Led By The Nose

by Jenny Joseph, Yvonne Skargon (Illustrations)

Jenny Joseph was no ordinary poet - and Led by the Nose is no ordinary memoir. Shaped around the smells of the English countryside, it is full of the wilful personality and the sly humour that characterised the purple-clad old woman in her iconic poem 'Warning'. Joseph's eccentricities permeate each chapter as she flows through the gardening year with its chores and blossoms, frequently leading the reader off the garden path to stop, smell the roses, and ignore the world for a while. Full of the sensual awareness of Jenny Joseph's poetry, Led by the Nose is a singular a work of delicious diversion and literary flair, horticultural anxieties and countercultural tendencies, providing a glimpse - or sniff - of the landscape of this treasured poet's life.

Genres: Gardening

208 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2002

About the author

She was born in Birmingham, and with a scholarship, studied English literature at St Hilda's College, Oxford (1950). Her poems were first published when she was at university in the early 1950s. She became a journalist and worked for the Bedfordshire Times, the Oxford Mail and Drum Publications (Johannesburg, South Africa).

Joseph's best known poem, Warning, was written in 1961 and is included in her 1974 collection Rose In the Afternoon and The Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse. Warning was identified as the UK's "most popular post-war poem" in a 1996 poll by the BBC. The second line was the inspiration for the Red Hat Society. Her first book of poems, The Unlooked-for Season won a Gregory Award in 1960 and she won a Cholmondeley Award for her second collection, Rose in the Afternoon in 1974.

Reviews

[Jurgita]

I am not a gardner, so a lot of plant names were absolutely new to me (I am not even a native English speaker) and that would throw me out of the reading flow. I don't know why, cause it doesn't affect me when I am reading fantasy or sci fi, which is inherently full of new/ made-up words.
But when I would get into the flow, it would be magical, sensual. Exactly how I would imagine life in an English cottage would be.
Also, at the end of the book there are extensive lists of plants and their frangace profiles, what is happening and what you can do in the garden every month.