I love snowdrops. Just when January seems endless and grey, the snowdrop appear — a magical all day frost. These were taken during an afternoon *ahem* skipping work when Mr S and I went walking at Kingston Lacey. Kingston Lacey is a fabulous country house in North Dorset, a seventeenth century stately home, more palace than manor. I’ve always loved it – especially after I read Viola Banks memoirs of growing up in the house in the ’20s. I read it when I was nine or ten and stomped about the house when we came to visit, pretending I was Viola and wishing that all the pesky tourists would leave me in peace.

In the last few years they’ve been doing lots of work to the gardens – which even in the depths of winter are rather spectacular.

This is the Kingston Lacey version of a summerhouse — the summerhouse itself is quite similare to ours, only the stately mansion behind is a little grander than our cottage/ hovel.

And then walking in the woods on the way to tea (if only every walk had macaroons and cheese scones at the end) Mr S spied this door into a tree and what we can only presume to be a Hobbit Hole.

Here is a photo of a windswept Dorset seascape near Tyneham… no wonder I was inspired to write a novel set here.

Burt's Tyneford cottage

And here is a picture of the real-life Landau girls, taken in Berlin in the 1920s.

Gerda, Gabi, Margot

My grandmother Margot is the eldest.

The US version of ‘The Novel in the Viola’ is now published by Plume and is currently at no 17 on the Indiebound bestseller chart! Hurray. I love, love this cover.

We’ve just ordered our Christmas tree/ Channuka bush from
Bulbarrow Hill, but I’m wondering if we shouldn’t have made one of these instead. Would help with the whole book storage problem…

What books would you like in your book tree? Some of the books I’ve loved this year are: Elif Batuman ‘The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People who Read them’ — part memoir, part surrealist comedy, part literary critique. I loved the atmosphere Andrew Miller’s ‘Pure‘ (a foul smelling fug seemed to hang over me as I read) as well as the language — the things that man can do with a sentence. I adored Alexandra Harris’s ‘Romantic Moderns‘ — a fascinating journey through the first part of this century’s literature and art in Britain as well as an investigation about Englishness itself. I fell in love with Billy Collins through his best of collection ‘Taking Emily Dickinson’s Clothes off’ and now need to read his other poetry books. He combines humour and pathos and the poet’s grasp language — ah shuddering perfection. I read his poem on ‘Marginalia’ at formal hall in Cambridge — these stanzas went down particularly well:

And if you have managed to graduate from college
without ever having written “Man vs. Nature”
in a margin, perhaps now
is the time to take one step forward.

We have all seized the white perimeter as our own
and reached for a pen if only to show
we did not just laze in an armchair turning pages;
we pressed a thought into the wayside,
planted an impression along the verge.

(I did not graduate from college without having written man v nature in the margins of several books…)

What did you particularly enjoy this year? Feel free to share in the comments below!

ploughing near ansty

I love autumn. Somehow it sends me back to my childhood and those seemingly endless days spent walking through the woods with the smell of leaf litter and the hope that lurking somewhere amongst the yellow beech leaves is a chanterelle. I spent so many weekends as a girl hunting for mushrooms with my grandparents and my parents. When you find a good spot, you check back every year, hoping they’ll come again and you never, ever tell.

These are some parasole mushrooms we found in a field in Dorset.

parasol mushrooms on the kitchen table

Guest post by Mr S

Sometimes stories come to you in a flash, sometimes you have to stand on a cliff for yonks and stare moodily into the middle distance, and then there are stories such as ‘Not Another Happy Ending,’ a screenplay about a quirky young novelist, her deadbeat screenwriter boyfriend, a roguish publisher, and a very late manuscript. It would be too easy to say that one morning I simply looked across the breakfast table and there, behind the box of organic muesli, one finger of toast poised with characteristic elegance above her dippy egg, it came to me – I shall rip off my wife’s career! It would be too easy to say that, but it wouldn’t exactly be wrong. In my defence, what’s the point of being married if you can’t turn your spouse into a screenplay (‘to love, honour and adapt’ was actually one of our vows). So, thanks to the towering efforts of producer, Claire Mundell, and director, John McKay, casting for said film has just been announced. You can read all about it at the link, but the exciting news is that we’ve landed the combined talents of Karen Gillan (Doctor Who) and Emun Elliot (Game of Thrones, Black Death, and Ridley Scott’s forthcoming Prometheus). More to come, once I’ve had a lie down.

http://www.screendaily.com/news/production/karen-gillan-emun-elliott-to-star-in-not-another-happy-ending/5030411.article

David Solomons is a screenwriter who is sometimes allowed to share the summerhouse with his wife, Natasha.

Each year my mum grows sweet peas. I remember before we lived in the countryside full time and in the days before Carol used to grow her own, she’d go a little crazy whenever we passed a ramshackle road side stall selling a miserly handfull of dusty stems. She’d cry out ‘sweet peas, stop, Clive, Stop!’  My dad would swerve, break and hand my mum whatever exorbitant fee the flower seller demanded. I understood: sweet peas are beyond price. For me they remain the smell of childhood summers.

Since moving to Dorset and starting her garden, Carol has grown sweet peas every summer. Some (braver than me) might say she grows them slightly obsessively. Every year she panics that she has not started enough seeds and so buys some seedlings too, just in case. She now has three vast wigwams of sweet peas. Some are the classic summer pastels — pink, white, blue, lilac — but she has nurtured some unusual variegated varieties, my favourite is a ink-blot, leopard-spot black.

This is from a single cutting session -- it looked like we had barely cut any

If you’re out and about in London over the next week, keep an eye out for these gorgeous posters for ‘The Novel in the Viola’. Mr S and I made a pilgrimage to Baker Street to see this one and I was quite excited as I think you can tell…

I am slightly behind in replying to comments and e-mails so if you’ve written to me and not heard back, I will do my best to reply next week. I really appreciate your notes and comments and I promise that I will get back to you.

garden at the Old Smithy

My mum, Carol, is a fantastic and passionate gardener, and it’s she who helps me with all horticultural references in my books. I love writing about nature but without a little nudge my peonies would be blooming alongside my primroses, and my lilac would be lovely in July. (Yes, I felt you gardeners shudder).

Sadie’s garden in ‘Mr R’ is inspired by  Carol’s (though Sadie is far more tolerant of weeds and don’t even ask what Carol does to the deer who dare to eat her roses). I’ve watched as over a decade my parents have turned a couple of fields into an idyllic English cottage garden. There is a riotous herbaceous border filled with giant alliums (mum calls them ‘space rockets’), poppies, hellebores, irises, lilies, roses, daisies, lupins and wigwams of Carol’s prized sweat-peas. The striped lawns roll down to a stream, and a bridge leads to a series of bog gardens and ponds — one white, one yellow, one blue — and paths lined with towering bamboo snake to a bench beneath a willow arbour.

Beyond the bog gardens and stream is a field full of grass and wild flowers through which my dad, Clive, has carefully mown a series of paths. There are plantings of young trees — fruit trees and hard wood — and at the bottom lies the grandchildren’s pride: a secluded tree house. And, I can’t possibly discuss the garden without mentioning my dad’s favourite part of the garden: the veg patch. During the summer we enjoy his courgette flower risotto, lettuce plucked straight from the ground as well as home grown strawberries, raspberries, gooseberries, black-currants…

From the garden you can see both the thatched cottage which inspired Jack and Sadie’s home as well as Bulbarrow hill. If you have enough cider, you might even see the flags of Jack’s golf course or the tail of a woolly-pig.

For two days this summer Carol and Clive are opening the garden as part of the National Garden’s scheme and are featured in The Yellow Book (if you don’t know what the yellow book is, just make sure you say it in hushed and reverent tones).

‘The Old Smithy’ garden, Ibberton, Dorset,  is open on Sunday 19th of June and Wednesday 22nd of June between 2-5.30pm. Admission is £3 (children free) and all proceeds go to charity. There are plants for sale and cream teas will be served at Ibberton Village Hall. The postcode for your sat nav is DT11 0EN

I will be there collecting tickets and failing to answer questions about plants.

Leave a comment below if you need further details.

my hair's neat and everything...

I decided to go all out and dressed up in full-on ’30s glam. My dad did a double take, and my mum said that I looked just like old photos of my grandma.

That's my dad at the front, smiling

The Viola party at the Grosvenor House Hotel was so much fun. Thanks so much to everyone who came along and made it such a special night. I did a reading and managed to say ‘brasserie’ instead of ‘brassiere’…

Marcus played Jeff Rona’s viola waltz so beautifully — I had tingles.  And you can get the full version on itunes:

At the end of the night, I’d had so much fun, I didn’t want to take out my hair pins and go to bed…