Literary and Garden Arts Shop Takes Root in Berkeley

The opening words of Virginia Woolf's 1925 classic novel, Mrs. Dalloway, are inscribed on a wall in the three-year-old bookstore and garden shop founded by Marion Abbott and Ann Leyhe in Berkeley, California. The line -- "Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself" -- depicts the blending of the literary and garden arts in Mrs. Dalloway's, a 2,000-square-foot store, which is profiled in October's issue of More Magazine. October also marks Mrs. Dalloway's third anniversary, which will be celebrated with a sale and a month loaded with events.

Abbott and Leyhe brought to the business many years of friendship and experience in different arenas: Abbott, whose career in trade book publishing included stints at Sierra Club Books, Little, Brown, and Knopf, was a longtime writer and editor with expertise in marketing and publicity; Leyhe had been the photo editor for Horticulture Magazine and a photo researcher and stylist for Sunset Garden books and Chronicle Books' garden series. An authority on all aspects of gardening, she guided a tour of secret gardens of Oakland's East Bay for over a decade.

Both women attended the Radcliffe Publishing Procedures Course in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the summer of 1975, where they first met.

Abbott's desire to open a general bookstore dovetailed neatly with Leyhe's interest in opening a specialty gardening store. Understanding that combining the two stores would greatly enhance the possibilities for success, they financed the store with a mix of their own savings and contributions from a group of 10 investors.

Alongside a robust selection of fiction, nonfiction, children's books, art, and architecture, Mrs. Dalloway's sells and displays works of original art; paintings, photography, weavings, and sculpture inspired by gardens; a collection of 19th-century European botanical and insect prints; and cards with nature themes. Many small plants and decorative pots are also for sale.

"We are not a nursery," Leyhe told BTW. "We don't have the space to offer large plants, and since this is a residential, urban neighborhood and people often walk here, they can't carry home big bags of mulch and fertilizer. About 20 percent of our space is devoted to garden-related merchandise."

Mrs. Dalloway's also features an extensive selection of gardening books. The store's all-time bestseller is Plants and Landscapes for Summer-Dry Climates of the San Francisco Bay Region. Leyhe told BTW that more than 400 copies have been sold so far. Local author Michael Pollan (The Omnivore's Dilemma and The Botany of Desire) has drawn the store's largest crowd yet for a reading.

Among Mrs. Dalloway's large architecture section is a subcategory of books on "sustainable architecture." The store itself exemplifies eco-friendly building, thanks to Leyhe's husband, a builder eager to try a renovation using all "green" materials. These include shelves made of recycled materials, a sea grass rug, and environmentally friendly paint.

After a "rocky start for the first 18 months," Leyhe said, "business is definitely growing -- our sales are up by 30 percent over last year. Marion and I complement each other well; we work very hard and we make adjustments." She signed off cheerfully, "We've done it -- we have a business." -- Nomi Schwartz