Read by Matilda Longbottom
“Why don’t you go and see Elisabeth Woodburn?,” my husband used to say whenever I needed cheering. When I did, it always worked.
She died on this past November 18, and gardeners and garden-book lovers all over the world will mourn her. I was one of hundreds of visitors to her out-of-the-way Booknoll Farm and its unique book collection in Hopewell, New Jersey. I rationed my visits to birthdays, Christmas, and a few other times when I just couldn’t stay away, but the gap she has left in my life will not be filled, and those rare visits will always be treasured memories.
I had read about her several times before I realized that she lived only a few miles from us. I assumed that her “Antiquarian Garden Books” would be well out of my financial range, but one day I plucked up the courage to telephone her. Yes, she had books on garden history (my passion). Yes, I could come round if I made an appointment. She didn’t, however, accept “ladies who just want to browse after lunch.” If I was serious, I could come. With much trepidation, I made an appointment.
I suppose garden addicts, like most others, can recognize each other fairly easily. Elisabeth Woodburn must have realized quite soon that I was not in danger of whiling away a useless lunch hour. I went from shelf to shelf, almost squeaking with excitement. Up to then, I might have found one book I wanted in a bookstore. Now I wanted whole shelves.
From then on, any extra penny I had was saved to spend at Booknoll Farm. Sometimes I had a certain book in mind and ended up with something quite different, as she would take down volumes and show them to me, or dismiss something pretty with a short but scathing condemnation. Once she told me firmly, I hadn’t read enough sources and introduced me to Farrer, Wilson, Fairchild, and others. We both loved Nan Fairbrother, who had died, she said, “Alas, too young.” Once she showed me the most beautifully bound copy of Elizabeth and her German Garden, a book as lovely as a perfect lawn, with green, smooth leather and gold lettering. She let me stroke and open it, though it was far too expensive for me to buy.
I was never a book collector, and I think many came to her. I was a collector of garden thoughts and garden friends on paper. If ever there was someone who could introduce me to so many friends, it was she. Elisabeth Woodburn knew them all.
I never, ever mentioned a garden book she did not recognize. It was quite extraordinary. She dismissed those she did not like with a wonderful swiftness. “Not properly researched,” “written by an unpleasant man,” “nothing but a little how-to” were phrases she used, mostly about modern gardening books. Most of the good ones, she told me, were out of print. Occasionally there would be a contemporary book she admired. Then she would admonish me to “buy it at once or it will go out of print, and I’ll have to charge you four times as much for it.” They were often books written by friends, for, of course, many of her friends were garden book writers. Sometimes she provided much of their research material.
After a while, like many of her customers, I had my own manuscript to show her. In fear and trembling, I asked her if she would read it. “I will. But,” she said, with her piercing glance, “I shall tell you exactly what I think of it.”
Days passed with no response. I would wake in the night and fearfully curse myself for being so presumptuous. Then one day the telephone rang—and she did like it. She tried to help me publish it. The effort was unsuccessful, but I never really minded. It had already passed what, for me, was the only real test.
When one publisher turned it down as unlikely to sell, I said, “But Elisabeth Woodburn liked it.”
“Yes,” he replied, “but she is rather impractical. All the books she sells are out of print.” I suggested, with his help, I might go directly out of print and omit the tedious period in between. He wasn’t very amused.
She was—amused, that is. She wasn’t the least impractical. Her business was booming, and the telephone seemed to ring constantly when I was there. She was obviously an excellent business woman, but was still kindness itself to a poor, crazy, garden-thought lover like myself. She always found the cheapest volume for me. She kept things for months if I couldn’t yet afford them.
She even took back books that I had paid for, taken home, and read. For instance, when I learned about Pot Pourri from a Surrey Garden, by Mrs. C.W. Earle, I went to Elisabeth and found that she had it and the author’s three subsequent volumes. Soon I was able to get them for my birthday present. The first was a delightful account of gardening, household hints, and moral asides. About halfway through the second volume, Mrs. Earle became a vegetarian. From then on, page followed page on the dangers of meat-eating. Everything related to vegetarianism, and I still had volumes to go. I rang up Elisabeth Woodburn and said I could no longer stand Mrs. C.W.
“Why?” she asked.
I explained. Peals of laughter followed. “My daughter is a vegetarian. Bring the books back, whenever you like, and choose something else for your birthday.”
Almost the last time I went round to Booknoll Farm, I was, as usual, out of money. She started to show me around a garden library she had just acquired.
“Have you ever read this?” she asked, taking down My Summer in a Garden by Charles Dudley Warner. I hadn’t. She handed it to me. “It’ll make you laugh.”
I thanked her and said I would bring it back when I had finished.
“You needn’t bring it back,” she said.
Stammering with confusion, I said, “But you can’t give it to me.”
“I can do what I like,” she said, sternly. “That’s why I have my own business, so I can do exactly as I like.”
She is gone now, and all those expeditions to Booknoll Farm are over. I still have our friends, though: the books and writers we shared. Ones like Katherine White. When White was near death, her husband, E.B., noted:
“Her studied absorption in the implausible notion that there would be yet another spring, oblivious to the ending of her own days, which she knew perfectly well was near at hand, sitting there with her detailed chart under those dark skies in the dying October, calmly plotting the resurrection.”
Gardeners believe in Spring. ❖
Published originally in GreenPrints Issue #5, Spring 1991
Such a lovely story.
I see that this is a reprint, but I’m very happy that it is from far enough back that I hadn’t read it before.