Even when Elizabeth’s guests are dear friends such as the irrepressible Irais, their very presence keeps her from being able to run out into the garden and hide with a book. Many of them try to sympathise with her for living so far from the city and are completely unable to appreciate the joy of a well-stocked library and a beautiful garden. Her social position obliges her to welcome guests and be a gracious hostess, but she finds her courtesy tested to the limit whenever she has visitors.

She loves her children but is under no illusions about them, deploring their tendency to dip their fingers in her inkpots when she’s trying to write, and despairing at the ‘ miniature prize-fighter’s arms‘ of her youngest (‘ I shall certainly not be able to take her to balls when she grows up, if she goes on having arms like that‘).

With her tongue firmly in her cheek she reports her sorrows over cooks who see ghosts her frustration at gardeners who give notice on the first of every month and the pains of having impertinent governesses. Elizabeth’s poetic rhapsodies on her garden are woven in with a picture of her everyday life, which is reported with a scarcely-blunted rapier wit. You might be tempted to write this off as an angel-of-the-hearth style book written by a maternal Victorian lady gardener. Surrounded by her three beloved ‘babies’ and her cherished books, Elizabeth tells us that she is far happier now, in her self-imposed exile, than she was in the days when she was one of those ‘ eyeless and earless persons‘ who formed a cog in the great wheel of Society.

Like The Enchanted April, it is full of rapturous descriptions of nature, drawing a stark contrast between the ever-changing vista of a country garden and the stultifying, stifled view of life to be gained from living the ‘civilised’ life in a city. Presented in the form of a diary by the semi-autobiographical Elizabeth, it takes the reader through the span of a year in her beloved garden in Northern Germany, following her trials and errors in planting and her passionate appreciation of the way every season affects her little corner of the earth. After discovering Elizabeth von Arnim* through The Enchanted April, I was keen to read some more of her work and the natural next step was to find a copy of this book: her first novel, published in 1898.

Elisabeth and her german garden