Description

'Wonderful. A manifesto of horticultural delight' Literary Review

'Beautiful. Perfect for literary garden lovers' Good Housekeeping

'Rich and unusual, a book to treasure. Few recent gardening books come anywhere close to its style, intelligence and depth' Observer

'The two central activities in my life - alongside writing - have been reading and gardening.'

Penelope Lively has always been a keen gardener. This book is partly a memoir of her own life in gardens: the large garden at home in Cairo where she spent most of her childhood, her grandmother's garden in a sloping Somerset field, then two successive Oxfordshire gardens of her own, and the smaller urban garden in the North London home she lives in today. It is also a wise, engaging and far-ranging exploration of gardens in literature, from Paradise Lost to Alice in Wonderland , and of writers and their gardens, from Virginia Woolf to Philip Larkin.

'Exquisite and original' Daily Telegraph

'A gentle survey of the garden's place in Western culture, which morphs into a personal meditation on time, memory and a life well lived' i

'Scholarly bedtime reading' The Times , Books of the Year