Gardening Books from 1962 – Watch Out For Rabbit Holes

Would you like to follow along to see how one simple search could send me down yet another rabbit hole?

It all started early yesterday morning when I read a blog post from Stuck in a Book about their 1962 Club. They are encouraging readers to read and review books from 1962, any genre.

(They’ve also done this for other years.)

So, I checked my catalog of books for any gardening books I have from 1962.

(Yes, last winter, I cataloged ALL my books, at least those I intend to keep, so now it’s easy to find out if I have a book.)

For 1962, up pops Her Garden Was Her Delight by Buckner Hollingsworth.

I’ve written about Buckner several times as a Lost Lady of Garden Writing. So I pulled her book off my shelf so I could read it and give it a proper review to post for the 1962 Club, as they call it.

I love Buckner’s dedication to this book, one of three books she wrote. “DEDICATED IN THE MEMORY OF MY SISTER MARY KIRK SIMPSON – planting tulip bulbs in her London garden during the Autumn of 1940 when the Germans were raining bombs down onto the city.”

If you’ve read my previous blog posts about Buckner, you may remember her sister Mary was friends with Wallis Simpson and played a small role in the events that led to Wallis’s second divorce. (This reminds me I want to watch the new documentary A Very Royal Crisis: Countdown to Abdication when I have a few hours to really watch it.)

And that’s not even my rabbit hole.

I decided to see what gardening books I have that were published in 1959, the year I was born.

I don’t have any! Time to fill that hole in my library, don’t you think?

So I went to my favorite site for finding old books, put “garden” in for the title, and specified 1959 as the publishing year. Honestly, RABBIT HOLE ALERT should have flashed across my screen to warn me as I hit enter on that search. Anyway, up pops Rodale’s Encyclopedia of Organic Gardening. I do have that one so I checked when my copy (okay copies, I have 2 copies!) was published (1999, 2003) and proceeded down a small rabbit hole to see if I could find a 1st edition published in 1959 for sale. (I found one but do I really need it? I’ll have to think about it.)

But that was a minor rabbit hole.

I found another gardening book from 1959 with that search, which led me to another Lost Lady of Garden Writing, which hurled me down a major rabbit hole.

In that rabbit hole, I found three more books I needed (okay, wanted) at good prices, so I’ve ordered them. (It’s for my research!) I’ve also explored newspaper clippings, ancestry.com and Google books to find some rather interesting information.

And there are violets involved!

I hope to complete my research on this next Lost Lady of Garden Writing soon and write about her thoroughly sometime next week.

And I won’t tease. It’s Doretta Klaber.

And that’s how you can lose your footing and end up deep in another rabbit hole. One you might not have “thyme” for, but there you are. (Doretta has a variety of thyme named after her, Thymus ‘Doretta Klaber’.)

May you have a lovely day. Watch out for rabbit holes!