Elizabeth and her German Garden (1898)

I’ve been wanting to read von Arnim for some time and decided to start with this title, her 1898 debut, because it is the one that Crawley House’s Mr. Molesley gave to Anna Smith when he tried to court her during Mr. Bates’ first absence in early season 2 of Downton Abbey.

Von Arnim was a young English woman who married an older German Count, and Elizabeth and her German Garden is considered semi-autobiographical. In it, a young wife and mother flees her hated social life in the city to live at one of her husband’s country estates and tend the garden.

It’s sensual, witty, and sweet all at once. 4 stars

Read this if: you love gardens; or, like me, you just want the thrill of that Downton connection! ( )

Gardens. Mine is a work in progress and I spend way too much time looking at seedlings and measuring daily growth and progress. I wonder about my neighbors who have professional firms come in to clip, blow, and mulch all the sameness into perfection. So I could certainly relate to Elizabeth and her escape into her own garden.

However the big difference is that I can choose when and how much time I will spend in my garden, with my children and on my career. Elizabeth is much more constrained and escapes to the country as to not have to deal with social norms and her husband 'The Man of Wrath'.

The book is full of her observations and short quips. My favorite: “When I got to the library I came to a standstill, - ah, the dear room, what happy times I have spent in it rummaging amongst the books, making plans for my garden, building castles in the air, writing, dreaming, doing nothing.”

I can relate. ( )

When you are leading a very urban life nowadays, spending time daily in either the subway and/or in the car, and keeping an eye on the watch constantly, reading a book about white blossoms, dandelions, blue hepaticas, snow-drop anemones, violets and bright celandines, silvery-pink peonies and delicate lilacs, seems to me as far off as reading about Life in Mars.

This is a delightful book but also naughtily mischievous. ( )

I enjoyed Enchanted April so I thought this book would be good. It wasn't near as good. The plot and dialogue drug on and on with descriptions of flowers and rather boring conversations. ( )

I’ve had Elizabeth and Her German Garden on Mount TBR since last September, and it came to my attention recently while watching the second season of Downton Abbey, when two characters talk about the book briefly in passing. The novel is a kind of diary that our heroine keeps in order to record her thoughts about motherhood, marriage, life—and, of course, her garden, in which she spends most of her time in order to get away from the stresses of daily life. Her husband, the Man of Wrath, doesn’t understand it, but Elizabeth’s situation will probably resonate with a lot of fellow introverts—she likes having the space in order to recharge.

Yes, there’s a fair amount in the book about gardening. But you don’t have to be a gardener necessarily in order to enjoy the book (in fact, in an early review, a reviewer was disappointed that there were no gardening tips for the amateur). Knowing what we know about Elizabeth, it’s interesting to watch how she handles the invasion of two unexpected houseguests at Christmastime—and how her husband assumes that she’ll enjoy it (why did those two get married in the first place? They seem to have nothing in common). There is something kind of poetic about Elizabeth’s prose, particularly in her descriptions of her need for solitude.

There is a (slight) autobiographical note to the novel, as Elizabeth von Armin was married to a German aristocrat. Homesick for England, in 1896 she accompanied her husband to his country estate as Nassenheide, outside Berlin, where she became enamored of the garden; Elizabeth and Her German Garden describes the first spring months that von Arnim spent there. I wasn’t quite as bothered by the Man of Wrath’s actions as some other readers, but then again I think von Arnim was satirizing the Count. It was also interesting to me to find out from the Introduction to the Virago edition that EM Forster visited the estate at Nassenheide in 1904. ( )