Grounding: Finding Home in a Garden
LULAH ELLENDER
(GRANTA, 304 PP, £16.99)
Tablet bookshop price £15.29 • tel 020 7799 4064

Why do people bother gardening? It is, often literally, back-breaking work. Unless you’re very skilled, a lot of what you try to grow will die. Any stuff that does grow, rarely grows the way you want it. Pests will eat your garden; weather will batter it; neighbours, you can be sure, will sneer at it. (Have you ever been to those events where ordinary people open up their gardens for charity? A tsunami of criticism, plus cake.) You’d think gardening would be an exercise in despair. And yet, most often, it offers hope.

This is the main message of Lulah Ellender’s book, a memoir of a year spent grieving the death of her much-loved mother, while fearing imminent eviction from her family’s rented house in a Sussex market town, and all the time tending the large, mildly chaotic garden at its rear.