Every time he appears on the programme we feel that life is worth living. He has that power to lift your spirits.

Exquisite and original

A gentle, scholarly progress through the lives and works of Penelope Lively's favoured authors - from Jane Austen to Beatrix Potter, Philip Larkin to Tom Stoppard

Enchanting. Reading this book is like walking with a wise, humorous guide through a series of garden rooms . . . and finding that vistas suddenly open out, on to history, fashion, politics, reflections on time and the taming of nature

Lively finds memories of her own gardens scrambling like roses through insights into the history of gardening and the artists - including Woolf, Monet and PG Wodehouse - who have been inspired by their gardens

Delightful

Elegant, entertaining and inspirational

The perfect book for dedicated garden lovers

A blossoming triumph

[An] engaging history... All sorts of people found solace in creating small regions of abundance and fertility, a counter to the annihilating wastefulness of war.

[A Green And Pleasant Land is] this year's most stimulating work of Horticultural History...an exhaustively researched, possibly definitive, and occasionally myth-dispelling account of the role of gardeners, amateur and professional, in World War II.

Fascinating . . . [Buchan’s] narrative, together with a collection of well-researched first-hand accounts, takes us on a journey that starts with 1930s Britain (where gardens and allotments had little significance in everyday life), through the war years that encouraged every citizen to grow their own and provide for their families. It ends with what happened in the desperate post-war years that saw potatoes and bread being rationed. An absorbing read.

Buchan has done a lot of work to show how gardening became a war time survival tool . . . Powerful

In this unpretentious account of Britain's wartime gardeners, Ursula Buchan gently celebrates the dogged determination of characters such as... middle-class ladies who taught the rudiments of gardening in draughty village halls; park superintendents and professional gardeners employed by country house estates, who transformed rose gardens into fields of maize and herbaceous borders into cabbage patches; ...horticulturalists who improved compost and researched the most productive vegetable strains; hard-pressed nurserymen who gave up selling more profitable ornamental plants for vegetables; and professional gardeners, who watched the young men they had trained go off to war.