Life in the Garden

Wonderful. A manifesto of horticultural delightLiterary Review

Beautiful. Perfect for literary garden loversGood Housekeeping

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

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 grandmothers 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 originalDaily Telegraph

A gentle survey of the gardens place in Western culture, which morphs into a personal meditation on time, memory and a life well livedi

Scholarly bedtime readingThe Times, Books of the Year