The pairing of writers and their subjects should be open to suggestions. What I wouldn't give to have Oscar Wilde opine on current politics, for example. Occasionally, writers anticipate us: Stephen Fry writing about poetry, Dorothy Parker's rough, familiar essay about sleeplessness, or Terry Pratchett's love for cats.

Or, in this case, an apposite pairing: British novelist Penelope Lively (born March 17, 1933) on Life in the Garden.

Gardening and writers go hand in hand, Lively supposes, because of the close attention paid to life. I could not agree more.

Once a gardener, you look around you differently; you notice more, you pay attention to the mundane, and you pounce at once on anything unfamiliar.

In both professions (hobbies?), there is a clearing of anemic waste, a celebration of triviality, and a trenchant observation of detail. There is also, as creative writing teacher Dorothea Brande put it, "a cultivation of temperament."  Or consider what journalist George Mikes's observed in his 1946 book How To Be a Brit: "It is important that you should learn to enjoy simple joys because that is Extremely English."

A decidedly simple joy indeed, gardening. Deceptively so.

My May garden. Euphorbia, hebe, sedum, and one remaining tulip. Like Lively, I believe the love for gardening might be genetically passed through the female line.

In a rich chapter about the metaphor of the garden, Lively digs deeper than an assumed "gardening is about life" and stirs up examples from ancient times to Jacobean to modern-day obsessions with orderly plants.

Language scholar James Geary wrote that metaphor is a way to express things that are less understood or better unmentioned. If that is the case, gardens have provided us ways to communicate about all and sundry pretty much as long as humans have been cultivating (read more on the nature of gardening.)

She was a real gardener, Virginia Woolf; she planted, she weeded, and she knew the chocolate earth. But now, here she is when the garden becomes a fictional device: 'Flower after flower is specked on the depths of green. The petals are harlequins.'

Lively wrote Life in the Garden in the last decade (she shall turn ninety in 2023). The viewpoint is highly retrospective. Lively does not structure the book chronologically, but her memories and first love of gardening formed in the "intimate paradise" of their Cairo gardens feature strongly. 

As do her early influencers:

Way back, I remember relishing James Fenton's newspaper gardening articles. Fenton is, of course, an eminent poet, and I doubt if there have been many or any, other poets with such a depth of practical horticultural knowledge. The articles were engagingly witty and nicely instructive.

Lively, like most curious, eager, energetic individuals drawn to gardening, writes about our human need for meaningful work. She exemplifies the need to garden rather than the need to have a garden. A distinction echoed in Robin Lane Fox's Thoughtful Gardening.

Gardening, we step beyond the dictation of time. We create order. We design and direct. We get right in there with the plants, escape worldly worries, do in our knees and our backs, set spinning our circadian rhythms, jack up our immune systems, and possibly live a few years longer. When hard at it, none of this is relevant; it is simply a matter of intense engagement with cutting back, taking out, putting in, with this rose, that weed, these seeds, bulbs, tubers.

My garden shed. A tidy shelf, a few birds’ nests, a struggling rudbeckia, my trusty trug, spiders and cooling pot of tea.

I'm curious about the things we do that are not our stated professions, things that give succor and devour our resources. In Life in the Garden Lively gives us many reasons for our complex relationship to hobbies and insight into our common human need to balance and create.

"Miss Jekyll's Gardening Boots" by William Nicholson, 1920. Learn more.

Lively's forte is her keen observations and rendering of memory. She can be both in memory and reflective about that memory at the same time. It's a gift of intelligence and self-awareness few writers possess, and when they do, I try to grab them with both hands (the books, obviously) and thrust them at you gleefully. This is one. Her memoirs Dancing Fish and Ammonites is another.