Well aware of the difference between patrician gardening in the grand style and the more plebeian approach of cottage gardening, Ms. Lively appreciates both. She glides through a review of history, from the Garden of Eden through ancient civilizations to the earth-moving landscape approach of Capability Brown and Humphry Repton ... For readers already well versed in garden history and writing, she might seem to cover a lot of familiar ground, but she does so in her own delightful voice. In the hands of a less skillful writer, this romp through so many subjects might seem haphazard, but because she is both so informed and idiosyncratic, Life in the Garden feels like a fascinating conversation with a valued friend. The author grows philosophical as she thinks about time and how gardens provide refuge, an escape from the press of daily existence.
Lively has been a voracious gardener her entire adult life, and it shows in her nearly encyclopedic knowledge of gardening. Yet this is not a traditional gardening book. You won’t find tips for slug removal, growing roses or mulching. And thank goodness for that, because Lively has so much more to say about the relevance of gardens ... Lively’s trademark British wit makes several delightfully acidic appearances, but Life in the Garden is also at times almost unbearably poignant, coming as late as it does in the life of the wonderfully prolific author.
It is a rambling and informative celebration of life, human and vegetable ... in this wise and perceptive book, she considers changes in gardening fashions and the way that gardens have been represented by artists...as well as novelists and writers ... She offers up her favorite plants and her pet hates with wry humor, and beats a drum for the importance of gardening for the body, soul and local community.
Lively begins by exploring the garden’s place in art and literature (perhaps veering a tad too close now and then toward a book report) and then explores the changing fashions of gardening and what gardens may show about class distinctions. But glimpses of her own life appear throughout the book, often anchored by matter-of-fact juxtapositions of beauty and loss ... And so it seems in this mosaic of musings and memoir, art history and social commentary ... the book falls together beautifully, organically and carefully, like the English gardens Lively loves.
There are moments of poignant observation ... But these sharp insights are undermined by the book’s exceeding discursiveness. One chapter, called 'Reality and Metaphor,' encompasses everything from the gardening dynamic between Virginia and Leonard Woolf to the Hanging Gardens of Babylon to gardens as subjects by artists as varied as Monet and Munch. This may be gently didactic for readers with no gardening background. If you are even mildly versed in such topics as Tulipomania, the English landscape style, the creation of Sissinghurst Castle Garden, it seems cursory and, in the absence of stronger connecting threads, actually quite tedious. More engaging are Lively’s reminiscences of her personal life ... Reading Life in the Garden, I felt like I was peering out of an airplane window, surveying lots of territory but not really seeing anything.
It brought home to me how few recent gardening books come anywhere close to its style, intelligence and depth ... This is a book that gives words to something that those of us who garden know by instinct—how being in the garden raises the spirits, modulates the seasons ... Lively is such a consistently genial presence in the book, her references friendly reminders of writers one loves...of new names such as Eleanor Perenyi, and of authors one knows ... Throughout the book we are drip-fed scenes from Lively’s life, so it becomes like an autobiography smuggled into a garden book ... This isn’t quite a perfect book ... Lively has a tic of too-regular authorial interjections to remind the reader of what’s to come ... outbursts come too often and begin to clunk ... And yet ... Our long history of gardening deserves a book as beautiful as Life in the Garden.
She visits 'painted' gardens by Monet, Bonnard, and Van Gogh, as well as diverse fictional gardens, including those conjured by Beatrix Potter, Virginia Woolf, and Edith Wharton. Lively also looks to gardens as indicators of social standing, tracks garden fashions, confesses her addiction to fuchsias, and zestfully critiques the writings of influential English garden designers, including Gertrude Jekyll and William Robinson. Erudite, witty, and irreverent, Lively darts ebulliently from topic to topic like a bee among blossoms.
At first glance, award-winning and beloved novelist Penelope Lively's new book Life in the Garden looks depressingly predictable: a slim hobby-memoir filled with jostling canned quotes about gardening, the kind of thing distracted novelists have been knocking together and tossing off with their left hands for centuries. Instead of that sort of thing, Lively here has written a quiet little masterpiece, a winding, turning memoir of a long lifetime spent gardening and the intertwining of all that gardening with the reading and writing that has likewise been her life's passion. All the expected potted (no pun intended) sections are here – the garden through history, gardening tastes and peculiarities in various eras, famous gardeners and gardening manuals and gurus, gardening in literature, all the usual suspects – but they're animated by Lively's wise, slow, novelist touches in a way such book virtually never are (she mentions one such success, Jenny Uglow's A Little History of British Gardening, and then easily surpasses it) ... It goes without saying that all avid gardeners will treasure this book, but even readers who've never grown so much as a weed will love this performance too, the literary equivalent of listening to your most literate friend collect her thoughts about the most unassuming of her life's passions.
In a graceful melding of memoir and reflections on literature and art ... The gardener 'floats free of the present, and looks forward, acquires expectations, carries next spring in the mind’s eye.' A gentle elegy on the 'charisma' of gardens.
Lively’s astute observations of one’s relations with nature becomes a study of how people view themselves ... 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.
