The Morville Hours

"The book takes the reader on a journey through time, from 1988 when the author arrived to make a new garden of her own, back to the forces which shaped the garden, telling the story of the soil and the streams which nurture it, linking the stories of those who lived in the same Shropshire house and tended the same red Shropshire soil with the stories of those who live and work there today. It is a story which spans thousands of years. But is also the story of one life: of relationships tested to breaking point, of illness, despair and loss as well as joy. It is a journey through the seasons, but also a journey of self-exploration, about beginning to understand oneself and one's past. It is a book about finding one's place in the world, and putting down roots. "The Morville Hours" takes the form of the medieval "Book of Hours", recalling the monastic past of the house. Each chapter is named after one of the Hours of the Divine Office, and summons vividly to life an hour of the day or night in the garden of today and in the gardens of the past, from the crunch of grass underfoot at midnight on a frosty New Year's Eve, to the drip of trees in a melancholy March dawn; from a perfumed May Day morning when the whole world seems sixteen again, to the enervating heat of a Midsummer noon; from the bloom of blue-black damsons picked on a golden September afternoon, to the smell of holly and ivy cut in the dusk of a rainy Christmas Eve. Together they describe the arc of the gardening year, and the arc of a life, from darkness into the light and from the light back into the darkness once more"--Publisher's description.