In this vivid meditation, the novelist traces her love of gardens from childhood in Egypt to London and through art and literature
Penelope Lively modestly admits she is “only the most amateur gardener”. And yet this delightful and very personal paean to gardens amply demonstrates her abiding love of tending them.
From the hot, sunny garden in Egypt where she grew up and discovered the joys of reading amid bamboo groves and lily ponds, to the small London one in her ninth decade and with a chronic back problem, gardens have always played a “formative and essential” role in her life.
Related: Penelope Lively: my debt to roasted grasshopper with ladybird sauce
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