Product Description
Life in the Garden
Author: Penelope Lively
Format: Paperback
'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
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