Life in the Garden

May 7, 2018
In this charming memoir, Booker Prize–winner Lively muses languidly on her life and how it has been influenced by gardens literal and imaginary. Exploring gardens in literature, Lively quotes Virginia Woolf: “The first pure joy of the garden... weeding all day to finish the beds in a queer sort of enthusiasm which made me say this is happiness.” In “The Written Garden,” Lively delights in how Elizabeth Bowen in The Little Girls “plunges the reader into a garden with ‘steamy flower-smells.’ ” Lively’s history of gardening tracks its evolution from being something enjoyed by English Victorian aristocrats through to modern middle-class window boxes in urban London, and she realizes that people’s aesthetic and communal values are reflected in how they manipulate nature: “And to garden is to impose order... the harnessing of nature to a purpose, initially practical, and later aesthetic.” Lively’s astute observations of one’s relations with nature becomes a study of how people view themselves: “We garden differently according to who we are... By their windows ye shall know them.” She clearly knows her gardening, and her exuberance on the subject will make novice gardeners long to be a part of her club. For garden enthusiasts and lovers of Romantic British literature, Lively’s narrative is like an intimate conversation with an erudite fellow gardener.

I have no idea what Penelope Lively sounds like, but as far as I'm concerned, narrator Helen Lloyd channels the 84-year-old esteemed author perfectly. Her mellow, educated tone is just right for the Booker Prize-winning Lively's newest book, which combines memoir with gardening commentary. Lively has gardened since she was growing up in Egypt, and though she's now limited to a small London yard, she has formed opinions on everything horticultural: style, order, control, the admirable willfulness of plants, and why we keep planting our little plot. It's all here, as well as her thoughts on the gardens of the literary and the famous, including Virginia Woolf's inexplicable love of "nasty yellow bulbous spotty" calceolaria. These are audio essays for gardening enthusiasts to savor. A.C.S. � AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine