The Writer’s Garden: How Nature Inspired Our Great Authors

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 in Kent and Hampshire, Agatha Christie in Devon, Beatrix Potter in the Lake District, Thomas Hardy in Dorset, Walter Scott and Robert Burns in Scotland, William Wordsworth in Cumbria, Virginia Woolf and Rudyard Kipling in Sussex, Frances Hodgson Burnett in Kent, Jack London in California, Edward James in Mexico, Jean Cocteau and George Sand in France and Goethe in Germany.

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.

Jackie Bennett has travelled widely, visiting and writing about gardens. Her books include Shakespeare’s Gardens, The Writer’s Garden, Wild About the Garden and Island Gardens. She is a former editor of The Garden Design Journal and The English Garden.

Richard Hanson’s work has appeared in books and magazines and he has photographed in the gardens of well-known garden writers such as Helen Yemm, Ursula Buchan, Francine Raymond and Ronald Blythe. His photography has been featured in The Garden Design Journal, and Gardening with the National Trust.