Book clubs always get us reading books we wouldn’t normally pick up. That’s what happened with this short lyrical novel set in WW 2. It beautifully describes the horrors of war from the relative comfort and serenity of an idyllic English country farm, sort of like refracted light.
In the spring of 1941 Gwen Davis leaves the chaos of wartime London to go to Devon. There her new job is to tend a neglected garden at a country house and to take charge of some Land Girls. Their job is to grow potatoes for the war effort. There’s also a house full of handsome soldiers in the house up the lane and a white wisp of a ghost flitting about. Gwen Davis at age 35, is completely unprepared for this assignment because as a horticulturalist, she relates better to parsnips than people. “They are truly more reliable. The stupidity of vegetables is preferable to the unpredictability of people.” She discovers a lost garden, but also many things inside of herself that she never knew were there, like the capacity to love.
This is a beautifully written little gem by this Canadian author and poet, deceptively simple, subtly comic, yet with layers of depth.
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