cover image The Ghost in the Garden: In Search of Darwin’s Lost Garden

The Ghost in the Garden: In Search of Darwin’s Lost Garden

Jude Piesse. Scribe, $28 (336p) ISBN 978-1-950354-76-4

“If a place can be said to follow a man, then the garden at The Mount followed Darwin to the last,” writes Piesse (British Settler Emigration in Print), an English literature lecturer at Liverpool John Moores University, in this intimate look at Charles Darwin’s garden. Skillfully blending memoir and biography, Piesse explains that her relationship with the garden began unexpectedly, during a 15–month teaching stint in Shropshire, England, where her residence abutted the property of Darwin’s childhood home, the Mount. The garden there captured her imagination while she started a family and plotted a career in academia, though studying the garden plot changed her intended course, as she found herself researching both the illustrious family who cultivated it and the history of the land itself. Piesse shows the place as Darwin’s first classroom: Gardens’ “human-sized range, as Darwin knew, enable us to face nature on a scale we are psychologically equipped to handle.” It was also the venue in which Darwin’s eldest sister imparted a “lasting influence” on him via gardening lessons, and in his old age, Piesse writes, Darwin “chose to return to his earliest haunt.” The result is an original take on a giant of science. (Nov.)