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Eleanor Perenyi, Writer and Gardener, Dies at 91

Eleanor Perenyi, a writer and deliciously opinionated amateur gardener whose book “Green Thoughts” is widely considered a classic of garden writing, died Sunday in Westerly, R.I. She was 91 and had lived in Stonington, Conn., for many years.

The cause was a cerebral hemorrhage, her son, Peter Perenyi, said. Mr. Perenyi is her only immediate survivor.

“Green Thoughts,” Mrs. Perenyi’s only gardening book, was published by Random House in 1981. Subtitled “A Writer in the Garden,” it comprises 72 essays arranged alphabetically from Artichokes through Toads and on to Weeds. The book was notable for using Mrs. Perenyi’s years of toil in her Connecticut garden as a window onto the wider social world, ranging over history, myth and philosophy. This was perhaps all the more striking in that Mrs. Perenyi was an autodidact who never completed high school.

Though Mrs. Perenyi had done her first gardening on the grounds of her husband’s castle — she was technically a baroness, though she had not used the title in years — her book was an ode to the ordinary pleasures of getting one’s hands dirty in one’s own backyard. Known for its plain, elegant prose, trenchant humor and above all, its forthright opinions, “Green Thoughts” is routinely cited by contemporary gardening writers as one of the finest perennials in the genre, placed alongside the work of horticultural eminences like Gertrude Jekyll and Thalassa Cruso.

Reviewing the book in The New York Times Book Review, Brooke Astor wrote: “ ‘Green Thoughts’ is quite unlike any other gardening book I know, with its Old World charm, its down-to-earth practicality, its whimsy and sophistication. It is a book to keep by the bedside to read when one is tired of the problems of the day.” The volume makes no secret of its author’s dislikes (rock gardens, chemical pesticides and petunias, which she called “as hopelessly impractical as a chiffon ball dress”), as well as the things she held dear (compost, earthworms, defiant dahlias).

“It hasn’t escaped me that mine is the only WASP garden in town to contain dahlias, and not the discreet little singles either,” Mrs. Perenyi wrote. “Some are as blowsy as half-dressed Renoir girls and they do shoot up to prodigious heights. But to me they are sumptuous, not vulgar, and I love their colors, their willingness to bloom until the frost kills them and, yes, their assertiveness.”

“Green Thoughts” was reprinted in 2002 by the Modern Library, with an introduction by Allen Lacy. Mrs. Perenyi’s other books are “More Was Lost” (Little, Brown, 1946), a memoir of the vanished European world she had shared with her husband; “The Bright Sword” (Rinehart, 1955), a novel of the American Civil War; and “Liszt: The Artist as Romantic Hero” (Little, Brown, 1974), a study of the composer, which was a finalist for a National Book Award.

Mrs. Perenyi received an award in literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in 1982.

Eleanor Spencer Stone was born in Washington on Jan. 4, 1918. Her father, Ellis Spencer Stone, was a naval officer who became a military attaché to the American Embassy in Paris. Her mother, Grace Zaring Stone, was a novelist whose books included “The Bitter Tea of General Yen.” Eleanor attended the National Cathedral School for Girls in Washington but left before graduating to travel with her family.

In 1937, at a diplomatic dinner in Budapest, Eleanor Stone, then 19, met Zsigmond Perenyi, a young, impecunious, socially progressive Hungarian baron. They were married that year and went to live in his family’s castle in Ruthenia, then under Czech control. There, as mistress of a 750-acre farm, a forest, a vineyard and a distillery where potatoes were spun into alcohol, Mrs. Perenyi helped work the land much as it had been worked for centuries.

As World War II loomed and Ruthenia was cast into political turmoil, Baron Perenyi, a Hungarian citizen, risked being named an enemy alien. (In 1939, Mrs. Perenyi’s mother published an anti-Nazi suspense novel, “Escape,” under the pseudonym Ethel Vance to avoid jeopardizing her daughter.) In 1940, with the war under way, Mrs. Perenyi, pregnant with their son, left Europe at her husband’s urging.

Baron Perenyi was conscripted into the Hungarian Army. An Allied sympathizer, he later joined a Hungarian resistance unit and remained in Europe after the war. The couple divorced in 1945. Settling in New York and later Connecticut, Mrs. Perenyi worked as an editor at several magazines, among them Harper’s Bazaar and Mademoiselle, where she was the managing editor.

Year in and year out, she tended her garden. “When will the final curtain fall?” she wrote in an essay on autumn in “Green Thoughts.” “Heavier dews presage the morning when the moisture will have turned to ice, glazing the shriveled dahlias and lima beans, and the annuals will be blasted beyond recall. These deaths are stingless. I wouldn’t want it otherwise. I gardened one year in a tropical country and found that eternal bloom led to ennui.”

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