Beatrix Potter's Gardening Life book cover

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Marta McDowell’s most recent book, Beatrix Potter’s Gardening Life: The Plants and Places That Inspired the Classic Children’s Tales, explores the origins of the beloved English author’s love of plants and gardens through stories, photographs, and drawings.

There’s a line in Marta McDowell’s résumé that’s easy to overlook. Buried at the bottom of the employment section, it reads: “Prudential Insurance. Vice President of Systems, Operations, and Training, 1979–2000.” The lack of bold type is no mistake. “It was a lovely, long career at Prudential; I have no complaints,” says McDowell DC’79, an American studies major and one of four siblings who graduated from Rutgers. “But I’m glad I got to have a second career.”

McDowell is now the author of three books on gardening, with a fourth, a past-and-present look at the White House’s gardens, in the hopper. She’s also a lecturer, a garden consultant, and a horticulturalist who tends to the gardens of a handful of lucky clients, in addition to her own half-acre plot in Chatham, New Jersey.

McDowell’s most recent book, Beatrix Potter’s Gardening Life: The Plants and Places That Inspired the Classic Children’s Tales (Timber Press, 2013), has earned her a wider and more enthusiastic readership than her two other books, Emily Dickinson’s Gardens: A Celebration of a Poet and Gardener (McGraw-Hill, 2004) and The Story of Willowwood (Willowwood Foundation, 2009). Gardening Life explores the origins of the beloved English author’s love of plants and gardens through stories, photographs, and drawings, demonstrating how Potter brought that passion to life on the pages of her classic children’s tales. The book continues to win raves among the gardening cognoscenti, and Gardening Life is winning McDowell invitations to speak before book and gardening clubs.

“It’s been surprisingly popular,” says McDowell, citing Potter’s ongoing popularity because of books like The Tale of Peter Rabbit. McDowell likens the author, who died in 1943 and published her best-known stories in the early 1900s, to J.K. Rowling. “In the same way kids gravitated to Rowling, people gravitated to Potter. She still has a huge fan base.”

McDowell didn’t get to know characters like Peter Rabbit and Jemima Puddle-Duck until adulthood, when she visited Hill Top, Potter’s garden, on a 1997 trip to England. “It was effervescent and had a little bit of magic,” she says. “You got the feeling that a person put a little bit of themselves into it.”

Experiencing the Hill Top aesthetic helped McDowell understand the world Potter concocted in her stories. “She was a watercolorist, with a watercolorist’s soft palette. If you look at the pictures of her garden, you see that same sort of impressionist palette. And they keep it a little bit scruffy, which was also her style. There’s nothing too precise.”

Getting to know the garden enabled McDowell to sketch a portrait of the down-to-earth personality behind its creation. “She didn’t try to pump up her reputation. I like the idea she had of herself,” she says.

Another idea McDowell likes is that she’s found her own literary niche. “Emily Dickinson and Beatrix Potter were two very different personalities, but I loved using the entry of their gardens to write about them.” Looking at gardens through a literary lens has been a revelation, she says. “It’s something I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of.”