Jackie Bennett (former editor of Garden Design Journal) examines the lives of 19 British writers and their relationships to their gardens in The Writer's Garden: How Gardens Inspired Our Best-Loved Authors. Virginia Woolf wandered the roomlike gardens at Monk's House while she labored over Mrs. Dalloway. Charles Dickens tended to the gardens at Gad's Hill Place each day before tackling his masterpieces. The woodland paths and boathouse at Greenway inspired Agatha Christie's Dead Man's Folly. And would there have ever been a James and the Giant Peach had Roald Dahl not studied his own fruit orchard and the crawly creatures in the gardens at Gipsy House?
Archival images and vivid landscape photographs accompany the profiles and enhance each intimate glimpse into the countryside sanctuaries that fed the imaginations of great writers. "Written in Residence" sidebars offer lists of works created at each locale, and epilogues explain what became of the homes and gardens after the death of each revered wordsmith. --Kathleen Gerard, blogger at Reading Between the Lines