The planting of an imaginative seed

The imagined gardens within the pages of our favourite books can seem as real as the flower beds outside our door. Here, author Sandra Lawrence explores three evocative literary landscapes

I guess my main preoccupations at 16 were just trying to stay out of trouble. I was incredibly unsuccessful with finding girlfriends and things like that. Really, very, very unsuccessful. I think I wa

Ian McEwan is strolling through the garden of his Cotswolds manor house. Bees waft drowsily between wildflowers. Plump apples, pears and walnuts bauble the trees. Vibrant cerulean-blue damselflies hov

The piece I’d never part with

Novels, for me, have come from somewhere I wasn’t looking. In my twenties I was carrying an idea about a woman wandering around Ireland on a quest she didn’t understand and I sat in the Reading Room o

L If they’re ever looking to recruit spies, forget handsome, fit, blue-eyed Bonds. Forget gym-buffed Daniel, impossibly good-looking Tom and danger magnet Matt. Look instead for a middle-aged woman in