Top ten books about gardening

Lulah Ellender is a writer based in East Sussex. Her first book, Elisabeth’s Lists: A Life Between the Lines, was published by Granta in 2018. It was one of The Spectator’s Books of the Year, described as "hauntingly beautiful" by the Guardian and reviewed widely across the press.

Her new book is a memoir called Grounding: Finding Home in a Garden.

At the Guardian Ellender tagged ten top books about gardening, including a few that reflect an "interest in creativity and the human impulse to cultivate beauty." One title on the list:

The Wild Iris by Louise Glück

A book of poems covering a year in the garden, this book portrays the creative interplay between words and plants, the page and the natural world. Glück deftly conveys the strange elasticity of time in a garden – the longevity and simultaneous transience. Plants speak poems, perspectives shift, material and spiritual worlds collide. She explores the cycles of nature, death and rebirth in precise, sharp language in this intimate exploration of loss, longing and beauty.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue