BOOK CLUB
“I knew what story I was telling – I didn’t map it all out”
“I was writing the chapter – chapter six, I think, a total immersion in the garden – from memory, and a few notes that I’d jotted down at the time. That was a very strange phase of the writing process: I’d been dreading going back to the garden in my writing, but it turned out to be a wonderful experience, writing my way more deeply into it. We needed to leave Switzerland, but it broke my heart to leave the garden. That was the most beautiful place on Earth, and we will never live somewhere like that again…” Beth had always wanted to write: in one of her previous past lives, as she calls them, she worked in academia, teaching and researching literature. Eventually, Beth phased herself out of studying and trained as a garden designer, qualifying and planning to set up a business at precisely the same point as her husband Shaun was offered the life-changing opportunity in Switzerland. For a short while, Beth mulled over the idea of starting a garden design business in their new locale, but soon discovered that her plant-led style wasn’t an easy match with the structured, design- focused Swiss approach to space creation. This led Beth back to writing, which she pursued wholeheartedly. “I started out planning a book on enclosed gardens, and the experience of enclosure – which I suppose came out of my design training – but I kept mulling it over, and writing bits and pieces around it, and just started thinking that this wasn’t my book, this wasn’t my story,” she says. “While I was grappling with the idea, this whole... story was happening in our life: the move to Switzerland, finding the garden – and the book gradually took shape. I never set out to write a memoir – it’s not something I planned to do, to make it so personal. That was quite an interesting thing to negotiate. Despite the impression you might get from the book, I’ve always considered myself to be quite a private person. It was an interesting process of discovery about myself.” There are some parallels to be drawn between the creative act of designing a garden and writing a book – or at least, Beth’s approach to both challenges. “I trained as a garden designer, but have always had some ambivalence about the
design process,” she explains. “When I was training, I learnt every garden designer worth their salt focuses on the space and the layout. I remember a tutor telling me – he was trying to provoke me, but he had a point – that plants are mere decoration: you do the design, and once you’ve mapped out everything on paper and done the architectural bits, then you can do your planting plan. But the key is the design. I loved learning about that, and doing the technical drawing and how to survey, to measure – and I’ve made gardens for other people in that way – but I’ve never been able to apply that to my own way of gardening. My primary passion has always been plants, and I can’t look at a space without thinking about plants first, which is what you’re not supposed to do when you’re designing. With the book – once I realised I was telling my story, and that I knew what story I was telling, I didn’t map it all out in an orderly way – I just started writing, and wrote from start to finish: so there are some parallels. It’s probably just that I’m undisciplined,” she laughs.
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