To Everything There is a Season: The Gardening Year with Thalassa Cruso

by Thalassa Cruso

Book Overview

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0394480740
• ISBN13: 9780394480749
• Release Date: October 1973
• Publisher: Random House (NY)
• Length: 300 Pages
• Weight: 1.43 lbs.

Customer Reviews

A Testament to Thalassa Cruso

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