Garden Voices : A year of gardeners’ writing

A fascinating celebration of our love for all things horticultural, with a selection of garden-related entries from diaries, letters and articles for every day of the year.

Garden Voices captures the past and present of gardening with dated, daily musings organised around the calendar year bringing gardening and gardeners to life like never before. In this engaging anthology, readers are transported back in time – and often place – to witness rare horticultural glimpses. We find George Orwell, half-naked, digging his newly acquired rock-filled, ‘dry as a bone’ garden on the Isle of Jura on 25 May 1946. On 25 September 1845, Emily Dickinson picks the last flowers of summer before ‘Jack Frost’ gets them. In New Mexico, Georgia O’Keeffe reveals to her New York-based lover Alfred Stieglitz that she has just discovered the joy of gardening. 

Key figures – from Samuel Pepys to Charles Darwin and Sigmund Freud, Queen Victoria to Virginia Woolf and Germaine Greer – feature alongside much-loved gardeners, such as Gertrude Jekyll, Margery Fish and Claude Monet, as well as lesser-known but no-less inspiring garden writers, including Eleanor Vere Boyle and Celia Thaxter, whose writing will be a revelation to many.

Whether tinged with emotion or filled with character and humour, strikingly evocative or thought-provoking, these daily thoughts remind us that gardeners are all connected by a timeless invisible green thread. With several selections for each day, from 1 January to 31 December, this book is a true celebration of horticulture, and is the perfect gift for the gardener or garden lover in your life. Garden Voices brings joy, comfort, a gladdening sense of affinity and – much like gardening itself – moments of awe and inspiration.