Product Description

No more delightful garden-related books have ever been written than Nichols's accounts of the rescue and renovation of Merry Hall, a rundown Georgian mansion and its garden. No wittier, and sometimes wickedly satirical, writer than the urbane Mr. Nichols has ever observed the world of house and gardenor the characters who inhabit them.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #143866 in Books
• Published on: 1998-03-01
• Format: Illustrated
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 342 pages

From Library Journal
Published in 1951, this example of "garden literature" relates how author Nichols constructed a massive garden on a run-down estate. Not a straight "how-to," Nichols's text also includes humorous portraits of the locals who both assist and frustrate his efforts. The text is buttressed with numerous black-and-white drawings.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review
"Though written half a century ago, Merry Hall captures that longing for the garden and a patch of land to call one's own. Nichols's wit and silly adventures ... add a bit of welcome hilarity to the all-too-serious literature of gardening."
—Anne Raver, New York Times, February 27, 2000 (The New York Times )

"Though written half a century ago, Merry Hall captures that longing for the garden and a patch of land to call one's own. Nichols's wit and silly adventures ... add a bit of welcome hilarity to the all-too-serious literature of gardening." Anne Raver, New York Times, February 27, 2000 (The New York Times )

"Be prepared. Beverley Nichols' garden books are part PG Wodehouse and part James Barrie — full of hilarious Jeeves-like characters and events, with moments of Peter Pan magic."
—Bob Cowden, Pacific Horticulture, Spring 2000 (Pacific Horticulture )

"His books are peopled with village characters, with Nichols himself cast as the English squire. He is at turns sentimental, arch and snobbish, but delightfully so."
—Dulcy Mahar, Oregonian, October 30, 2003 (Oregonian )

...Merry Hall, first published in 1951 and reissued this year by the redoubtable Timber Press, is the very model of gardening insouciance. -- Verlyn Klinkenborg, New York Times Book Review, 12/6/98

Be prepared. Beverley Nichols' garden books are part PG Wodehouse and part James Barrie full of hilarious Jeeves-like characters and events, with moments of Peter Pan magic. Bob Cowden, Pacific Horticulture, Spring 2000 (Pacific Horticulture )

His books are peopled with village characters, with Nichols himself cast as the English squire. He is at turns sentimental, arch and snobbish, but delightfully so. Dulcy Mahar, Oregonian, October 30, 2003 (Oregonian )

His real energy goes into his opinions, which-like those of most English garden lovers-are unshaded by doubt. -- Katherine A. Powers, The Boston Globe, May 21, 2000

Nichols' particular gift is to entertain, enlighten, and enrich his readers. -- Stephanie Feeney, The American Gardener, May/June 1998

Nichols's wit and silly adventures...add a bit of welcome hilarity to the all-too-serious literature of gardening. -- Anne Raver, New York Times, February 27, 2000

From the Publisher
Timber Press is proud to return to print a delightful classic in garden literature by the late Beverley Nichols. With a new foreword by Ann Lovejoy and a revised index updating all plant names, this edition should expand Nichols's readership. His subject is the most challenging and ambitious garden of his life, a desolate country estate attached to an elegant, if rundown, Georgian mansion. Merry Hall also represents Nicholss first collaboration with William McLaren, whose exquisite drawings grace the pages. Merry Hall, is the first book in the trilogy and is followed by Laughter on the Stairs and Sunlight on the Lawn.

Customer Reviews

You'll love it!
I grabbed this one from the New Books Shelf at the library pretty much because I liked the cover and the dustjacket said something about gardening. Beverley was an English gentleman who wrote popular fiction during the 40's. This one is the first in a series of books he wrote about living in Merry Hall, a run-down Georgian mansion that he bought after the war. I loved this little book, and now I'm going to read the whole trilogy. You should, too! At times you might find him irritating, but isn't that to be expected from an egotistical Englishman writing about himself? Besides, he's very funny in that droll way Englishmen have, and he even has two cats named "One" and "Four." How can you not love that? Here's a bit from it: After breakfast I went along to the music-room, to spend half an hour on the waterfalls. By spending half an hour on the waterfalls, I mean practising the double descending cadenzas in Chopin's Third Scherzo. It is perhaps the most superbly 'pianistic' piece of music ever written; to be able to play it properly must give to any pianist a sense of almost god-like power... a feeling of floating on wings over a sea of roses. I do not feel at all like that when I play it; I feel as if I were stumbling, with bare feet and with considerable pain, over the sharpest pebbles of Brighton beach. So, no doubt, do my listeners. But I have been practising it for nearly ten years, and I shall go on practising it, flat by flat and sharp by sharp and natural by natural, with an increasing hatred of the fourth finger of my left hand, which has Communist tendencies.

Practical prose....
Beverly Nichols, author of MERRY HALL says the love of gardening involves the love of art, the love of love, and the love of death. Following his experiences in WWII, Nichols retired to the English countryside to restore himself mentally, physically, and spiritually. He doesn't inform the reader directly of his background (I know this from having read some biographical material from other sources), but he had another life before he bought the house and grounds describes in his trilogy beginning with MERRY HALL. He was a journalist and writer, and during WWII he spent some time abroad in His Majesty's Service.

To the unknowing, Nichols narrative may seem a bit too cheerful, frivolous, or shallow, but his book is intended to entertain the reader--this is gardening mind you not the aftermath of war. To the extent he able to do so, Nichols kept the events in the DAILY MAIL out of his gardening books. As a result, some readers today can mistakenly think him an English prig who had no concern for life outside his own back yard.

MERRY HALL begins one afternoon when Nichols and his 'man' Gaskin stumble across a derelict Georgian manor house and it's grounds. Nichols is overcome with a desire to restore the house and rebuild the grounds. He has been living in London and until that fateful day was more or less settled, but now he wants to "move beyond the Tudor world" and into the world of the Georgian Manor House. He buys Merry Hall and thus begins his adventure.

MERRY HALL was written about six years into the project. By that time Nichols had undertaken the restoration of the foul smelling pond just off the music room and won the support of the able Oldfield, the gardener who came with the house and grounds. The book is an interesting mixture of personal anectdote, observations about the various neighbors who have their own opinions of what Nichols ought to restore the house and grounds, insights into elements of garden design, practical advice about various bulbs, shrubs, garden ornaments such as urns and benches, and observations about greenhouses and cats.

Merry Hall Beverley Nichols
It's wonderful that Bev is at last being remembered for his timeless, hysterical stories. This particular book is best remembered by me for the holly hedge burning episode & reminds me of many of my own champagne enhanced escapades! His books are appealing to anyone who remebers the forties in Britain, gardeners, house buyers & general lovers of gentle observational comedy.