Old Herbaceous by Reginald Arkell

Old Herbaceous

by Reginald Arkell

Back in print after fifty years

Old Herbaceous is a classic British novel of the garden, with a title character as outsized and unforgettable as P. G. Wodehouse’s immortal butler, Jeeves. Born at the dusk of the Victorian era, Bert Pinnegar, an awkward orphan child with one leg a tad longer than the other, rises from inauspicious schoolboy days spent picking wildflowers and dodging angry farmers to become the legendary head gardener “Old Herbaceous,” the most esteemed flower-show judge in the county and a famed horticultural wizard capable of producing dazzling April strawberries from the greenhouse and the exact morning glories his Lady spies on the French Riviera, “so blue, so blue it positively hurts.” Sprinkled with nuggets of gardening wisdom, Old Herbaceous is a witty comic portrait of the most archetypal—and crotchety—head gardener ever to plant a row of bulbs at a British country house.

This Modern Library edition is published with a new Introduction by
Penelope Hobhouse, a renowned garden designer and lecturer and the author of numerous gardening books.

Reviewed by MurderByDeath on

5 of 5 stars

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Well this one is just a cozy read that hit me in just the right way.   

Spanning from the late 1800's through the end of WWII, this is the story of a manor house's head gardener, from his inauspicious beginnings as a foundling through to his last days.   

I'm left confused about the narrator: for much of the story it feels like you're listening to Old Herbaceous himself telling his story as he looks back; in fact I'm sure it is him.  But there are moments of omniscient third person: the narrator lets the reader in on  conversations and the internal dialogues of secondary characters that Old Herbaceous couldn't know about.  It flows well if you don't focus too hard on it; it didn't throw me out of the story so much as just slow me down a little bit.   

This was the perfect book for a cold, rainy do-nothing kind of day, and I closed the book smiling.  

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Reading updates

  • Started reading
  • 4 June, 2016: Finished reading
  • 4 June, 2016: Reviewed