Welcome to the first episode of a new feature for Well Rooted Radio!
In “Well Rooted Readings”, I’ll be digging up a collection of public-domain nature and garden writing and reading it aloud. You can expect to find fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, held together by the simple thread that I find it beautiful.
It is a great delight to read these texts, both in their similarities to, and differences from, our current sensibilities. A gardener in 1906 was, like a gardener in 2026, both an observer of nature and an agent of creative disruption; a partner to the landscape and the aspiring master of it. This much is the same. What is most different is the language, worlds away from our current fetish for brevity and efficiency. Instead, we find lush, evocative passages, nimble and humorous turns of phrase, deliberate pacing.
We begin the series with “The Garden, You, and I”, a 1906 work in 19 chapters (plus an epilogue) written by Mabel Osgood Wright (pseudonym “Barbara”) a writer and conservationist who was the founder and first president of the Connecticut Audubon Society. I love the playful, yet respectful, relationship between gardener and natural world described here, with an emphasis on learning from, rather than controlling, one’s environment. I hope you, too, are charmed by Ms. Wright’s prose.
Read here: The Garden, You and I, Introduction and Chapter 1, by “Barbara”, Mabel Osgood Wright. New York, The MacMillan Company; London, MacMillan & Co, Ltd., 1906
Inspired to read more? You can find the full text of this work, along with a vast library of other public-domain writing, at Project Gutenberg: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/17514
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