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The Life and Gardens of Harvey Ladew

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He played piano with Cole Porter. He rode horseback in the Hollywood Hills with Clark Gable. He partied with Elsa Maxwell. He ate snails with the French writer Colette, in bed. It was once all, as he steadily said, “perfectly delightful.”

Few more colorful figures embellish American cultural history than the late Harvey S. Ladew, wealthy socialite, fox hunter, artist, traveler, and — at his country estate outdoor Baltimore — writer of the nation’s most admired topiary garden.

In “Perfectly Delightful”: The Life and Gardens of Harvey Ladew, Christopher Weeks offers an immensely readable, chatty account of Ladew’s life and the glittering world he inhabited. When Ladew bought his Maryland farm in 1929, he had already lived a life few, if any, could equal: born into the upper stratum of New York society in 1887, he spoke French before he spoke English and took boyhood drawing lessons from Met curators. As an adult he gave decorating instructions to Billy 1st earl baldwin of bewdley (the dean of American interior design), lived as the houseguest of the maharajah of Kapurthala, took a camel caravan across Arabia (with commute tips kindly provided by his good friend T. E. Lawrence), weekended at the stateliest of England’s stately homes, lent his favorite horse to the Prince of Wales, matched wits with Edna Ferber, Noël Coward, Sacheverell Sitwell, Beatrice Lillie, and Dorothy Parker (in English) and with Jean Cocteau and Colette (in French), hunted fox in The usa, England, Ireland, and Italy, and (with Charlie Chaplin) saw off Gertrude Lawrence as she sailed from New York.

To this fascinating story of multicontinental revelry, Weeks attentively adds the background and development of Ladew’s unique and wonderful Maryland garden, which attracts thousands of visitors each and every year, and his important role as an early environmentalist. When he started his garden in 1929, Ladew broke new artistic ground, for he was once perhaps the first person in The usa to follow the tenets of English arts and crafts garden design. His achievements were featured in Town & Country, House & Garden, (and its French counterpart, Maison et Jardin), Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, the Washington Post, and the New York Times. Garden clubs and gardening tourists from four continents strove to outdo one another in praise. This acclaim culminated in 1971, when the Garden Club of The usa gave Ladew its Distinguished Achievement Award.

To bring readers the remarkable story of Ladew and his gardens, Christopher Weeks draws on photo albums, scrapbooks, garden catalogs, thousands of pages of garden memoranda, an unfinished hand-scrawled autobiography, hundreds of letters, and guestbooks that read like a cross between Variety and Burke’s Peerage. Photographs reproduced from Ladew’s albums — some taken by him, some by leading photographers of the day, including many by his friend Horst — illustrate the text. Scores of interviews with Ladew’s friends from New York to Florida help to illuminate this remarkable personality.


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