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How long does it take to read Old Herbaceous?

Reginald Arkell

Old Herbaceous by Reginald Arkell takes about 2 hours 51 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.

About 2 hours 51 minutes

An evening's read

First published 1950. 155 pages, about 42,625 words.

6 days at 30 minutes a day

Estimate based on 275 words per page.

At other speeds

Slow, 150 words a minute 4 hours 44 minutes
Average, 250 words a minute 2 hours 51 minutes
Fast, 400 words a minute 1 hour 47 minutes

The page count is the median across 10 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.

About the book

Old Herbaceous is a classic British novel of the garden, with a title character as outsized and unforgettable as P. G. Wodehouse’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 “Old Herbaceous,” 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, “so blue, so blue it positively hurts.” Sprinkled with nuggets of gardening wisdom, Old Herbaceous is a witty comic portrait of the most archetypal—and crotchety—head gardener ever to plant a row of bulbs at a British country house.

Subjects: Gardening, Older men, Gardeners, Fiction, Manors, Fiction, humorous, general

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