Here are 47 books that A Year in the Life of Beth Chatto's Gardens fans have personally recommended if you like
A Year in the Life of Beth Chatto's Gardens.
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I have been writing for the past 21 years on mystical themes with a good dose of Mother Earth Love tossed in. Fifteen years ago, I launched the spoken word website, offering one ten-minute recorded essay monthly on mystical/philosophical themes. Having published three nonfiction books, I decided to take my love of nature and interest in mysticism and write a novel for young philosophers and Earth-loving elders. My book follows the mystical journey of a rather practical eleven-year-old to an enchanted lake in the high Alps. It contains gentle animals, wise trees, kindred spirits, and healing waters.
This is perhaps the best-known and most obvious choice illustrating Nature’s healing powers. Mary, an orphaned girl, moves in with an estranged, reclusive uncle on his isolated English estate. Lonely and bereaved, Mary spends her days exploring both the house and extensive gardens, when one day she discovers a secret garden, locked away behind a wall.
This garden, tucked away and neglected for many years, is the key to Mary’s healing. Through quiet deliberation, she begins to bring the garden back to life and, in turn, finds new life in herself. The healing of the uncle is perhaps the most mystical scene in the book for me, brought about by a quiet moment beside a trickling stream, where he has an epiphany of heart healing. I find the book’s mixture of nature and mystery beguiling.
The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett is a magical novel for adults and children alike
'I've stolen a garden,' she said very fast. 'It isn't mine. It isn't anybody's. Nobody wants it, nobody cares for it, nobody ever goes into it. Perhaps everything is dead in it already; I don't know.'
After losing her parents, young Mary Lennox is sent from India to live in her uncle's gloomy mansion on the wild English moors. She is lonely and has no one to play with, but one day she learns of a secret garden somewhere in the grounds that no…
I find myself drawn to stories about second chances and starting over because I find that, as a reader, I feel empowered whenever a character I have come to care about rises above their circumstances. I've always been drawn to characters who overcome, who find their own way in difficult times, and who do so with honor and integrity, especially when faced with adversaries who may be bigoted, self-absorbed, or even dangerous. I am drawn more to historical or exotic settings or even quirky everyday places, but I love writers who create almost an additional character with their sense of setting, giving it its own personality.
I count this book by Elizabeth Von Arnim as one of my all-time favorite books to read and re-read again and again. The setting is the medieval castle of San Salvatore, which stands on a hilltop over a picturesque sunny bay in Italy is absolutely gorgeous. The author skillfully makes the setting come alive.
But it is the characterization that really shines here with a group of random women who holiday together on a whim, strangers who must see beyond their initial impressions of one another, only discover as much about themselves as they do about the others.
Originally published in 1922, Elizabeth Von Arnim's The Enchanted April is a charming and light-hearted novel about unlikely female friendships and the power of a blissful escape.
Complete & Unabridged. Part of the Macmillan Collector's Library; a series of stunning, cloth-bound, pocket-sized classics with gold foiled edges and ribbon markers. These beautiful books make perfect gifts or a treat for any book lover.
Four mismatched women respond to an advert in The Times offering a beautiful medieval castle to rent on the Italian Riviera. Bashful Mrs Wilkins, cheerless Mrs Arbuthnot, widowed Mrs Fisher and socialite Lady Caroline Dester are each…
I’m a journalist and garden writer who discovered the joys of gardens 20 years ago when I got my own small backyard in London. Since then, I’ve studied horticulture, I’ve worked with garden designers, and I’ve travelled the country writing about gardens great and small. I’m interested in their history, their planting, and, most of all, how they make you feel, which is what I try to distill into my guides.
The first thing to say is that this is an absolute tome of a book – really heavy and certainly not something to take on your commute. But it’s well worth the arm strain. Packed with glorious pictures of gardens across the world it seduces with glimpses of beauty as yet undreamed of and provides new angles on gardens already visited. As a result of this book, I have my sights firmly set on the renaissance extravaganza that is Villa D'Este in Italy, on the romantic Jardins du Prieuré d’Orsay in France and on the naturalistic Arboretum Kalmthout in Belgium.
The ultimate garden book - both a collection of gardens from around the world and a resource for those seeking inspiration on garden design and planting. Featuring over 250 permanent gardens by leading garden designers, horticulturalists and landscape architects, from the 14th century to the present day, and covering all key types and styles of garden, this well-illustrated compendium combines images, text, key information and captions for each of the featured gardens, appealing to both amateur and professional gardeners, as well as garden designers.
Tap Dancing on Everest, part coming-of-age memoir, part true-survival adventure story, is about a young medical student, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor raised in N.Y.C., who battles self-doubt to serve as the doctor—and only woman—on a remote Everest climb in Tibet.
I’m a journalist and garden writer who discovered the joys of gardens 20 years ago when I got my own small backyard in London. Since then, I’ve studied horticulture, I’ve worked with garden designers, and I’ve travelled the country writing about gardens great and small. I’m interested in their history, their planting, and, most of all, how they make you feel, which is what I try to distill into my guides.
This is a book with a spring in its step. A lively romp through the history of British gardens from the Romans to the city patio garden, it is highly illuminating and bursts with amusing facts and anecdotes. I particularly enjoyed learning about Canon Ellacombe, an avid plant collector and angler, and chuckled to hear that architect Sir William Chambers complained of the Landscape Movement "that whole woods had been swept away 'to make room for a little grass and a few American weeds'." Even if you don’t read a line, Osbert Lancaster’s witty illustrations ably sum up the various styles.
First published in 1977, The Pleasure Garden is an entertaining and concise history of English gardening by husband and wife team Osbert Lancaster and Anne Scott-James. In a series of beautifully observed and witty cartoon illustrations Osbert Lancaster captures the essence of gardening styles from Roman times through to the twentieth-century patio, as he did for styles of architecture in Pillar to Post and A Cartoon History of Architecture. The accompanying text by Anne Scott-James explains the work of garden-makers and designers and the native and newly arrived plants they used.
As a child, I spent summers looking for adders on the Common and winters walking through snowstorms pretending to be a Hobbit in Tolkien's Middle Earth. My travels and studies taught me the importance of respecting different cultures and our planet. Glasgow Libraries gave me my first storytelling work in 1992, and I have a Master's degree in Scottish Folklore. I live in Scotland, sharing stories through writing and storytelling. Having collected hundreds of traditional folktales about our ancestors' wisdom and folly, I co-authored my first book, Dancing With Trees, Eco-Tales from the British Isles, to reflect our need to understand nature's wisdom and help us live sustainably on Earth.
This is more than a collection of garden folktales.
Donald Smith takes us on a storytelling odyssey through each month of the year. Reflecting on his garden in Edinburgh, Scotland, during the global pandemic 2020, he presents stories that speak of seasonal rhythms and nature connection.
Smith peppers his unfurling garden journey with snippets of history and musings on nature and storytellers past and present. He includes his unique retelling of classic folktales like Jack and The Magic Beans and fascinating and humorous autobiographical stories.
This book's confident narrative and beautiful artwork connect us to the botanical paradise and wildlife havens that are our glorious gardens.
The garden is an oasis, a pocket of nature in our busy modern lives, full of plants, animals, insects - and a fair bit of magic.
Folk Tales from the Garden follows the seasons through a year of stories, garden lore and legends. Explore the changing face of nature just outside your front door, from the tale of the Creator painting her birds and the merits of kissing an old toad, to pixies sleeping in the tulips, and an unusually large turnip.
I went through major surgery when I was in eighth grade. The physical pain was bad, but what hurt more was the emotional side. When I returned to school, the friend groups had shifted, shutting me out because of my extended absence. I had to face that time in life alone. Perhaps that’s why I’m drawn to works about kids who have to face challenges on their own. When we go through hard times, our true selves come out. They have to; we have no one else. We can’t pretend. We can only try to make it. The books I like show characters that shine through their hardships.
First off, this book was written by a good friend of mine and I got to read early, early drafts of it. But more importantly, Myra, the main character, is in a special school on the Moon for kids with magic. Only, she doesn’t have magic. She has to try to fake her way through it.
That is, until she develops the wrong kind of magic. When she discovers she’s a Boton, all is lost. She could be put in jail for having plant magic–or worse. Myra isn’t very good at making friends, but she learns through this tough situation how to trust other people.
"Moongarden blooms with heart and adventure. A stellar update of The Secret Garden, woven with a little science fiction, a lot of magic, a vibrant heroine, and a plucky robot sidekick to rival R2-D2." —Victoria Aveyard, New York Times bestselling author of Red Queen
The Secret Garden meets The City of Ember. Failed climate change policy, an intergalactic conspiracy, and the magical, unlikely heroine who could unearth it all. An explosive STEAM-inspired series starter perfect for young change makers.
Centuries ago, Earth’s plants turned deadly, and humanity took to space to cultivate new homes. Myra Hodger is in her first…
My husband sums up my biography as “I am, therefore I dig.” I live, garden, read and write in Chatham, New Jersey, and have had a long, open love affair with the gardening style “across the pond.” At the New York Botanical Garden I teach English garden history, and I’m a regular contributor to the British gardening journal, Hortus. In my writing, I follow the relationship between the pen and the trowel, that is authors and their gardens. I’ve written books about children’s authors Beatrix Potter and Frances Hodgson Burnett, and, as you might imagine, the research trips to the UK were a special bonus.
Derek Jarmon was a British avant-garde filmmaker, theater designer, and life-long gardener. In the last decade of his life, he built a new garden at a tiny house by the sea in Kent. Prospect Cottage sits on the shingle expanse overlooking the Dungeness Nuclear Power Station and the English Channel. It was an accidental garden, this arrangement of rocks and driftwood, flowers, and found objects. The book sings. Jarmon’s musings and poems wind through a small volume of 140 pages; there are 150 photographs. It is a book about why we garden, how to live, and how to die.
'Paradise haunts gardens', writes Derek Jarman, 'and it haunts mine.' Jarman's public image is that of a film-maker of genius, whose work, dwelling on themes of sexuality and violence, became a byword for controversy. But the private man was the creator of his own garden-paradise in an environment that many might think was more of a hell than a heaven - in the flat, bleak, often desolate expanse of shingle that faces the Dungeness nuclear power station. Jarman, a passionate gardener from childhood, combined his painter's eye, his horticultural expertise and his ecological convictions to produce a landscape which combined…
I’m not an expert in gardening, forestry, or herbal medicine. But like everyone else, I have a growing awareness that our planet Earth is entirely dependent on thriving forests and insects and even weeds. We owe it to our children and future generations to learn about and protect our precious resources. Although I live in the big city of Chicago and have a tiny backyard, last year I turned my little grass lawn into prairie! I have creeping charlie, dandelions, creeping phlox, sedge grass, wild violets, white clover, and who knows what else. (Luckily, my neighbors are on board.) I’ve already seen honeybees and hummingbirds. It’s not much, but it’s something I can do.
Many of us tend to view gardens only from the surface up.
This book dives underground to show how many living things in the dirt are working hard to help us garden. Worms and insects that we might find “gross” are actually essential for airing the soil and warding off invaders.
Plenty of things grow just fine without human help because they have all the helpers they need under the earth. This book shows how nature goes about its business, plants and insects and animals all working together to green the earth.
Bonus: Neal’s illustrations are anatomical wonders, showing worms and bugs with legs and feelers in a friendly light. Squeamish children (and their parents) might make a few buggy friends as they read.
A companion to the new Over and Under the Pond and Over and Under the Snow, this sweet book explores the hidden world and many lives of a garden through the course of a year.
Up in the garden, the world is full of green-leaves and sprouts, growing vegetables, ripening fruit. But down in the dirt there is a busy world of earthworms digging, snakes hunting, skunks burrowing and all the other animals that make a garden their home. In this exuberant and lyrical book, discover the wonders that lie hidden between stalks, under the shade of leaves... and down…
I belong to a family of dog lovers – Oscar, the black cocker spaniel; Buddy, the brown-and-white beagle; Riley, the buff cocker spaniel; Buffy, a black boxer mix, Milo and Max, Golden retrievers. In fact, cavorting with Riley at a San Francisco park was my inspiration for Bark Park. I also love children, especially my grandchildren Connor and Kasey. When Kasey, at five years of age, read my book Bark Park aloud for the first time, my heart swelled with joy! It took me back to my own young daughter Laura whose first all-by-herself read-aloud had been: Go, dog, go! So it’s only natural for me to combine my two great loves – dogs and children – with these book recommendations.
Biscuit is a curious little dog who loves the garden. He scampers about enjoying the butterflies and worms and especially the birds. But when Biscuit accidentally knocks over a bag of birdseed, his accident has a happy ending, for the seeds attract even more birds to the garden. Biscuit in the Garden offers simple words and a simple but engaging plot for young readers who are just beginning to read.
For fans of Clifford and Spot, welcome everybody’s favorite little yellow puppy, Biscuit, in an I Can Read adventure!
Biscuit is excited to explore the garden. From the prettiest flowers to the smallest bugs, there's so much to see. And the little puppy even finds his own special way to add to the garden's bounty!
Biscuit in the Garden, a My First I Can Read book, is carefully crafted using basic language, word repetition, sight words, and sweet illustrations—which means it's perfect for shared reading with emergent readers. Books at this level feature basic language, word repetition, and whimsical illustrations,…
I’m an incurable nostalgist and, thanks to early exposure to a curly-haired, scarf-wearing eccentric who travels the universe in a battered old police box, gained an early and ongoing obsession with time travel stories, whether intricately-plotted and filled with brain-tangling paradoxes, or steeped in wistful yearning for days gone by. Young me would, I like to think, be delighted to learn that he would, one day, write a book bursting with both paradoxes AND yearning.
As a six-year-old, I was enraptured by the 1974 BBC TV adaptation of this book, thrilled by the notion that I, too, might one day find a magical route into hidden worlds.
As my reading skills improved, I did just that, thanks to a library card and books like this one. Pearce’s tale is haunting and beautifully told, and there’s an ingenious little piece of time-travel plotting involving a pair of ice skates that blew my preteen mind.
From beloved author Philippa Pearce, this sixtieth-anniversary edition is the perfect way to share this transcendent story of friendship with a new generation of readers. Philip Pullman, bestselling author of the His Dark Materials trilogy, called Tom's Midnight Garden "A perfect book."
When Tom's brother gets sick, he's shipped off to spend what he's sure will be a boring summer with his aunt and uncle in the country. But then Tom hears the old grandfather clock in the hall chime thirteen times, and he's transported back to an old garden where he meets a young,…
