The forgotten garden that inspired Charles Darwin becomes the modern-day setting for an exploration of memory, family, and the legacy of genius.
Darwin’s childhood garden at The Mount in Shrewsbury was the site of some of the great scientist’s earliest experiments. It was where, under the tutelage of his green-fingered mother and sisters, and the house’s knowledgeable gardeners, he first examined the reproductive life of flowers, collected birds’ eggs, and began to note down the ideas that would lead to his groundbreaking theory of evolution.
In The Ghost in the Garden, Jude Piesse uncovers the lost histories that inspired Darwin’s work and how his legacy, and the legacies of those around him, live on today.
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‘[Q]uirky [and] gloriously unclassifiable … Ms. Piesse’s The Ghost in the Garden, with its many asides, intensely personal stories, and sometimes delightfully unrelated material … offers a radiant literary analogue for such botanical unpredictability.’
" - The Wall Street Journal
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‘What is special about The Ghost in the Garden is the combination of research with an empathetic imagination that enables Piesse to show how much Darwin was influenced by the seven-acre estate over which he had roamed as a boy … Piesse is a conscientious reporter.’
" - Financial Times
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‘What is special about The Ghost in the Garden is the combination of research with an empathetic imagination that enables Piesse to show how much Darwin was influenced by the seven-acre estate over which he had roamed as a boy … Piesse is a conscientious reporter.’
" - Financial Times
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‘It’s very well written, a beautiful book.’
" - Trinity Biomedical Sciences Institute
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‘Skillfully blending memoir and biography … the result is an original take on a giant of science.’
" - Publishers Weekly
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‘Absorbing … Unexpected, fresh, and revealing … a joy.’
" - Literary Review
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‘Well written and well researched.’
" - Saga Magazine
