Eleanor Perenyi, 91, writer and opinionated gardener
NEW YORK - 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, said her son, Peter Perenyi, who is her only immediate survivor.
"Green Thoughts" was published by Random House in 1981. Subtitled "A Writer in the Garden," it comprises 72 essays arranged alphabetically from artichokes to weeds. The book was notable for using Ms. 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 Ms. Perenyi was an autodidact who never completed high school.
Though she 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.
"It hasn't escaped me that mine is the only WASP garden in town to contain dahlias, and not the discreet little singles either," Ms. 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."
Eleanor Spencer Stone was born in Washington on Jan. 4, 1918. Her father, Ellis Spencer Stone, was a naval officer who became a military attache 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, Ms. 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, Zsigmond Perenyi, a Hungarian citizen, risked being named an enemy alien. (In 1939, Ms. 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, Ms. Perenyi, pregnant with their son, left Europe at her husband's urging.
Zsigmond 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, Ms. Perenyi worked as an editor at several magazines, among them Harper's Bazaar and Mademoiselle, where she was the managing editor.
