Gay Gardens (and the Men Who Love Them)

Readers charmed by Joe Eck and Wayne Winterrowd's 2009 memoir Our Life in Gardens [Kindle], about their thirty-two years at North Hill in Vermont, should look for Clyde 'Skip' Wachsberger's memoir Into the Garden with Charles [Kindle], covering twenty-eight years creating their sumptuous Adsworthy Garden in Orient, New York. They met through a personal ad when both men were over fifty and became inseparable. 

Chris Phillips highly recommends Skip's book, about which PW said:

"Wachsberger’s refreshing and heartfelt memoir invites the reader into a house, a garden, and two lives filled with affection and warmth. Sagging floorboards and rotting linoleum greet Wachsberger when, in 1983, he buys a 300-year-old house on Long Island. What will become a splendid garden is a “whole empty field around a clump of peonies.” The author, having “turned fifty without noticing how I had gotten there,” began “to grow around my loneliness the way a tree limb can grow through a chain-link fence, incorporating the sharp metal into its fiber without showing any outward signs of distress.” ... When Clyde met Charles, he found the “best friend who was also an affectionate lover, a friend who shared my deepest yearning to be someone special for someone special” he had been looking for. Together they form a union, produce a book (Of Leaf and Flower), and nurture a noteworthy garden. With a keen ear and eye for the anecdotal, Wachsberger sketches beautifully lucid picture in words, and his illustrative paintings add both beauty and emotional content to this candidly romantic memoir." 

Winterrowd died in September 2010,  Wachsberger died of prostate cancer in November 2011.

Comments

[Vikram]

Gay garden writing is a genre with some enjoyable roots. I wonder if the British writer Beverley Nichols is remembered at all these days, but his garden writing was very popular in the mid 20th century and is still entertaining today.

He wrote about a series of different gardens - from a cottage in Huntingdonshire, from a small manor house and then from a small house again. Given the period the books are not, of course, very openly gay, but they are certainly elegantly camp and plenty of gay hints can be picked up.

[Brian]

Beverly Nichols is alive and well: http://www.timberpress.com/search/Beverly+Nichols

[Chris]

Stephen, thanks for sharing this book. It was the best read I've had in a while. So tender, and honest. Completely irony and bitterness free zone!