To quickly link to a Bates book for more details, use the list below:
The Seasons & The Gardener
First Published in 1940 by Cambridge University Press.
The many who knows H.E. Bates as novelist and short-story writer will ahve discovered already that he is a gardener and a born countryman, and will be the first to welcome this book. Mr Bates writes for real children and of a real garden - his own, near Ashford in Kent.
But gardening history, methods, botany, tools, creatures, moods and maxims, all get their share of attention, and Mr Tunnicliffe's pictures are practical, definite, and beautiful, as can be seen at a glance within.
"But my real plum is The Season and the Gardener. What a good book for children in England, now!
Mr Bates makes the idea of a garden so absorbing that any child who reads this book will long to make one.
Beauty, common sense, and interest imbue all his words - that is, his words are as near as can be to
the thing itself; and C.F. Tunnicliffe's drawings are sown through the pages like the best of seed."
Eleanor Farjeon, The Listener