It can’t be a coincidence that Vickers refers to Lolly Willowes at some point, so I was expecting some witchery, but sadly it never came to much. uk/landing-page/quercus/quercus-company-information/">The data controller is Quercus Editions Ltd. When Lydia Grace discovers a way up to the roof of the building, she begins working on a rooftop garden that she hopes will bring a smile to the face of her solemn Uncle Jim. If all this is beginning to sound like a white woman’s Orientalist fantasy of a handsome stranger from the East who might teach her to love and live again, then it does so by design.

Hassie is haunted by memories of two men: her recently deceased father and her former lover, Robert, a married man with whom she had an affair. During the course of the book, there are some fabulous descriptions of nature – the very act of reading about gardening, flowers, the earth and the wildlife is calming and felt therapeutic to me. It seems to have an answer to all of life’s great questions and is also an incredible journey through the generations of different families.

One day Joe decides to plant a seed on his balcony and the chain of events that follow prove just how wonderful nature can be. The Gardener is an unusually gappy and opaque novel, because it refuses to turn the resources of narrative fiction towards pruning humans down into manageable characters. Thanks to my name, and my dad, I was an early lover of poetry and, my back against the warm brick wall of the house, wrote many childish poems addressed to my special tree, with which I formed a kind of spiritual communion.

I had already worked with Celtic history in “Cousins”, where St Cuthbert makes a ghostly appearance, and I decided to set this book in this part of the British Isles, where vestiges of Celtic Christianity can still be found. The Gardener is what I deem comfort reading — a lovely, well-written story that is not such a page turner that I am compelled to read non-stop, but is entrancing enough that I looked forward to picking it up before bed or in random moments of freedom. If there is one theme that runs through all of her novels, it is that people are a great deal more complicated than they appear at first glance.Her prose is gentle and graceful: ‘A kind of ritual established itself: early each morning, I would go outside in my nightdress and stand barefoot in the dew-drenched grass and the tremulous dawn light, letting the silvery birdsong rinse my ears and the clean morning air fill my lungs and the sun or wind or rain bless my skin. B.Yeats, was responsible for her name Salley, (the Irish for 'willow') which comes from Yeats’s poem set to music by Benjamin Britten 'Down by the salley gardens'. My only complaint (and this 3 stars) was with the end which I felt to be confusing and unnecessary— I don’t want to spoil, but I wish a book like this, so much about a woman finding her own soul, community and peace, could end with that being enough. But as Vickers, who trained as a Jungian psychoanalyst, well knows, shutting ourselves off from the feelings that torment us is no way to go about conquering them. On one of her first ventures out into the garden after arriving, she happens upon “what must have been a nursery garden”, where on “rotting posts” hang “remnants of nets, once there to keep marauding birds from ripening fruit, now riddled with holes large enough for flocks to fly through.