Lenka S. reviewed on 5/26/2009 + 822 more book reviews

Helpful Score: 4

A sweet but slight bouquet: a gardening memoir told in a Southern drawl. Whaley, an 85-year-old South Carolina gentlewoman, sits down, as it were, in her Charleston garden to summon up memories of camellias past. Baldwin, a South Carolina architect and novelist (The Fennel Family Papers, 1996, etc.), observes that she ``moves with the imperial bearing of a grand Southern matron. But on the inside she's a knobby-kneed 14-year-old country girl.'' The matron's account of life and gardening can come across as regrettably mild. ``It's an awful lot of fun to live into your eighties,'' she declares. ``It helps to have some money, though.'' Likewise, she remarks, ``People are the greatest--the most fun that life offers.'' But Whaley also delivers some choice comments and vignettes: ``Dad said if everything Nan planted had taken, a rabbit couldn't have run across the yard.'' And she can be folksily tart: ``You have a muscle here between your ears. When you play tennis, when you do exercises, you use muscles. The muscle up top is the same. Unless it's used it is going to be flabby.'' Whaley devotes chapters to her rural childhood, her parents, and her lawyer husband; she also offers her thoughts on her dog, on self-esteem, and on her favorite recipes. Discussions of her Charleston garden, measuring 30 by 110 feet, takes up about a third of the book, and though her description of it is charming, one doesn't walk away with a convincing sense of place. Her gardening advice is pretty basic: ``DO water your plants in the morning so that the leaves are dry by nightfall. You'll have less trouble with fungal diseases.'' And too many of the non-gardening vignettes seem slender, unrevealing. It would have been better to drench those portions with details, which count for as much in life stories as they do in gardens

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