Jean Hersey: A Year in a Garden’s Life
This botanical history post was featured on The Daily Gardener podcast:
September 29, 1902
Dearest readers,
Today, we celebrate the birth of Jean Hersey, an American garden writer whose gentle words and vibrant observations have quietly nurtured readers for decades.
Born Jean McKelvey in New York City, she later made her home in Weston, Connecticut, where her garden boasted a meadow front yard and woodland and stream behind—a natural sanctuary that fueled her writing.
Jean authored over a dozen books on gardening and life, winning praise for her first, I Like Gardening (1941), which, as one reviewer noted,
“makes one fairly itch to start a garden (bugs and insects included).”
Yet it is The Shape of a Year (1967) that remains her signature work—a tender almanac chronicling the rhythms and revelations of her garden through the seasons.
In her September chapter, Jean paints a scene alive with autumnal color and scent:
“September is a sweep of dusky, purple asters, a sumac branch swinging a fringe of scarlet leaves, and the bittersweet scent of wild grapes when I walk down the lane to the mailbox.
September is a golden month of mellow sunlight and still, clear days. The ground grows cool to the touch, but the sun is still warm.
A hint of crisp freshness lies in the early hours of these mornings.
Small creatures in the grass, as if realizing their days are numbered, cram the night air with sound.
Everywhere goldenrod is full out.
Jean’s garden stories are sprinkled with personal joys and charming discoveries, like the tomatoes lovingly coaxed to perfection.
In one memorable year, she and her husband Bob wandered the garden before the annual Organic Garden Club show, debating what to enter.
Bob noticed a group of small, flawless volunteer tomatoes growing among the chard.
“They're about the size of ping-pong balls,” Bob said.
“They must be a cross between the ordinary large ones and the cherry ones.
Say – why not enter them as Ping-pong Tomatoes?”
So I did, selecting three perfect ones, and they won first prize overall tomatoes.”
Though Jean Hersey’s name might not be as widely known today, her keen insights and poetic garden reflections live on as treasures to those who slow down enough to listen to the earth’s quiet year-round stories.
