Green Pens

A Collection of Garden Writing

Katie Holmes, Susan K. Martin, Kylie Mirmohamadi

A charming selection of clippings from gardeners who love to write and writers who love their garden.

Opinion

'In year of outstanding gardening books, here's a gem in content and production. Guaranteed not to dissapoint.'
Books of the Year, The Weekend Australian, 4-5 December 2004.

'This eye-catching and beautiful snapshot of Australian gardening in the 19th and 20th centuries is a treasury of previously unpublished material [sic]. Gardeners will love it; others will enjoy the delights of gardening without soiling their hands.'
Herald Sun 29/01/05

About this Title

A Hill’s hoist, some trees and a lawn; a field of rotting potatoes; a dazzling display of flowers or an oasis of peace and privacy? Green Pens reveals the passion, frustration, joy and despair that gardens have inspired throughout Australia’s history.

This charming selection of clippings from gardeners who love to write and writers who love their garden spans eras, fashions and genres. Letter and diary entries show ordinary people revelling in or struggling with their gardens; informed advice is offered by newspapers and magazines while extracts from gardening catalogues, planting guides, novels and poems reflect the full range of what a garden can mean—from the prosaic to the profound.

About the Author

Katie Holmes is a Senior Lecturer in History at La Trobe University. She has been active in the Australian Garden History Society and published many articles on gardening in Australia. Her book Spaces in her Day, on women’s diary-keeping, was short listed for the NSW and Victorian Premiers awards and she has co-edited a number of anthologies including Freedom Bound.

Susan K. Martin is a Senior Lecturer in English at La Trobe University. Her many articles and chapters on gardens in nineteenth-century Australia have appeared in publications as varied as the Victorian Naturalist and the prestigious Studies in the History of Gardens and Designed Landscapes and she wrote the introduction to the historical gardening volume Every Lady her own Flower Gardener 1839.

Kylie Mirmohamadi’s doctorate on gender, modernity and education in England during the first half of the twentieth century, awarded in 2000, has led her to more extensive research into school gardens. Her recent publications include an article on multiculturalism and garden metaphors, ‘Wog Plants Go Home’, in Studies in Australian Garden History.

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978-0-522-85103-8