The Writer’s Garden: How Gardens Inspired Our Best-Loved Authors Excerpt

By Jackie Bennett –

Gardens hold a special place in many writer’s lives. Novelists, poets, biographers and authors of children’s books, from Agatha Christie to Rupert Brooke, Beatrix Potter to Henry James, have turned to gardens for inspiration – their own and those that they knew best.

Great things happen in gardens – in fiction as in real life. No one reading Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca could doubt that the author herself had lived with the huge, blood-red rhododendrons that the heroine first sees on arrival at Manderley. Roald Dahl’s close study of his own fruit trees in his Buckinghamshire garden gave him the idea for James and the Giant Peach. Virginia Woolf wove the gardens she knew into all her stories, from Kew Gardens to Mrs Dalloway, while Agatha Christie hardly bothered to disguise her beloved house – Greenway – and its garden, which appeared in several of her crime novels. And, where would Jane Austen’s characters have walked, talked and schemed if their creator had never seen a Wilderness or a Shrubbery?

Some writers, such as the poets Robert Burns and John Clare, were born into rural families who worked the land, but for others the joy of making a garden came later in their lives. For Beatrix Potter at Hill Top Farm and Sir Walter Scott at Abbotsford, creating a garden was made possible only by the new-found freedom and wealth brought about by their literary success. Massachusetts poet Emily Dickinson was probably better known for her Amherst garden than her poetry – at least during her lifetime – and novelist H.E. Bates, the creator of The Darling Buds of May, wrote several gardening books later in his career.

In The Writer’s Garden the featured writers emerge from very different backgrounds. Thomas Hardy was raised in rural Dorset, where he collected cider apples for the annual pressing and relied on the vegetable plot at the family’s thatched cottage to supply food. Sir Winston Churchill, on the other hand, grew up at Blenheim Palace, with its ‘Capability’ Brown landscapes and capacious lakes. Yet, when both men reached maturity and were in a position to create their own gardens, they threw themselves back into the past – into their childhood years. Hardy tried to be almost self-sufficient at Max Gate in Dorchester, while Churchill hired a digger to enlarge his lakes at Chartwell, in an attempt to elevate them from ‘pond’ to ‘lakes’ – and so closer to those at Blenheim.

Published by Frances Lincoln www.franceslincoln.com.