LIFE IN THE GARDEN by PENELOPE LIVELY

 LIFE IN THE GARDEN by PENELOPE LIVELY (Pages 199)

The two central activities in my life - alongside writing - have been reading and gardening.

Penelope Lively has always been a keen gardener. This book is partly a memoir of her own life in gardens: the large garden at home in Cairo where she spent most of her childhood, her grandmother's garden in a sloping Somerset field, then two successive Oxfordshire gardens of her own, and the smaller urban garden in the North London home she lives in today.
It is also a wise, engaging and far-ranging exploration of gardens in literature, from Paradise Lost to Alice in Wonderland, and of writers and their gardens, from Virginia Woolf to Philip Larkin.

I also enjoy gardening and reading, and felt a kinship with the author. It was lovely reading about her gardens in places that I will never be able to visit, which is why I especially take pleasure in reading her story.