When a really good book comes along, one of the things it does is to draw attention to the absence of such a book on your shelves before it arrived. I hadn’t really thought much about the state of the once venerable art of garden writing until I read Life in the Garden. It brought home to me how few recent gardening books come anywhere close to its style, intelligence and depth. I enjoyed Dan Pearson’s A Year in the Garden; Alys Fowler is always worth reading; I couldn’t care less about Monty Don’s gormless retrievers, but he does write stylish if faintly patrician prose when describing Longmeadow. Other than these worthy exceptions, garden books have become, as Penelope Lively herself points out, nothing more than “vehicles for lavish photography”.
Lively, now in her 80s, is the only author to have won both the Booker, for Moon Tiger in 1987, and the Carnegie medal for children’s fiction, for The Ghost of Thomas Kempe in 1973. She has continued to write since her string of hits in the 1980s; 2009’s Family Album was a memorably sharp novel of middle-class manners and last year’s collection of short stories, The Purple Swamp Hen, garnered excellent reviews. In Life in the Garden, she has given us something quite new; rich and unusual, this is a book to treasure, as beautiful on the inside as its gorgeous cover and endpapers (all by the celebrated illustrator Katie Scott).
“The two central activities in my life – alongside writing – have been reading and gardening,” Lively says, and Life in the Garden laces elegantly between the two. Whatever you’re interested in tends to catch your eye when you’re reading, but there’s a special relationship between writers and their gardens. “I always pay attention when a writer conjures up a garden,” Lively writes, “… it is nearly always deliberate, a garden contrived to serve a narrative purpose, to create atmosphere, to furnish a character.” Life in the Garden moves between Lively’s own horticultural life and a broad history of gardening, with regular and illuminating examples from a host of our best garden writers in nonfiction, poetry and novels.
Lively’s work is full of memorable gardens, from the Egyptian oases of Moon Tiger (which drew on her childhood in Egypt) to the nursery at Dean Close in According to Mark. Lively doesn’t quote herself, which is rather a shame, but chooses to call on others instead, from Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West to her friends Elizabeth Jane Howard and Carol Shields (and it strikes me now what a debt Shields’s best novel, The Stone Diaries, owes to Moon Tiger). She is gently dismissive of those writers who give you a garden, but don’t know enough about it to name names, to distil the abstract general beauty of the place into the specificity of verbena and lily and coreopsis. Proust comes in for particular criticism here.
This is a book that gives words to something that those of us who garden know by instinct – how being in the garden raises the spirits, modulates the seasons. Lively writes of “that enriching lifting out of the restrictions of now, and today” that comes with the planning and retrospection of a garden. Gardening also allows us to “escape winter by swinging forward into spring, summer”. Lively is such a consistently genial presence in the book, her references friendly reminders of writers one loves (she sent me straight back to Anna Pavord and Jenny Uglow), of new names such as Eleanor Perenyi, and of authors one knows but not as garden writers – James Fenton’s gardening columns are a newfound joy.
A particularly zippy and entertaining chapter tells the history of landscape gardening. It slips with typical seamlessness between fact and fiction, summoning Capability Brown and Jane Austen, Humphrey Repton and Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia. This is intelligently wedded to a different kind of landscaping – the imposition of order on the wilds of the American prairie as evinced in the work of Willa Cather and Laura Ingalls Wilder. “The garden reorders time,” Lively writes, “and to garden is to impose order … It is the conquest of nature, the harnessing of nature to a purpose, initially practical and later aesthetic.”
Throughout the book we are drip-fed scenes from Lively’s life, so it becomes like an autobiography smuggled into a garden book. Now, at 84, time and space have conspired to circumscribe her gardening existence. She’s beset by problems with her back: “I can’t bend at all now, so my gardening of the London garden has to be restricted to watering, dead-heading, and such operations as I can manage from a folding seat.” Since the death of her husband, the academic Jack Lively, she has given up their home in the Oxfordshire countryside and tends “a few square yards” of urban north London. She writes frankly of the fact that the Hydrangea paniculata Limelight she’s planting will probably outlive her, although “I am requiring it to perform while I can still enjoy it”. Lively has made her negotiations with ageing and recognises the small and tentative gestures at immortality that come with gardening – her observation on the way plants pass down through generations prompted thoughts of the humble Alchemilla mollis that lines my patio, a gift from my mother-in-law’s garden that was given to her by her own mother. I’m sure the Alchemilla, which has seeded itself everywhere, will still be going strong when I’m long gone.
This isn’t quite a perfect book. Lively has a tic of too-regular authorial interjections to remind the reader of what’s to come. “I’m getting ahead of myself,” she says, or “more on that later,” or “as we shall see”. It’s part of the charm of the book, this enthusiasm, but the outbursts come too often and begin to clunk. In her diaries, Virginia Woolf describes coming in from the garden with Leonard and finding the “chocolate earth in our nails”. It’s a phrase Lively obviously admired – she uses it twice in three pages and three times in the first chapter.
There’s a common theme that links many of the authors Lively mentions – they’re infuriatingly privileged. You could hardly help writing well about gardens if you grew up at Knowle, or lived at Sissinghurst, or Monk’s House. Lively herself is from blue-blooded stock – her grandmother’s place in Somerset had a sunken rose garden, a ha-ha, a splendid-sounding yew-lined water feature. Few of my author friends have been lucky enough to inherit castles with 750 acres of grounds to be tended, as Perenyi did, or pick up a Prussian aristo with a sprawling estate, like Elizabeth von Arnim.
And yet, for all the scarcity of really good contemporary garden writers, there are still many who, like Woolf or Elizabeth Bowen, use gardens to powerful effect in their novels. I’m thinking of Amanda Craig in The Lie of the Land, Alan Hollinghurst in The Stranger’s Child, Melissa Harrison in At Hawthorn Time, Lucy Hughes-Hallett in Peculiar Ground. They recognise the truth that shines brightly from Life in the Garden – that our gardens assert a powerful hold on our collective imaginations; they are reflections of our secret selves, places of memory and nostalgia in which we perform complex rituals of hope and stewardship. Our long history of gardening deserves a book as beautiful as Life in the Garden.
• Life in the Garden by Penelope Lively is published by Fig Tree (£14.99). To order a copy for £12.74 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
