There is a close connection between writing and gardening.
Perhaps it’s to do with a shared joy in words: all those Latinate names appeal to people whose business is language. And gardening takes time and dedication, a parallel with writing a novel.
One of the greatest 20th-century gardeners was Vita Sackville-West, a writer long before she was a gardener.
Novelists Edith Wharton and Elizabeth Jane Howard were keen gardeners and so too is Booker Prize-winning author Penelope Lively.
Life In The Garden is a many layered book.
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In part it’s a memoir of the gardens in Lively’s life, starting with the exotic Egyptian garden of her childhood and continuing up to her small present-day garden in a north London square.
She recalls her gardens in Oxfordshire, which she worked on with her late husband Jack who delighted in acting as “plumber’s mate, or the aide in an operating theatre” to their mechanically minded gardener.
She also touches on family, talking about her grandmother’s large garden in Somerset and the passion for gardening inherited by her daughter Josephine to whom the book is dedicated and who now gardens in Somerset.
There is social history embedded in this book, too. Lively’s grandmother was happy to garden but wouldn’t have considered washing up, while the early 20th-century novelist Elizabeth von Arnim could not garden in Pomerania since the Germans regarded gardening as an unsuitable pursuit for a lady.
Lively discusses garden trends, now led by TV programmes with Monty Don currently the most influential person in British gardening.
She points to the pervasive influence of late 19th-century gardener and writer William Robinson, who advocated wild gardening, and to Gertrude Jekyll, who in the early 20th century inspired a careful, graded use of colour.
She looks at the eternal symbolism of gardens, kicking off with Eden, the first garden.
Her eagle eye also spots which writers are gardeners and which are not. The now seldom-read author Angus Wilson was clearly a gardener, referring in one novel to the kind of soil required for Iris stylosa.
PG Wodehouse, by contrast, lists a random, unconnected group of plants in Blandings Castle.
Lively acknowledges that she may well annoy people by stating that gardeners are more perceptive than non-gardeners.
I suspect that by the halfway mark, she won’t have many non-gardening readers, but this is a perfect bedside book for those who share her passions.