming and delightful people with beautiful homes and lives. Now I can’t get past the purchase price of such lives.

There are witty observations about human nature and the gulf between our social personas and our inner thoughts. But the years had cast a haze of charm over this book that has now vanished, unfortunately.

Although this novel is not strictly memoir, both the intimate voice and the known facts of the author's life make it read as if it were. It's a strange and whimsical little book in some ways, and I think it needs to be read in the right mood: ideally, when solitary; and even better, when drunk with the beauty of the countryside in spring. There are no chapters, and there is no real plot - although it roughly chronicles a gardening year at a large country estate in northern Germany at the end of the 19th century. Elizabeth flees her family and the dull social obligations expected of an aristocratic wife in order to (ostensibly) furnish her house, but really to create something beautiful in the garden. She is a bit of a rebel, and definitely something of an original, and amidst Elizabeth's somewhat breathy gush is a sharp sense of humour and some lovely and wise observations.

Utterly delightful, funny, quirky. Yes, I don't know half of the plants she mentions, but there are plenty of observations of life and personalities and cultural differences to keep me happy too.

Elisabeth y su jardín alemán ha sido la cuarta obra que he leído de Elisabeth von Arnim, y su escritura ya se ha convertido en refugio para mí. Este libro no es una novela, si no que estamos ante una especie de autobiografía de la autora escrita a modo de diario. No sé si la autora tenía pensado publicar este texto, o si lo escribió de forma personal, ya que vemos a una Elisabeth que no se esconde ni intenta poner su mejor cara ante el lector.
Estamos ante una mujer muy crítica en muchos aspectos, a la que en ocasiones se le olvida que se encuentra en una posición muy privilegiada. Nos deja ver su genial sentido del humor, ácido, irónico y muy sarcástico que me ha sacado una sonrisa en más de una ocasión (sobre todo en las discusiones con su marido).
Y por supuesto, no puedo olvidar a su maravilloso jardín. Porque este libro es una oda a la contemplación de las plantas y la naturaleza que cultiva, a las flores, a conocer el ritmo de las estaciones según la vegetación que crece. Elisabeth se sirve del trabajo en el jardín para conseguir paz mental y serenidad ante el día a día, a pesar de las críticas de la sociedad del momento que no veía con buenos ojos que una mujer de su posición se ensuciase las manos de tierra.
Un estupendo libro que me ha hecho comprender un poco más a la autora, y me ha proporcionado calma y sosiego, lo mismo que a ella su precioso jardín.
3,75 ⭐️

This is an autobiographical fiction written in the form of a diary entry. Elizabeth (though her true christened name is Mary) who married a German count twice her age had little in common with her husband. The husband being of the German aristocracy, Elizabeth was additionally burdened with the traditions, expectations and conventions. Stuck in a foreign land with an overbearing husband, Elizabeth took in to gardening and writing as a solace. Through Elizabeth and her German Garden, she tells us her story with a bit of fiction here and there thrown in.

The major part of this narrative is dedicated to the garden and gardening. But in between the lines as well as through many expressions, the readers get a good insight into what Elizabeth's life was. German aristocratic life was different from what she was used to. Her ways differed. Her love of nature and to be lost in its beauty was incomprehensible to the German society. Also her love for book shocked them. So the German society had no scruple in labeling her an "eccentric". However, amidst all opposition, she works on what is close to her heart, what gives her peace and comfort, and most importantly, what helps her to balance and incompatible marriage; she works on her garden and her writing. I actually admired Elizabeth in this account. She was strong, courageous and optimistic. Without letting the situation she found herself in depresses her, she finds a way to make the best out of it. She is a woman to be commended.

There was a lot of satire here which made it an interesting read. The satire was directed at all quarters - her own self, her husband, her friends, relations, acquaintances and her household. I found it quite amusing that she should refer to her husband as "the man of wrath" and her babies as "April baby", " May baby" and "June baby". These interesting expressions gave a novelty to her writing.

Overall it was an interesting read. I enjoyed story of her life, her satire, and her beautiful descriptions of nature, its landscape, and of course her garden. Had I been a gardening enthusiast, perhaps I would have enjoyed it more.

I am on a mission to clear out my TBR list, which has five years worth of reads. This was one of the 2013 books. Turns out it’s about a woman who loves her garden. I love my garden too but I can’t fill a book with it. It did have some extremely quotable lines, but it’s not what you call a gripping story. Still, very glad I finally read it, and that 2013 is one book lighter. Onward!