Alice Vincent picks out ten fiction books that gardeners will love to read on holiday and beyond
We asked writer Alice Vincent to choose ten works of fiction for gardeners to lose themselves in this summer. Set against a backdrop of landscapes both curated and wild, her picks range from a spell-binding tale of the search for identity on a tropical Caribbean island to an epic 19th-century journey to discover the flora and fauna of far-flung lands…
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The Gardener
by Salley Vickers
Penguin Books, £9.99
ISBN 978-0241991176
Former Jungian psychotherapist Salley Vickers is a keen gardener and folds the language of gardens and plants alongside her artfully drawn characters. The Gardener, her most recent novel, puts the long-neglected garden of a country escape at the heart of the story. In the fictional Shropshire village of Hope Wenlock, heartbroken and bereaved Halcyon Days, a questioning woman in her forties, finds redemption and an unlikely friendship when she tackles a tumbledown cottage and garden she owns with her sister. The sisters bicker and seethe as if they were still children, but as the novel progresses the garden gives them space to gain understanding. The titular gardener is Murat, an Albanian local hired by Halcyon to help with the overgrowth. The histories they uncover give everyone a new sense of common ground.
When We Were Birds
by Ayanna Lloyd Banwo
Penguin Books, £9.99
ISBN 978-0241991633
There are, arguably, two green spaces that underpin the remarkable magical realism of Trinidadian author Ayanna Lloyd Banwo’s debut: the haunting depth and stillness of the gardens around Morne Marie, the family home of medium Yejide St Bernard, and the lush, tropical growth between the Victorian gravestones of Fidelis, a sprawling cemetery at the heart of the city down below. It is here that Darwin works, making money to fund his mother’s medical bills. His role as a gravedigger means he has had to shave off his dreadlocks, going against his faith as a Rastafarian. It is also to Fidelis that Yejide is drawn, lured by spirits she struggles to understand. Between the ghosts of Morne Marie, a former plantation, and the recently buried stories of the cemetery, these two characters form an unlikely connection. The result is a story that is mesmerising in its ability to transplant the reader into the verdancy of Trinidad.
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
by DH Lawrence
Alma Classics, £6.99
ISBN 978-1847494085
DH Lawrence’s incendiary novel is famous for many things, chief among them its victory at the heart of the 1960 obscenity trial that transformed what publishers were – and were not – allowed to print. Even if you’ve not read Lady Chatterley’s Lover, the chances are that you’ll be aware of the title character Oliver Mellors. So yes, there’s a lot of sex in the book – but there’s also a lot of garden. Lawrence was a plant person, unusual among authors in having a degree in botany, rather than one of the arts. Flowers crop up across his writing, but few authors would have had the botanical nous to know that, during a clandestine meeting in the middle of a wood, Connie Chatterley and Mellors could indeed have dressed one another’s body hair in forget-me-nots – presumably Myosotis sylvatica, which is common in the Midlands.
The House of Broken Bricks
by Fiona Williams
Faber & Faber, £14.99
ISBN 978-0571379552
This eagerly anticipated debut won biological scientist Fiona Williams the Bridport Prize and a coveted publishing deal with Faber. The House of Broken Bricks hops between the streets of Peckham, London, and a quiet village in rural Somerset and four separate narratives from a young family with twin boys: one who appears white, the other black. As the family splinters for shocking reasons that take time to unfold, the garden becomes the space where they try to connect, whether through growing, playing, cooking or becoming immersed ever deeper in nature. Williams’ knowledge of the natural world is evident in her ability to enliven flora and fauna to the extent that they become their own characters. Identity, love and loss collide in this elegiac portrait of a simple family garden and its ability to offer resilience and strength to the people who tend to it.
Between the Acts
by Virginia Woolf
Oxford University Press, £7.99
ISBN 978-0199536573
While her 1919 short story Kew Gardens may be the work many think of when considering Virginia Woolf’s nature writing, or perhaps To The Lighthouse with its ever-nostalgic family garden, it is the green space in Between the Acts that I envisage most clearly. Woolf’s final novel, posthumously published a little while after she died in 1941, is largely about a play – an am-dram production staged by villagers just before the outbreak of the Second World War – and somewhat informed by her neighbours doing just that in Rodmell, East Sussex. Over the course of a day, the villagers rehearse and undertake the performance in the grounds of a large house. Woolf manages to capture so much with so little: through fragments we learn of lust and longing, ambivalence and ambition and the ability – and futility – of art to make change. Read now, Between the Acts still prompts thoughts on our actions during times of great historic conflict.
Romeo and Juliet
by William Shakespeare
Wordsworth Editions, £3.99
ISBN 978-1840224337
Plants do a lot of heavy lifting in Shakespeare’s works; the Bard set 29 scenes in gardens, many of them involving secrecy, betrayal, lust or confusion. A Midsummer Night’s Dream is inexorably entwined with the idea of a forest in full flush, for instance, while muddled-up identities run riot in the gardens of Twelfth Night and Much Ado About Nothing. But perhaps the most recognisable Shakespearean scene takes place in the Capulet orchard, where a lovestruck Juliet calls out for Romeo, unaware that he is hiding beneath her balcony. It is here that they announce their love for one another and make the fatal decision to marry, sparking off endless similar scenes in high-school movies, romance novels and romcoms centuries on. We don’t actually hear that much about the orchard itself – these swoony teenagers are far more interested in the matter of their forbidden love – but its ‘high and hard to climb’ walls have been imagined plenty of times on the stage.
The Garden of Evening Mists
by Tan Twan Eng
Canongate Books, £9.99
ISBN 978-1786893895
Tan Twan Eng’s novel won a clutch of accolades after its release in 2012, among them a Man Booker Prize shortlisting and the Man Asian Literary Prize, but the Malaysian novelist is beautifully unshowy in depicting the power of gardens for reflection and memory in The Garden of Evening Mists. A love story of sorts unfolds between the former gardener to the Japanese emperor and the sole survivor of a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp. Yun Ling, now a prosecutor of war criminals, has one request of Aritomo, the gardener who lives ‘on a mountain above the clouds’: that he make a garden for her sister, who died while imprisoned by his employer. He refuses, but instead offers her a two-year-long apprenticeship. As Yun Ling learns, so does the reader: of the sacrifice involved in making a stone garden, of the value of borrowed landscape and, most of all, of all that a garden can hold beneath its surface.
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
by Lewis Carroll
Macmillan Children’s Books, £5.99
ISBN 978-1447279990
Down the rabbit hole we go! Whether starting from the dreaming spires of Oxford or descending into the psychedelia of Wonderland, the gardens conjured on the pages of Carroll’s well-loved children’s books are among the most famous in literature. Readers of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland may find her quest frustrating: all those liquids that make her smaller or bigger, caterpillars that lead her (cognitively, at least) astray, and tea parties that never seem to end. But read the novel with the view that the garden itself is the answer, and Carroll spins a story that captures an experience familiar to many gardeners: one of beauty, growth, mystery and challenge. If we can’t get curious in our own gardens, where can we?
Married Love (Because the Night)
by Tessa Hadley
Vintage, £9.99
ISBN 978-0099570189
Nobody writes about homes and gardens like Tessa Hadley. Across her many short stories and novels, the domestic exists as a perfectly drawn backdrop for love affairs, heartbreak, delight and despair – all the more compelling for happening between seemingly ordinary people. Because the Night, one of the short stories in her Married Love collection, is a fine example of Hadley’s ability to capture a sense and a feeling – specifically, that of the smell and mystique of a greenhouse to a small child. Throughout her work, gardens are scenes of events: under the cover of darkness, all manner of things can happen. But here our child protagonists are held perfectly – and poignantly – on the cusp of a moment of change and loss of innocence. You read it and smell tomato feed rising from the page.
The Signature of All Things
by Elizabeth Gilbert
Bloomsbury, £9.99
ISBN 978-1526626561
Best-selling modern sage Elizabeth Gilbert is perhaps more immediately known for her heartbreak memoir Eat, Pray, Love, but this historical novel set in the era of botanical exploration is one that I still think about years after reading. Published in 2013, Gilbert brings a rare and vital female perspective to the Victorian boom in plant science. Alma Whittaker, born in 1800, is the clever daughter of an exotic plant titan with facial features as sharp as her mind. She becomes a pioneer in studying mosses, her studies and curiosity taking her to Europe, Peru and Tahiti from the snowy estate of her chilly Pennsylvanian upbringing. Gilbert extracts such realism from the plant worlds Alma encounters that it is impossible to read this book without harbouring a new-found respect for moss, but she is equally skilled at depicting Alma’s inner life: that of a human with as much longing and desire for human company as she has for botanical understanding.
Here are more great books to read as chosen by Penelope Hobhouse