I have now finished reading the Morville Hours which I quoted from in my post yesterday.  So what did I think of it?

Synopsys (from book cover):

Katherine Swift takes the reader on a journey through time, back to the forces which shaped the garden, linking the history of those who lived in the same Shropshire house and tended the same red soil with the stories of those who live and work there today. It is an account which spans thousands of years. But is also the story of one of one life: of relationships tested to breaking point, of despair and loss as well as joy and achievement. It is a journey through the seasons, but also a journey of self-exploration. It is a book about finding one’s place in the world and putting down roots.

Review:

The book is very elegantly written with beautiful prose, it deserves to be read slowly so you can take it all in and feel the wonderful atmosphere.  The book is all about time and the garden and how the author made a new garden for the Dower House at Morville when she moved in and leased it off The National Trust in 1988.

The chapters are structured according to the medieaval Books of Hours and each chapter is named after one of the Hours of the Divine Office. The book includes line drawings that are styled like illustrations in the Books of hours.

It describes life in the rural Shropshire countryside and includes many interesting and fascinating topics such as gardening, astronomy, language, religion, horticulture, beekeeping and the history of Morville and the surrounding Shropshire countryside. It is also part autobiography.

It is well worth a read for anyone who enjoys the countryside and gardens or who has a love of lyricl prose.

This  good article from TimesOnline gives a bit of background information about Katherine and the garden.

The wearing of scarlet poppies and the laying of poppy wreaths on Remembrance Day dates from 1921, though the sheets of poppies which covered the battlefields of France and Flanders had been remarked on as early as the summer of 1915, the first summer after the war began. An anonymous poem appeared in the pages of Punch for that year which was to be reprinted around the world:

In Flanders fields the poppies grow
Between the crosses, row on row…

The old Somerset name for them was ’soldiers’. At the outbreak of World War 1 Britain was still largely and agricultural nation, and poppies in all their frailty, their scattered petals like drops of blood among the harvested corn, must always have been suggestive of spilt blood and sacrifice, the necessity of death for the continuity of life, the duty to remember. For these are not the poppies of oblivion (Papaver somniferum, the source of opium, morphine and heroin), bu Papaver rhoeas, the field poppy, which springs up wherever soil is cultivated or disturbed, each plant producing perhaps a dozen flowers, each flower producing a seed head, each seed head containing thousands of seeds, each seed viable for eighty or a hundred years – waiting for the right conditions to germinate. Like the websites now which enable one to search for the fallen of the two world wars, each site filled with innumerable small facts, each fact inconsiderable in itself, one hardly distinguishable from the next, each biding its time until it is found by the person who seeks it, waiting for the time when it will germinate in the mind, like a poppy seed.