Life in the Garden
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher 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
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this charming memoir, Booker Prize winner Lively muses languidly on her life and how it has been influenced by gardens literal and imaginary. Exploring gardens in literature, Lively quotes Virginia Woolf: "The first pure joy of the garden... weeding all day to finish the beds in a queer sort of enthusiasm which made me say this is happiness." In "The Written Garden," Lively delights in how Elizabeth Bowen in The Little Girls "plunges the reader into a garden with steamy flower-smells.' " Lively's history of gardening tracks its evolution from being something enjoyed by English Victorian aristocrats through to modern middle-class window boxes in urban London, and she realizes that people's aesthetic and communal values are reflected in how they manipulate nature: "And to garden is to impose order... the harnessing of nature to a purpose, initially practical, and later aesthetic." Lively's astute observations of one's relations with nature becomes a study of how people view themselves: "We garden differently according to who we are... By their windows ye shall know them." She clearly knows her gardening, and her exuberance on the subject will make novice gardeners long to be a part of her club. For garden enthusiasts and lovers of Romantic British literature, Lively's narrative is like an intimate conversation with an erudite fellow gardener.
