The Gardener

Product Information

It’s a job too big for one person, so Hassie hires an Albanian migrant who has broken up with his English wife to help her. As her plants in window boxes start to bloom and even radishes, onions and lettuce emerge to decorate the building windows, Lydia Grace becomes known by her new nickname - the gardener. After that, the book was self-published with the help of a successful crowdfunding campaign, which pre-sold books and other goodies to help fund the cost of publication. Hassie plans to live there permanently, but Margot, who has a job in the city, will simply visit on weekends or stay over when she needs a respite from London life.

Salley Vickers’ The Gardener is an easy-going, almost old-fashioned, story about a woman moving to the Shropshire countryside to begin a new life. The Gileses had no children of their own and I became a kind of surrogate child to them and with that role came a shared love of gardens. Some have a troubling past, while others have ignited human creativity or enabled whole civilizations to flourish. Finding it rather a large task, she asks for the help of Murat, an Albanian refugee, who has largely been ‘made to feel out of place amongst the locals’. Michael kept his secret most loyally, but Helen, as usual, explained the fact to her friends; which when Michael heard, he raged.No, there is some semblance of a story as regards Hass settling down, and some indication of a kind of fairy legacy regarding the building and its environs, but nothing that ever gels into the form of a decent story. They have a passionate long relationship that is only able to be maintained on the sly, as Robert is married and has no intention of leaving his wife. It is a novel whose ethical concern is inextricable from the context of the pandemic during which it was writtenIn 1625 Francis Bacon described gardens as “the purest of human pleasures”.

She admitted that George had always been rather a black sheep, but things might have been much worse if the mother had insisted on her right to keep the boy. She won a state scholarship to St Paul’s Girl’s School and went on to read English at Newnham College Cambridge. She climbed a few woodenfaced earthen steps and then met the entire crowded level of the thing in one held breath. Vickers is an author whose work I tend to enjoy, and whom I feel is rather underrated in the sea of contemporary British authors. It seems to have an answer to all of life’s great questions and is also an incredible journey through the generations of different families.

Because it's always best to tell the truth", Helen answered, her arm round him as he shook in his cot.

When Lydia Grace discovers a way up to the roof of the building, she begins working on a rooftop garden that she hopes will bring a smile to the face of her solemn Uncle Jim. In her letters she informs her Mama, Papa and Grandma that she will start to tend plants in window boxes in the city and she thanks her family for sending her seed catalogs and flower bulbs that she will use in preparing her garden. Little time is spent developing Murat’s character and the descriptions of him often speak to stereotypes: he is cautious, diligent, deferential and mostly silent; he has ‘dazzling teeth’ and ‘topaz eyes’, uses formal language and misunderstands British idioms. It was put down near the Salient, where it led a meritorious and unexacting life, while the Somme was being manufactured; and enjoyed the peace of the Armentières and Laventie sectors when that battle began. Hassie feels realistic and fully-formed, and part of this is due to the sense of humour which Vickers sculpts for her.

He was everything to me that he oughtn't to have been - the real thing - the only thing that ever happened to me in all my life; and I've had to pretend he wasn't.