Uploaded February 2018 | Updated September 2026, 3 weeks ago
The inimitable British novelist, Penelope Lively, is also a consummate gardener. In this delightful pastiche - a blend of history, memoir and horticultural musings - she describes the garden in Cairo where she grew up, her grandmother's garden in Somerset, and two Oxfordshire gardens of her own.
But she also cites books with horticultural leanings. "Tom's Midnight Garden" leads to Carol Shields' "The Stone Diaries" and Eleanor Perenyi's immortal "Green Thoughts".
"Gardening, we step beyond the dictation of time. We create order. We design and direct. We get right in there with the plants, escape worldly worries, do in our knees and our backs, set spinning our circadian rhythms, jack up our immune systems, and possibly live a few years longer. When hard at it, none of this is relevant; it is simply a matter of intense engagement with cutting back, taking out, putting in, with this rose, that weed, those seeds, bulbs, tubers. As an occupation, it seems to me unparalleled; productive, beneficial, enjoyable. What more could you want?"
Amen!
More video garden book reviews at: thisoldHoarehouse.com
The inimitable British novelist, Penelope Lively, is also a consummate gardener. In this delightful pastiche - a blend of history, memoir and horticultural musings - she describes the garden in Cairo where she grew up, her grandmother's garden in Somerset, and two Oxfordshire gardens of her own.
But she also cites books with horticultural leanings. "Tom's Midnight Garden" leads to Carol Shields' "The Stone Diaries" and Eleanor Perenyi's immortal "Green Thoughts".
"Gardening, we step beyond the dictation of time. We create order. We design and direct. We get right in there with the plants, escape worldly worries, do in our knees and our backs, set spinning our circadian rhythms, jack up our immune systems, and possibly live a few years longer. When hard at it, none of this is relevant; it is simply a matter of intense engagement with cutting back, taking out, putting in, with this rose, that weed, those seeds, bulbs, tubers. As an occupation, it seems to me unparalleled; productive, beneficial, enjoyable. What more could you want?"
Amen!
More video garden book reviews at: thisoldHoarehouse.com
