Book review: Life in the Garden
Book Review – Life in the Garden
by Penelope Lively
“Gardening, in its small way, performs a memory feat: it corrals time, pinning it to the seasons, to the gardening year, by summoning up the garden in the past, the garden to come,”- Penelope Lively
Booker Prize winner and bestselling author Penelope Lively has always been a keen gardener. Gardening, along with reading have been the two central activities, in her life along with her writing. To Lively, her two interests often intersect and she likes to see how writers conjure up a garden and how gardening can become an element of fiction.
Life in the Garden represents her reflections and appreciation of the role gardening has played in her life (she is now 89) as well as in novels, poetry and art. Key to the book are her personal recollections of her own life in gardens; from her childhood garden in Cairo, her grandmother’s garden in Somerset, her two Oxfordshire gardens and her small urban garden in her current London home. In Penelope Lively’s view gardens represent both an enduring connectedness to memory and the passage of time.
Lively has always been a hands-on gardener, not afraid to get what Virginia Woolf called “chocolate earth” under her nails and Lively views gardening as a vital, even therapeutic encounter with nature. And she notes, while gardening “you are no longer stuck in the here and now.”
Life in the Garden is an engaging book and some would say a rambling stroll through gardens in literature, from Paradise Lost to Alice in Wonderland, and of writers and their gardens, from Virginia Woolf to Katherine Mansfield and painters Monet to Matisse with Lively sharing her thoughts and wisdom along the way.
Life in the Garden, does go a lot broader at times and delves into a diverse range of topics from Tulipomania to English landscape styles, gardens and visual art, gardens as social architecture and fashion in gardening. As a result, at times, the book at times comes across as a bit random and superficial in terms on how it dealt with various subjects and loosely connected ideas. The book reviewer for The Washington Post put it another way, “I felt like I was peering out of an airplane window, surveying lots of territory but not really seeing anything.”
Life in the Garden is a readable original book that is personal and interesting but in the end doesn’t really fulfil its initial promise. The result is a bit of a mix up between a personal story of Lively’s life in gardens and while touching on a broad range of tenuously connected garden related topics (which are viewed through a very English lens). Maybe its randomness is part of its appeal but personally, I would have preferred Lively to focus on telling her personal story, adding in the gardening stories of writers and artists she clearly knows well.
Black Teal Bay Books rating: 7/10
