I’m a big fan of Sandra Lawrence, the author of Lost Gardens iof the World: An Atlas of Forgotten Horticultural Treasures (also illustrated by Lucille Clerc) and Miss Willmott’s Ghosts.
She’s produced another winner here. Publishers like publishing books about books because they have a ready audience of bought-in readers.
The idea is not new, Jackie Bennett did The Writer’s Garden with the same publisher in 2023. There’s been books on the gardens of writers from Beatrix Potter to Derek Jarman.
What is new is that these 30 gardens are the made up ones in the books of CS Lewis (Narnia/Christ Church, Oxford), Lewis Carroll (Alice), Katherine Mansfield (her Wellington, NZ garden), Frances Hodgson Burnett (The Secret Garden/Great Maytham Hall), and the Lake District gardens of Potter’s Peter Rabbit.
The format is detailing a close reading of mentions of plants and gardens in well-known books where plants and gardens feature strongly.
You don’t need to have read all the originals, and you don’t need to have visited the gardens (because they are imaginary), which makes this book the perfect distraction from real life, be that doing the weeding, or reading the difficult literary novel.
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