Happiness In The Dirt, And The Diaries

How many rare book and manuscript collections can you visit leaving with a pack of zinnia seeds?

I know one — right in our backyard: Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, where that’s literally one of the takeaways from the charming and accessible new exhibition ​“Happiness: The Writer in the Garden,” which runs through Aug. 12.

Along with a a mini exhibition on bird-watching within the gardening show, ​“Happiness” is a survey of largely 19th and 20th century photographs, books, plans, diaries, botanical drawings from the archives of the likes of Edith Wharton, the great New Jersey poet and doc William Carlos Williams, Bloomsbury’s Vita Sackville-West, Alexander Pope, and San Francisco post-Beat poet and novelist Richard Brautigan.

There’s a brief bird-watching exhibition up on the second floor, organized by the library’s bird-watcher and poetry curator Nancy Kuhl, that includes the notebooks of Rachel Carson as she gathered material for her groundbreaking expose on the indiscriminate use of pesticides in Silent Spring.

In the corner on the second floor there’s John James Audubon’s The Birds of America, with a surprise imaginary bird facing off against it in the adjacent vitrine — one of the exhibition’s audience-friendly surprises.

Nearby, but before you get to the Gutenberg Bible (which is definitely not part of the show), there’s even a manual or two on how to annihilate flower-killing vermin.

I became particularly fond of a seed catalog offering a remarkable 50 varieties of gladioli from a store on Church Street back in 1872.

In short, this show is a kind of kol bo, as the Israeli phrase has it; the words mean, with a connotation of fondness, ​“everything’s in it.” And as the title suggests, it puts a a smile on your face.

“Happiness’s” garden-loving curator Timothy Young said the exhibit’s unifying theme is that when you poke through writers’ books, diaries, and paper ephemera, amid the darkness and struggles of creation, the writer seems always to find pleasure, comfort, solace, and even a touch of illumination with a spade or packet of new seeds in his or her hand.

The show inaugurates the library’s extending its welcome mat even more to the general public by staying open a seventh day of the week, on Sunday, until 4 p.m.

The hospitality includes a little outdoor garden that Young has helped create on the south side of Beinecke’s plaza, complete with a small mobile library of books that echo materials in the exhibition.

When I told Young on a recent visit that Renaissance philosopher and gardener Francis Bacon’s famous essay on gardening — a 1629 edition launches the show — was one I had been planning to get around to reading for at least 30 years, he ran over to the mobile library, showed me a facsimile edition of the very same text, and invited me to take a chair to fulfill my self-promise.

One of the surprises for Young in doing the research and preparation for the exhibition was to discover that writers’ garden diaries — places where, like bird-watchers, they kept track of their inventories and which plants live and which die — often contain revelations that go beyond gardening.

Poet Vita Sackville-West, a much admired friend and lover of Virginia Woolf, for example, is represented by a journal of the early 1950s open to an entry that records the arrival of the Queen, along with American photographer Arthur Penn.

In another entry Sackville-West complains that she has to put aside her work on Sissinghurst, the family gardens, which have become, says Young, probably the most visited gardens in the world, because someone is arriving with their ​“horribly boring wife.”

While the show has to come down on Aug. 12, the makeshift garden, complete with chairs and tables to lunch and discuss gardening plans, will remain open to the public until October.

They’ll keep the seeds — and with luck, replant — so that the garden, and the happiness it provides, will be a regular feature of the Beinecke for the seasons to come, Young added.