Back in print after fifty years Old Herbaceousis a classic British novel of the garden, with a title character as outsized and unforgettable as P. G. Wodehouse's immortal butler, Jeeves. Born at the dusk of the Victorian era, Bert Pinnegar, an awkward orphan child with one leg a tad longer than the other, rises from inauspicious schoolboy days spent picking wildflowers and dodging angry farmers to become the legendary head gardener "Old Herbaceous," the most esteemed flower-show judge in the county and a famed horticultural wizard capable of producing dazzling April strawberries from the greenhouse and the exact morning glories his Lady spies on the French Riviera, "so blue, so blue it positively hurts." Sprinkled with nuggets of gardening wisdom,Old Herbaceousis a witty comic portrait of the most archetypaland crotchetyhead gardener ever to plant a row of bulbs at a British country house. This Modern Library edition is published with a new Introduction by Penelope Hobhouse, a renowned garden designer and lecturer and the author of numerous gardening books.

<b>Reginald Arkell</b> (1872-1959) wrote many musical plays for the London theater, the most popular of which was <i>1066 and All That</i>. He was the author of <i>A Cottage in the Country</i> and the Green Fingers series of garden verse.<br><br><b>Michael Pollan</b> is the author of the <i>New York Times</i> bestseller <i>The Botany of Desire</i> (available from Random House Trade Paperbacks) and <i>Second Nature</i>, named one of the best gardening books of the twentieth century by the American Horticultural Society. He is a contributing editor to <i>Harper</i>’s magazine and a contributing writer at <i>The New York Times Magazine</i>.