The Morville Hours

Nobody writes about the garden like the English. And few in England have ever been as eloquent or astute as Katherine Swift. Some twenty years ago, she and her husband leased a house in the town of Morville, in Shropshire, whose garden became her passion. Driven to uncover its history, she takes readers on a journey through time, back to the forces that shaped the garden, linking the stories of those who lived in the house and tended the same red soil with her family's own. Spanning thousands of years, The Morville Hours is also deeply personal, a journey through the seasons, but also one of self-exploration, of finding one's place in the world and putting down roots. The Morville Hours takes the form of the medieval Books of Hours, recalling the monastic past of the house. Each chapter is named after one of the Hours of the Divine Office, and summons vividly to life an hour of the day or night--from the crunch of grass underfoot at midnight on a frosty New Year's Eve to a perfumed May Day morning when the whole world seems sixteen again; from the enervating heat of a midsummer noon to the bloom of blue-black damsons picked on a golden September afternoon. Together, they describe the arc of the gardening year, and the arc of life.

One of the most admired gardening writers of her generation, Katherine Swift returns to describe a year in the life of her garden she created over twenty years in the grounds of the Dower House at Morville, Shropshire, meditating on everything from the terrain and its history, to the plants and trees, and the odd habits of the animals and humans who inhabit the garden. Following the turning wheel of the Morville seasons, from the green shoots of spring, through summer and autumn, to the stark beauty of winter, and back to spring again, The Morville Year is a journal full of surprises and enchantments that will appeal not only to gardeners, but to all who enjoy the natural world.

A wonderful book about the gardening year with practical advice by the top garden writer and best-selling author of The Tulip

To the girls who came to make it big in the town's 'What the Butler Saw' movie industry, Aberystwyth was the town of broken dreams. To Dean Morgan who taught at the Faculty of Undertaking, it was just a place to get course materials. But both worlds collide when the Dean checks into the notorious bed and breakfast ghetto and mistakenly receives a suitcase intended for a ruthless druid assassin. Soon he is running for his life, lost in a dark labyrinth of druid speakeasies and toffee apple dens, where every spinning wheel tells the story of a broken heart, and where the Dean's own heart is hopelessly in thrall to a porn star known as Judy Juice.

In this book the author describes the way her garden evolved and how, without meaning to do so, she let it take over her life. She suggests moving away from planning, regimentation and gardening with the mentality of a stamp-collector. Frequently funny and always stimulating, she writes of the alchemy of gardens, of the 19th-century plant-collectors and plant illustrators and of the gardening philosophers, all fertilizing great thoughts along with their hollyhocks. She won the 1988 Sinclair Consumer Press Garden Writer of the Year Award.

The forgotten garden that inspired Charles Darwin becomes the modern-day setting for an exploration of memory, family, and the legacy of genius. Darwin's childhood garden at The Mount in Shrewsbury was the site of some of the great scientist's earliest experiments. It was where, under the tutelage of his green-fingered mother and sisters, and the house's knowledgeable gardeners, he first examined the reproductive life of flowers, collected birds' eggs, and began to note down the ideas that would lead to his groundbreaking theory of evolution. In The Ghost in the Garden, Jude Piesse uncovers the lost histories that inspired Darwin's work and how his legacy, and the legacies of those around him, live on today.