Book Reviews and Signings: Trains and Gardens

Posted in Shop/Book Reviews on December 9 2009, by Plant Talk

Authors of Old Penn Station History and Children’s Tale Visit

John Suskewich is Book Manager for Shop in the Garden.

A replica of the late, great Pennsylvania Station is new this year in The New York Botanical Garden’s Holiday Train Show. I remember that building at the end of its life. My family used to go by train to Philadelphia to visit my aunt who was actually born in Russia and scared us kids by removing her false teeth. Penn Station seemed like a ruin even when it was intact. It was grim and grimy and as you got pulled downstairs and yanked down corridors, it loomed overhead like a cliff or a cave. During demolition the building sat on its city block with broken columns and cornices and clocks hanging in midair like Valhalla after the gods had left.

The rendition of Pennsylvania Station that designer Paul Busse has created for the train show imagines it as it was in its heyday and is impressively colossal even at reduced scale, with bark colonnades, acorn capitals, pine cone clocks, and sugar-water windows.

In Old Penn Station, author William Low traces the history of the great depot from its inception as a monumental gateway to Gotham to its glory days as a transportation hub and its decline and destruction in the name of progress and profitability. His muscular, colorful illustrations, lit like an elegy and pictured from every conceivable angle, bring this fallen monument to life and will turn even a tot into an ardent preservationist.

William Low will be signing copies of his handsomely illustrated book on Friday, December 11, from 5 to 6 p.m.

Another book with a garden and railroad theme, The Curious Garden, by Peter Brown, is a charming parable in which a child transforms a city with a garden that strongly resembles the High Line, and the child transforms himself by becoming a gardener. The illustrations vividly show this process, their palette changing from a sooty, somber smog to an exuberant rainbow at the end.

I’m not sure which story has the more resonance: the boy learning how to garden or the effect that the garden has on his urban environment, but that the two themes are bound together is part of what makes The New York Botanical Garden—or any garden, especially any public garden—tick. Horticulture changes the inner you while you use it to change the world out there. You won’t find too many books that demonstrate this concept more joyfully.

Peter Brown will be signing copies of his book on Saturday, December 12, from 4 to 5 p.m. Hope you can make it to one or both of these events celebrating two sweet books.

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