How do authors’ gardens inspire them?

When Henry James moved to Lamb House in the Sussex coastal town of Rye, he admitted that he could hardly tell a dahlia from a mignonette: ‘I am hopeless about the garden, which I don’t know what to do with and shall never, never know – I am densely ignorant.’ He sought advice from the artist and designer Alfred Parsons and fortunately Lamb House already had a gardener, George Gammon, to do all the work. When Gammon won prizes at local horticultural shows, James was delighted: he was a vicarious gardener, more comfortable at his desk in the Garden Room than with his hands in the soil.

Thomas Hardy was at the other end of the gardening spectrum. Born in Dorset in the thatched cottage at Higher Bockhampton that his grandfather built, he grew up helping in the kitchen garden and orchard, trading apples for access to books with a friend whose father was a bookseller in Dorchester.