Mark Twain's coauthor for The Gilded Age--Charles Dudley Warner--wrote his first book about a garden he tended one summer in Hartford, where he edited the Courant. In 1870 he gave readers of his newspaper a weekly report on the progress of his latest hobby—vegetable gardening. It may not sound promising, but the subject brought out the best in him, inspiring a series of essays rich in lyrical prose and practical wisdom. Readers began not only to await eagerly each new installment, but also to cut out the old columns and paste them in their scrapbooks. Interest was so great that the essays were reprinted at the end of the year in a little volume called My Summer in a Garden.
A modest, sociable man’s Walden, the book is a minor masterpiece. It features one of the more endearing animal characters in American literature: Warner’s faithful cat—and chief defender of the pea patch against marauding birds—Calvin, so named “on account of his gravity, morality, and uprightness.”
A gift from Harriet Beecher Stowe, the cat was a beautiful, silky creature who seemed indifferent to the charms of the human race until he met Warner. Each afternoon, when Charles came home from the newspaper office, Calvin was waiting for him at the gate. Together, they spent the summer in the garden, Charles working with his shovel and hoe while Calvin sat in the grass under the hawthorn trees and kept a sharp eye on the birds.
Near the end of the book the cat studies the dry remnants of the garden in its autumn desolation, and wisely surrenders his post under the trees: “Calvin, aware that the summer is past and the harvest is ended, and that a mouse in the kitchen is worth two birds gone south, scampers away to the house with his tail in the air.”
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