‘If Eve had had a spade in paradise, we should not have had all that sad business with the apple,’ claims the narrator of the novel Elizabeth and her German Garden (1898). The author, Mary Annette Beauchamp, eventually adopted the pen name Elizabeth von Arnim, merging her identity with the fictional character she had created. Both Elizabeths lived in Nassenheide in Pomerania (now Rzedziny, Poland), but whereas the fictional one had a spectacular garden, with a majestic clematis ‘Jackmanii’, giant poppies and delphiniums, the real Elizabeth, according to E.M. Forster (who was briefly employed as a tutor to the von Arnim children), did not have much of a garden at all. 

‘I shall have a garden one day,’ Katherine Mansfield wrote to her husband four months before she died

Forster might have been being a bit catty, but the relationship between the real and the imaginary resonates throughout Sandra Lawrence’s Literary Gardens. The author adopts von Arnim’s episodic style, filled with confidences and confessions. She has chosen 30 eclectic literary gardens to showcase in this lavishly illustrated book andopenly admits:

Even I don’t approve of my choices. Or rather, I berate myself for the gardens I had to leave out, some of which were on the list from the very start but fell by the flower-strewn wayside as the word count caught up with me. 

Lawrence’s gardens are a pleasing mix of the predictable and unexpected. ‘The Sheridan garden’, from von Arnim’s cousin, Katherine Mansfield’s short story ‘The Garden Party’, is described as ‘a garden for non-garden-fanatics, for people that just like “nice things”’. ‘I shall have a garden one day,’ Mansfield wrote to her husband John Middleton Murry four months........

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