by Penelope Lively **'Wonderful. A manifesto of horticultural delight' _Literary Review_** **'Beautiful. Perfect for literary garden lovers' _Good Housekeeping_** **'Rich and unusual, a book to treasure. Few recent gardening books come anywhere close to its style, intelligence and depth' _Observer_** _'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. **'Exquisite and original'** _Daily Teleg