<b>Back in print after fifty years</b><br><br><i>Old Herbaceous</i> is a classic British novel of the garden, with a title character as outsized and unforgettable as P. G. Wodehouse&#8217;s immortal butler, Jeeves. Born at the dusk of the Victorian era, Bert Pinnegar, an awkward orphan child with one leg a tad longer than the other, rises from inauspicious schoolboy days spent picking wildflowers and dodging angry farmers to become the legendary head gardener &#8220;Old Herbaceous,&#8221; the most esteemed flower-show judge in the county and a famed horticultural wizard capable of producing dazzling April strawberries from the greenhouse and the exact morning glories his Lady spies on the French Riviera, &#8220;so blue, so blue it positively hurts.&#8221; Sprinkled with nuggets of gardening wisdom, <i>Old Herbaceous</i> is a witty comic portrait of the most archetypal&#8212;and crotchety&#8212;head gardener ever to plant a row of bulbs at a British country house.<br><br>This Modern Library edition is published with a new Introduction by<br>Penelope Hobhouse, a renowned garden designer and lecturer and the author of numerous gardening books.