ONE YEAR AND ONE WEEK ago, my lifelong dream of being a published author finally came true! My debut novel, The Walled Garden, entered the world, kicking off an amazing year of opportunities and encounters I could never have imagined. I want to highlight some of them here, and to say thank [...]
And that sweet city with her dreaming spires . . . I SPENT TWO BLISSFUL DAYS in my spiritual home last month, and even though a shocking number of years (43!) has somehow gone by since my first visit to Oxford, I wrote in my journal, “Still as timelessly beautiful and moving [...]
IT'S THE PERFECT July afternoon and my head is full of flowers. Last weekend, I went a beautiful wedding on the grounds of a local winery that evoked the French countryside. The bride and groom were married under the most gorgeous arch of fresh flowers I’ve ever seen. Roses, delphiniums, ranunculus, nigella, [...]
AH, SPRING! THIS TIME of year, I walk around with Gerard Manley Hopkins’ lines beating in my head: Nothing is so beautiful as Spring— When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush . . . Though, as a gardener, I always think that if Hopkins had [...]
I'VE ALWAYS LIKED THE IDEA of one person giving another flowers that might appear to others to be just a casual bouquet, but with the power to communicate secrets only the recipient could understand. As I was writing The Walled Garden, I realized I needed a code that two gardeners might use [...]
It began with a bowl of beautiful reddish-gold plums and a question: are those damsons? The young woman behind the bar at one of my favorite places in the world, The Old Parsonage Hotel in Oxford, England, shrugged her shoulders and said she didn’t know. Why did I want to know about [...]
The Hermit of Eyton Forest(and others in the Brother Cadfael series) by Ellis Peters If you haven’t yet encountered the chronicles of Brother Cadfael, of the Benedictine Abbey of Saint Peter and Saint Paul at Shrewsbury, you have a huge treat in store for you! The twenty-book series follows the medieval monk’s [...]