The Writer's Garden presents an intriguing study of the beautiful gardens and outdoor spaces of 30 history's greatest writers.

See inside the gardens where literary giants from Tolstoy to Agatha Christie created some of their finest works in this visually stunning and fascinating book. Discover the flower gardens, vegetable plots, landscapes and writing hideaways of 30 great authors – from Louisa May Alcott’s ‘Orchard House’ where she wrote Little Women and Agatha Christie at Greenway, to Virginia Woolf at Monk’s House and the Massachusetts home of Edith Wharton. Fully illustrated with specially commissioned photography plus archive images, and spanning centuries and continents, this book visits the homes and gardens that inspired novelists, poets and playwrights. It shows how outdoor spaces were important to writers in many different ways and offers insight into the lives and creative processes of beloved authors. Writers featured include: Jane Austen at Godmersham and Chawton, Agatha Christie at Greenway, Beatrix Potter at Hill Top, Roald Dahl at Gipsy House, Virginia Woolf at Monk’s House, Walter Scott, Thomas Hardy at Hardy’s Cottage and Max Gate , Robert Burns at Ellisland, William Wordsworth at Cockermouth and Grasmere, Rudyard Kipling at Bateman’s, Louisa May Alcott at Orchard House, Emily Dickinson at The Homestead, Amherst, Beatrix Farrand, Mount Desert Island, Maine, Elizabeth Lawrence, Winghaven Gardens, F Scott Fitzgerald in Montgomery, Robert Frost at Derry, Ernest Hemingway in Florida, Jack London at Beauty Ranch and Wolf House, Henry David Thoreau at Thoreau Farm & Walden Pond, Mark Twain at Hartford, Alice Walker in Eatonton, Georgia, Marcel Proust, Illiers Combray, Georges Sand, Nohant, Nr Chatelroux, Emile Zola, Medan South of Paris, Herman Hesse, Casa Camuzzi, Lake Lugano, Weimer Group: Goethe, Christoph Martin Wieland & Schiller, Alessandro Manzoni, Milan + Lake Como, Tolstoy, Yasnay Polyana Estate, Moscow. This deeply insightful book sheds new light on some of literature's greatest works, offers rare glimpses into the lives of these brilliant minds, and showcases in stunning full color the gardens in which these writers spent their time.

Show me a person without any prejudice of any kind on any subject and I'll show you someone who may be admirably virtuous but is surely no gardener.--Allen Lacy. Idiosyncratic, determined, and occasionally obsessed, gardeners have a lot to say about their outdoor passion. THE WRITER IN THE GARDEN brings together a host of writing gardeners and gardening writers reveling in their quirks, confessing their shortcomings, and sharing their experiences. Combing through a hundred years of garden writing, editor Jane Garmey has discovered some great contemporary works and rediscovered many classics: "I am strongly of the opinion," declares Gertrude Jekyll, "that the possession of a quantity of plants, however good the plants may be themselves and however ample their number, does not make a garden." "It isn't that I don't like sweet disorder, but it has to be judiciously arranged," writes Vita Sackville-West. "Gardeners are--let's face it--control freaks," Abby Adams admits. "Who else would willingly spend his leisure hours wrestling weeds out of the ground, blithely making life or death decisions about living beings, moving earth from here to there, changing the course of waterways?" Drawing on the work of more than fifty writers, THE WRITER IN THE GARDEN covers subjects ranging from the beauty of the garden to ornery weeds, the hazards of rare plant collecting, and the tribulations of inclement weather. The collection includes a range of authors from both sides of the Atlantic: from Edith Wharton, who insists that we could all learn a thing or two about design from the Italians, to Stephen Lacey, who reveals that his most exciting gardening moments are spent in the bath. Some of the other writers in the collection are: E. B. White, Beverly Nichols, Ken Druse, Eleanor Perenyi, W. S. Merwin, Mirabel Osler, Henry Mitchell, Jamaica Kincaid, Robert Dash, Sara B. Stein, Michael Pollan, M.F.K. Fisher, Anne Raver, Patti Hagan, Paula Deitz.

If there is anywhere on earth where metaphor flourishes and parables abound, it is in the garden. For Pochocki the garden is a parallel world, a stage upon which the drama of life is played out. Here we dig for ethical solutions; we try to do no harm, accept defeat with grace and triumph with modesty - and, always, as Emily Dickinson puts it, we "dwell in possibility." Pochocki presents us with a warmly human, charmingly wise collection of essays, stories and poems. Beautifully illustrated by Peter LaGue.

Gardening has always attracted devotedly literate practitioners; people who like to dig, it would appear, also like to write. And many of them write exceedingly well. Focusing on gardeners' words about the art of gardening, and ranging in time and place from Enlightenment France to modern-day New York, Writing the Garden brings together a diverse array of authors including Vita Sackville-West, Gertrude Jekyll and Sir Roy Strong. For the most part they are not professional landscape designers or how-to horticulturalists, but rather hands-on gardeners who write with their own gardens in full view.

By the time she reached her late twenties, Eudora Welty (1909–2001) was launching a distinguished literary career. She was also becoming a capable gardener under the tutelage of her mother, Chestina Welty, who designed their modest garden in Jackson, Mississippi. From the beginning, Eudora wove images of southern flora and gardens into her writing, yet few outside her personal circle knew that the images were drawn directly from her passionate connection to and abiding knowledge of her own garden. Near the end of her life, Welty still resided in her parents' house, but the garden—and the friends who remembered it—had all but vanished. When a local garden designer offered to help bring it back, Welty began remembering the flowers that had grown in what she called “my mother's garden.” By the time Welty died, that gardener, Susan Haltom, was leading a historic restoration. When Welty's private papers were released several years after her death, they confirmed that the writer had sought both inspiration and a creative outlet there. This book contains many previously unpublished writings, including literary passages and excerpts from Welty's private correspondence about the garden. The authors of One Writer's Garden also draw connections between Welty's gardening and her writing. They show how the garden echoed the prevailing style of Welty's mother's generation, which in turn mirrored wider trends in American life: Progressive-era optimism, a rising middle class, prosperity, new technology, women's clubs, garden clubs, streetcar suburbs, civic beautification, conservation, plant introductions, and garden writing. The authors illustrate this garden's history—and the broader story of how American gardens evolved in the early twentieth century—with images from contemporary garden literature, seed catalogs, and advertisements, as well as unique historic photographs. Noted landscape photographer Langdon Clay captures the restored garden through the seasons.