There's always been a strong connection between many writers and gardens, and perhaps it's nature, perhaps it's serenity -- simply a place where a writer can stop and think.
In "The Writer's Garden" (Frances Lincoln, 2023), British author Jackie Bennett profiles 30 gardens or landscapes that inspired literary giants from Virginia Woolf, Jane Austen, and Thomas Hardy in Britain to Louise May Alcott, Edith Wharton and Jack London in the United States, to Edward James in Mexico and Goethe in Germany.
As Bennett says in the introduction to the book, "Although working in widely different styles and genres (plays, novels, poetry and children's stories), the writers in this book wold probably all agree on one thing -- great things can happen in gardens. It is inconceivable to think of a Jane Austen novel that did not use a shrubbery, a wilderness or a 'park' as the setting for accidental meetings and intrigue, while three of Agatha Christie's mysteries clearly use her own Devon garden as a setting."
While many of us have seen photos and/or visited Ernest Hemingway's home in Cuba, the house and gardens in Key West, where he lived for 10 years with his second wife, Pauline, are less familiar. The focus of the garden is a 60-foot long swimming pool surrounded by lush tropical plantings. Bennett reports that a friend of Pauline, the poet Elizabeth Bishop, wrote about "swimming at night in a 'green fire' -- referring to the expensive underwater lighting."
You'll learn that Virginia Woolf and Roald Dahl both had writing sheds in their gardens, that Jack London and William Faulkner wrote on tables set out under trees, that Jean Cocteau wrote inside, where he could view the garden from an upstairs window.
Beautiful photos of the gardens, including many of favored plants and trees, accompany each of the 30 entries. It's a book that would make a perfect present for any writer or anyone who's passionate about reading.
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