Buckner Hollingsworth

Gardening on Main Street

Cover of Gardening on Main Street by Buckner Hollingsworth

“If you have an ounce of bone meal in your body, you will enjoy, on a day too wet to go weeding or on a chilly evening in front of an open fire, accompanying Mrs. Hollingsworth through her gardening year. You’ll rarely find a garden companion with more to share, and your own garden, whether outside or inside or both, will be the better for it. ~ From the back flap of the cover of Gardening on Main Street by Buckner Hollingsworth.

I found my first book by Buckner Hollingsworth about ten years ago on a shelf of assorted books at a local antique mall. I had gone with a friend, who found the book while I was off looking for old gardening tools and china with violets on it. When we met back up, she handed me a copy of Gardening on Main Street by Buckner Hollingsworth (Rutgers University Press, 1968) and said she thought I would like it. 

Though it was newer than most of the old gardening books I tended to buy, I decided to buy it because it looked interesting (see the quote from the back flap of the cover!) and would be a nice addition to my growing stack of “mid-century modern” gardening books, as I call gardening books published in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s.

While I don’t often actually sit down and read the old books I buy cover to cover, for some reason, I read this one almost as soon as I got it. As usual, as I read the book, I asked, “Who are you, Buckner Hollingsworth?”

Her Biography

I discovered quickly that Edith Buckner Kirk, known as Buckie to her friends and family, was born in 1892 in Baltimore, Maryland. The Kirks were silversmiths dating back to 1815. Buckner graduated from Bryn Mawr College, where one of her classmates was Katharine S. White, who wrote the classic Onward and Upward in the Garden.

Buckner served in the Red Cross in World War I and later married the artist, Will Hollingsworth, with whom she had one son, Kirk. Eventually, Will and Buckner bought a house on Main Street in Windsor, Vermont, where they lived, and she gardened.

One interesting tidbit about Buckner is that her younger sister, Mary, was a childhood friend of Wallis Simpson, and kept in contact with her through the years. Yes, that Wallis Simpson, for whom the King of England abdicated his throne to marry. Mary was “the woman” caught with Ernest Simpson, Wallis’s husband at the time, giving Wallis the excuse she needed to divorce him. Mary then eventually married Ernest after he divorced Wallis. Buckner’s youngest sister, Anne, wrote a book about their sister Mary, but it is hard to find anywhere. But I recently found a recent article about Mary which has as much information as I’ve ever read, if you are interested.

Buckner passed away in 1979, and many of her letters and correspondence related to her books and her sister Mary are now housed in a library at Harvard University.

Her Books

After I finished reading Gardening on Main Street, I found good used copies of the two other books written by Buckner: Flower Chronicles (Rutgers University Press, 1958) and Her Garden was Her Delight (The MacMillan Company, 1962).

In Flower Chrionicles she writes about the histories of flowers ranging from roses to saffron crocuses. On the front flap of the cover, Buckner, or someone, wrote:

Every gardener knows that his craft is immemorially old, and that the flowers of this year’s blossoming are the latest delights in a sequence rooted in centuries and millennia. This is a book to affirm the gardener’s sense of the past, to reaffirm the ancient sense of connection between this year’s blossoms and the story of flowers and men as it has happened in many times, many places and among many peoples.”

Her Garden was Her Delight is a book of essays Buckie wrote about women gardeners from the 17th, 18th, 19th, and very early 20th centuries.  It’s a gold mine of information all on its own and was reviewed by Katharine S. White, though not with great enthusiasm.

In a letter sent by White to Elizabeth Lawrence dated June 5, 1962, White writes she couldn’t give Buckner’s book an enthusiastic review. She “detected many small errors in fact…” She felt bad about the short review she did include it in The New Yorker, because Buckner was an old friend and according to White, almost totally blind.

I am searching high and low for my copy of this book, which I know I have because I took a picture of it last winter when I finally cataloged all of my books in an online database.

Cover of Her Garden Was Her Delight by Buckner Hollingsworth

Gardening on Main Street

Buckner’s garden on Main Street in Windsor, Vermont, is described as “a twenty-by-thirty-foot plot,” which the Hollingsworths moved to after leaving “the large garden surrounding their country home in New York State.”

I think what I enjoyed most about Gardening on Main Street is that reading it was like sitting in Buckner’s garden or in her kitchen, listening to her tell the story of her garden. I can imagine arriving early and following her around the garden, stopping here and there as she tells how she solved the problem of what to plant along the narrow front garden, how beautiful the morning glory vine is that grows by her front door, and how she and Will rigged up a garden hose to keep the water moving in her little fish pond.

The book has a timeless quality about it, even though it was written 56 years ago.  And it made me want some of the plants she described, though, as most gardeners know, planting morning glory vines is a risky business for most gardeners.

If you want to find any of Buckner’s books, you can sometimes find used copies on Amazon or go to my secret search site for old books to find other sellers. Or do what I did. Wander around in an old antique store and see if one appears on a bookshelf.)

If you know of any other Lost Ladies of Garden Writing that you’d think I should know too, let me know!