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INTERVIEW BY CHARLOTTE GRIFFITHS
FROM A FAMILY GARDEN IN SUSSEX TO THE SWISS JURA, WHERE THE HORNBEAM GROWS IS A MOVING MEMOIR ABOUT LOVE, LONELINESS AND THE HEALING POWER OF GARDENING WHERE THE HORNBEAM GROWS
B eth Lynch’s beautiful new book Where the Hornbeam Grows: A Journey in Search of a Garden evades easy categorisation: part memoir, part travelogue, part heartfelt nature writing, this evocative book is deeply reflective on the themes of memory, sense of place and how we choose to entangle ourselves (or not) with the world and people around us. The book follows the author from her parents’ home and exquisitely-drawn garden in Sussex to Switzerland, after her husband is offered a job there, and tracks her attempts to connect with her new country mates and possibly, maybe, begin to feel at home in
that unfamiliar land. Of course, the book is also so much more than this, covering loss, grief, growth – both personal and plant – and a whole heap of bewitchingly written descriptions of flora that’ll leave you making a beeline for the garden centre, scribbled Latin names in hand. Ironically, for a tale about putting down one’s roots, Beth was constantly travelling while creating her book. “The whole process was very disjointed,” she says. “I started writing while we still had the house in the Jura: I was sitting at my desk and looking out at the garden when I began. Most of it was written on the move: sometimes in London, in Zurich, in cafes –
a couple of key paragraphs were written at the steering wheel in the Channel Tunnel… It’s been a really itinerant process: but the writing was something that I found bizarrely rooting, or grounding. I feel like a bit of a fraud: I think writers are supposed to have a desk with everything in place, which they sit at every day – I haven’t achieved that yet!” she laughs. Interestingly, Beth was never residing in the places she was describing as she was writing about them. “I was writing about the Sussex garden while I was in the Jura: then a lot of the writing about our lovely country garden in Switzerland was done after we’d left it.
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