Jean Hersey

A Lost Lady of Garden Writing

Picture of Jean Hersey on the back cover of her book, The Shape of a Year.

I learned about the author Jean Hersey when I posted on my blog about finding and reading books that followed the calendar year. My intention was to read about 12 of these books through the year, reading the January chapters in January, February in February… you get the idea. When I posted about that on my blog, one reader, Susan M., left a comment suggesting I might like Jean Hersey's book, The Shape of a Year (1967).

I quickly looked up this book and decided I might indeed like it. I also discovered I could get a copy through my library, so I reserved it for pick up later.

Then, even though I was methodically going through all my books to catalog them and get rid of those I thought I'd never read, telling myself that I should not buy one more book, I bought a good used copy of The Shape of a Year.

I'm glad I did because I discovered on the back flap of the cover of this book that Jean also wrote several gardening books.

That’s all it took for me to go down a rabbit hole to look for information about Jean on the Internet.

For starters, here's a list of her gardening books and the year they were published based on my research:

I Like Gardening (1941)

A Garden in Your Window (1949)

Carefree Gardening (1961)

Wild Flowers to Know and Grow (1964)

The Woman's Day Book of Houseplants (1965)

Cooking with Herbs (1972)

Flowering Shrubs and Small Trees, 169 Varieties for Your Garden (1974)

The Woman's Day Book of Annuals and Perennials (1977)

Gardening and Being (1982)

She also wrote a book about a trip to Guatemala, Halfway to Heaven: A Guatemala Holiday (1947), another month-by-month book, A Sense of Seasons (1964), A Widow's Pilgrimage (1979), and The Touch of the Earth (1981).

In 1972, she and her husband, Robert, co-authored Change in the Wind, and in 1979, they wrote These Rich Years: A Journal of Retirement. In 1977, Jean and probably her husband too, wrote Happy Retirement: The Best Years of Your Life!

I suspect that based on when she wrote A Widow’s Pilgrimage, her husband died around 1978, and their last book written together was published after he died, but I didn’t do extensive online searching to confirm this.

Why had I never heard of Jean Hersey, author of so many gardening books? Here's what the internet told me about her.

Insert sound of crickets... virtually nothing.

On that back flap of The Shape of a Year, her biography is short, other than the list of books. "Born and brought up in New York City, Mrs. Hersey now lives in Weston, Connecticut."

Finding Jean online was not easy. When she passed away in 1997, there was no obituary, at least not that I could find via digitized newspaper archives. On Ancestry.com, I was finally able to break through and find a few records that provided a bit more information.

As always, here is a little disclaimer that I could have found the wrong Jean, but I don't think so.

Jean was born Jean McKelvey in the Bronx, New York City, on September 29, 1902. She married Robert Hersey in 1925. They had three children: a daughter and two sons. This is based on census records from 1940, which also noted they lived in New York City at that time. Her husband was an "advertising manager" who made $5,000 a year, and she was a writer earning $1,200 a year. They employed a cook who made $600 a year and a children's nurse who made $960 a year. (In today's dollars with some rounding... $107,000, $26,000, $13,000, $21,000.)

Since she listed herself as a writer in 1940 and she had some income to report, what did she write before her first book came out in 1941? Magazine articles, most likely. I confirmed at least one magazine article written in 1937 in The Once & Future Gardener, edited and with an introduction by Virginia Tuttle Clayton (2000).

Clayton also noted that Jean was a prolific writer and at one time made her home in Kennett Square, PA. In 1962, she "was honored with the Asta award for best garden writing of the year..." There is a footnote on the statement about the Asta award leading to another reference I don't have access to, so I assume it is correct, but I have no idea what the Asta awards were and who handed them out. I also couldn't confirm the part about her living in Pennsylvania. That would take more searching through census records.

(A reader commented on my original blog post that “Asta” might be the American Seed Trade Association, but one wonders why a seed organization gave out writing awards.)

I also checked two other books I have about garden writers in the past: Writing the Garden: A Literary Conversation Across Two Centuries by Elizabeth Barrow Rogers (2011) and The American Gardener: A Sampler, edited by Allen Lacy (1988). Neither one mentioned Jean Hersey.

My last discovery was a record of her death. Jean passed away on August 22, 1997, at the age of 94, in North Carolina. How she ended up there is anyone's guess, and why there was no obituary published for such a prolific garden writer is mystifying as well. Perhaps it was published in a newspaper that isn't yet available to search online.

Regardless, I think Jean Hersey is a garden writer worth knowing, and I'm happy to have found her to add to my list of lost ladies of garden writing.

If in my wanderings, I discover any of her books for sale, I’ll likely buy them. (And for those who suggest I could just go online to find and buy them, yes, I could do that. My favorite site for finding old books is bookfinder.com. But I’d prefer to trip over these old books in a used bookstore or antique market. I’m particularly interested in finding her book I Like Gardening.)

As always, I like these posts to be conversation starters. Do you own a book by Jean Hersey? Have an old magazine with an article written by her? Or have any biographical information to share? Leave a comment!

(And if you run across an old gardening book written by a woman author you’ve never heard of, maybe I haven’t heard of them either. Send me an email to tell me who you’ve found!)