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Rating: 
Summary: Bring it Back !
Review: Adding to Carol Summers words I too have given at least a dozen of these books as gifts. It is simply a great read and I don't even have a garden. The cover is absolutely a stunner. I would love to have a print of it.That quality continues to the last period. Bring it back !
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Summary: "Green Thoughts" by Eleanor Perenyi
Review: Although I have not gardened in years and have no plans to start now, I have been enchanted by "Green Thoughts." Ms. Perenyi's writing is crisp, intelligent, and witty. Anyone who can take such non-riveting subjects as worms, mulch, and compost (to name a few) and turn them into elegant, fascinating essays deserves some sort of prize. If E.B. White had written a gardening book, it would probably resemble this one. A real treat.
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Summary: "Green Thoughts" by Eleanor Perenyi
Review: Although I have not gardened in years and have no plans to start now, I have been enchanted by "Green Thoughts." Ms. Perenyi's writing is crisp, intelligent, and witty. Anyone who can take such non-riveting subjects as worms, mulch, and compost (to name a few) and turn them into elegant, fascinating essays deserves some sort of prize. If E.B. White had written a gardening book, it would probably resemble this one. A real treat.
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Summary: Fascinating - bring it back. Wait! It's back!
Review: Bless, oh, bless Modern Library for bringing this book back into print. When I wrote the review below, it was still unavailable, so I'm delighted by its return. This time, I will be buying several copies to give as presents. One could hardly do better.Original review: Eleanor Perenyi is one of those people who can make anything interesting. Knowledgeable, opinionated, at times cranky, her writing is at once delightful and profound. With wit and whimsy, the books skips from the trials and tribulations of trying to find good help to the horticultural explorations of the Spanish conquistadors. The book is a real treat for anyone who loves gardens and words. In fact, I think I'll read it again.
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Summary: Woman's work.....
Review: Eleanor Perenyi's book GREEN THOUGHTS is a memoir of sorts. She apparently never wrote another book on gardening, but as Alan Lacy says, sooner or later every writer who gardens will write a book about gardening. At the time her book was published in 1981, she had worked in her own garden in New England for a number of years. She says she had been gardening for 30 years, but does not indicate if she is including the years she lived in Hungary her birthplace. She was an immigrant who migrated first to Europe and then to America where she worked in New York as editor of Madamoiselle and lived and gardened in New England. Her detailed observations about gardening are of limited use to those who live and garden elsewhere in the States. However, Perenyi has many wise 'thoughts' that can be acted on in almost any garden, including the advice 'don't be overly neat' - something that's taken me a while to appreciate. Perenyi's book contains many original insights and much information not widely available at the time she wrote her book - such as gardening tips from 'Organic Gardening Magazine'. Perenyi wrote only one book on gardening but she is often quoted-the main reason I wanted to read GREEN THOUGHTS. She organized her comments Alpha to Zeta (actually ends with 'W' for Woman's Place), which are literally a set of small essays ranging from a paragraph in length to several pages on various topics from hedges and lawns to onions and potatoes. My favorite essay is "Woman's Place" which appropriately enough covers the history of women in the garden from Eve to Eleanor Perenyi. She reveals the sad truth that women invented horticulture while men were off hunting in packs, only to be thrown out of the garden at a later date when men "took charge" of the fields. Over the eons, women were relegated lower and lower positions garden-wise until they became decorative ornaments - well at least in upscale gardens East and West, whether the Seraglio with it's harem or the Virgin's Bower. In the gardens (er..vegetable patches) of traditional societies she says women became beasts of burden. Perenyi notes that Oriental women do the weeding in the rice paddies and carry the firewood in Africa. At any rate, while European upscale men were busy adapting their posh Renaissance gardens to the latest 'Arabasque" notion or plowing up the 18th Century landscape under the guidance of Sir Humphrey Repton (and still hunting in packs one notes), enterprising nuns and country women with their "messy" cottage gardens preserved the diversity of the native species of plants. In the 20th Century, Gertrude Jeckyll and William Robinson discovered what the old wives had been up to and introduced "native" plants to upscale country gardens. The moral of the book is that men's overly tidy and rational gardening habits are bad and women's messy garden habits are good. Rational agriculture destroys, messy gardening preserves.
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Summary: Bring it back!
Review: I must have blinked when this book went out of print; I've had a stockpile of copies for years to give to deserving friends. Now my children are old enough to have gardens and I NEED Eleanor Perenyi. BRING HER BACK! PLEASE, PLEASE! This is the best book for gardeners ever written.
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Summary: Divine reading experience
Review: If you love amateur gardening and you love food, you have to love this book. Perenyi is informed, witty and timeless and she writes like a dream. She is way up there with one of my other all-time favorites, MFK Fisher. I've given this book as a gift at least a dozen times and now that I want to again, I find that it's out of print. What a travesty. Bring it back!
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Summary: Adored this book
Review: What a wonderful experience to spend time with this intelligent, funny, morally secure woman. She's an elegant writer with a wealth of gardening knowledge. Her views on organic gardening, composting, etc. are now widely recognized as correct. Her taste, which she does not hesitate to reveal, is impeccable. One of the best gardening books I've ever read. I hope the years since this book was published have been very kind to Ms. Perenyi and her Stonington, Conn. garden.
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