A fascinating celebration of our love for all things horticultural, with a selection of garden-related entries from diaries, letters, and articles for every day of the year.

Garden Voices captures the past and present of gardening with dated, daily musings organized around the calendar year, bringing gardening and gardeners to life like never before. In this engaging anthology, readers are transported back in time—and often place—to witness rare horticultural glimpses. We find George Orwell, half-naked, digging his newly acquired rock-filled, “dry as a bone” garden on the Isle of Jura on May 25, 1946. On September 25, 1845, Emily Dickinson picks the last flowers of summer before Jack Frost gets them. In New Mexico, Georgia O’Keeffe reveals to her New York–based lover Alfred Stieglitz that she has just discovered the joy of gardening. 

Key figures – from Samuel Pepys to Charles Darwin and Sigmund Freud, QueenVictoria to Virginia Woolf and Germaine Greer – feature alongside much-lovedgardeners, such as Gertrude Jekyll, Margery Fish and Claude Monet, as well aslesser-known but no-less inspiring garden writers, including Eleanor Vere Boyleand Celia Thaxter, whose writing will be a revelation to many.

Whether tinged with emotion or filled with character and humor, strikingly evocative or thought-provoking, these daily thoughts remind us that gardeners are all connected by a timeless invisible thread. With several selections for each day, from January 1 to December 31, this book is a true celebration of horticulture, and is the perfect gift for the gardener or garden lover in your life. Garden Voices brings joy, comfort, a gladdening sense of affinity, and—much like gardening itself—moments of awe and inspiration.

About The Author

Claire Masset is the author of the best-selling Secret Gardens of the National Trust, as well as other books on gardens and social history. Her most recent book, Why We Garden (2023), was published by Batsford. She currently works as publisher for the National Trust; she writes and gardens in her spare time. Her journalism has appeared in BBC Homes & Antiques, Gardens Illustrated, Art Quarterly, and The English Garden. Claire lives in Oxfordshire.