Cultivating the human spirit against the odds
It doesn’t sound like a compelling plot but the book is full of surprises. The author is a wonderful writer who can describe country life with the passion of a Thoreau and the humour of a Bill Bryson. In a former existence, he was a successful advertising copy writer. This is probably the most exacting of literary disciplines — though it seldom gets credit for it. To write a 30-second commercial for television or radio requires the same precision and economy with words as writing a 17th-century sonnet did. Woodward uses these skills to make the reader, in turn, happy, sad and enthralled.
The second surprise is that there’s little about gardening in the book. He does write movingly about gardens he knew in his childhood and about other people’s gardens.
