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The Morville Hours: The Story of a Garden…
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The Morville Hours: The Story of a Garden (2008 original; edición 2009)

por Katherine Swift (Autor)

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2167124,225 (4.11)23
In 1988 Katherine Swift arrived at the Dower House at Morville to create a garden of her own. This beautifully written, utterly absorbing book is the history of the many people who have lived in the same Shropshire house, tending the same soil, passing down stories over the generations. Spanning thousands of years, The Morville Hours takes the form of a medieval Book of Hours. It is a meditative 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.… (más)
Miembro:cctesttc1
Título:The Morville Hours: The Story of a Garden
Autores:Katherine Swift (Autor)
Información:Bloomsbury Publishing PLC (2009), 384 pages
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The Morville Hours por Katherine Swift (2008)

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This was our latest Gardening book club choice, one I have tried to read before and not got very far with. Being a book club choice means I persevered with it and I am glad I did.

Katherine Swift was a rare-book librarian at Trinity in Dublin and her husband, Ken, a bookseller in Oxford. In order to lure her back to this country, they found a house where she could make a garden and Moreville House ended up being the lucky recipient of Katherine's thoughtful research and reading about gardens.

This isn't a garden book that will tell you what to do with sandy soil or which plants to use in shade, rather a very site specific treatise about the land, its people, history and geology with some botany thrown in for good measure. It is the sort of book that has a range of information that you could bring out on a quiz night and astound everyone such as the country name for daffodils is Lenten lily because they bloom in the liturgical season of lent or that there were 38 vineyards in Britain before the Romans arrived. The climate then was that of a warming one and so we are now and have vineyards again.

The book is structured around a book of hours used by the Benedictine monks who used to live on the land. It is a book of prayers for the different times of the day and so works neatly to fit the months of the year and for each 'prayer' or chapter to be a reflection and meditation upon the garden and how it ended up being there at that time of the year. In fact the structure is like that of a formal garden, neat, clipped hedging in the form of the times of prayer or seasons but inside each season or prayer there is a lushness and a billowing out of plants and people, history and geology. As readers, we are reading Swift's reading of the landscape and it anchors her to the land and the garden.

I have seen it written that the book is a journey of self-exploration or that it is part memoir but all of these seem a generous description of the nuggets of her life that we are allowed to peep at behind the plants. Her writing about the garden is rich and descriptive with perhaps some of the longest sentences I have ever read, there are a lot of colons and semi-colons, but the writing about her family is greatly contrasted: short, spare, often tense or terse and never ever with any sense of her feelings about the situations other than love for her father. The nearer we get to the end of the book, the more she says until at last she explains that she has tried to tell the story of 'why I am as I am'. She mentions friends and local people often, but of her husband there is little other than his understanding about her need to make a garden until she says that in 2008 the lease on the property would be due and they thought they would go and make a garden by the sea. She then says that he left before that and I was left wondering whether their marriage was over, had he died, did he have Alzheimers? As a reader, you have to do a lot of the heavy work about her life which is in complete contrast to reading about the garden. She has definitely done all the hard work there.

The writing is wonderful but at times a little too rich. I couldn't sit down and just read, I had to parcel the book up and read it bit by bit, a certain amount each day so that I didn't tire of it. She has very clear sentence patterns and once I had found them, I couldn't stop noticing them. There are wonderful images,

The cat flap in the kitchen door lifts open, horizontal: the cats flatten their ears and narrow their eyes before breasting the tide of freezing air like Christmas Day swimmers taking the plunge.
p62

and the idea of a Norman deed to the house, parchment paper with formal language, dense with contractions and suspensions and conditions 'like an airline ticket to another world.

She is big on the idea of 'threeness'

Only in the eighteenth century did Morville attain that sort of stability: Morville's was a tale of lost heirs, heirs defrauded, heirs dead before their time; of childless couples, bachelor uncles; of a succession that zigzagged, backtracked, skipped generations; of a house eventually surplus to requirements, bought and sold; its library, archives, contents all scattered
p94

She is a lister, with all sorts of ways of listing

Pippins and pearmains, costards and codlins, leathercoats and russets; silver and white, rose-pink and carmine, pearly grey and apple green - the apple blossom of old England, now in flower once more in the gardens of Morville: Geneting and Gillyflower, Calville and Catshead, Quining and Quarrenden, the branches clustered with flowers like posies carried by school children.
p151

Yes, there are parts that are overwritten and could have been edited a bit more firmly but Swift is a wordsmith and I greatly enjoyed that element of her writing.

There were also sections that spoke to me as a gardener. The challenges of knowing when a pear is ripe, 'my pears are a mystery to me. We just don't speak the same language', and the temptations of seed catalogues

First to list the seed saved or unused from last year. Then to list what new seed needs to be bought. And then, only then, cautiously, to open the catalogues, with their honeyed promises of shapes and tastes and smells; their coloured photographs of laden baskets and ripe pods, purple aubergines and ruby chard; yellow flowers of courgette and soft sweet flesh of parsnip; leeks like thighs and lettuces like the frilled red skirts of cancan dancers; flowers like butterflies, like birds, as blue as lapis lazulis, as dark as bitter chocolate. And every year, despite my resolutions, I fall, succumbing to their thousand-and-one temptations and ordering far more than I need.
p63

I know this is a bit over-the-top, leeks like thighs is not an image that works for me or all the birds and butterflies, but I do understand that feeling of wanting to try everything and believing everything the catalogue descriptions and photos tell me.

This will not be an easy book to discuss in book club. I can't think of questions that can be asked of it and us as readers. I do want to follow-up on any thoughts others might have about the sort of person Swift might be based on the little information that we got in the book. Swift is an expert in reading the land and I wonder if we can read the landscape of the allotments in the same way. What do we know about its geology, history and people? ( )
  allthegoodbooks | Feb 6, 2024 |
A fascinating book, beautifully written. ( )
  LouieAndTheLizard | Oct 21, 2022 |
I picked this up in a charity shop thinking it was a historical novel, perhaps along the lines of Rumer Godden's "China Court". But instead it's a beautifully written account of how the author made a garden, practically from scratch, for the National Trust, recreating older styles of garden within it. (I'm still intrigued as to how she achieved this massive project when she had no money; this is never explained. Magic?) Actually, on a re-read, I noticed it is explained, but in a very throwaway fashion!
Horticulture, geology, history, family memories, local lore and much more besides make a glorious pot-pourri, or perhaps a patchwork quilt, of a book, based around the monastic Hours or services throughout the day.
Other books about making gardens sprang to mind, notably "Memory in a House" by Lucy Boston, and also "A Garden in My Life" by Cynthia Ramsden, about a garden in North Derbyshire.
Then occurred one of those synchronicities or happenstances: the very next book I picked up, completely unrelated, featured a family called Morville on the very first page ("The Heir of Redclyffe" by Charlotte M Yonge). As my dear departed brother might have said "Th'art entering the Twiglet Zone, tha knows".
  PollyMoore3 | Nov 23, 2017 |
The Morville Hours by Katie Swift

In August 1988 Katie Swift and her husband moved in to The Dower House, Morville. They arrived with two removal vans of books, three cats, and two car loads of plants. Up until that time Katie was Keeper of Early Printed Books in the library of Trinity College, Dublin. Her husband had a bookshop in Oxford, and Swift was commuting back to Oxford at weekends. "Morville was his plan to get (her) home." Although closer than Dublin, Morville is in Shropshire, up against the Welsh border.

From the garden of the Dower House one can see the church clock tower, and hear the bells as they strike the quarters and the hours, and ring for the rituals of the church. The church had been built in the early twelfth century by monks of the Benedictine Abbey of Shrewsbury, and then in 1138 permission was granted to build a priory there. The priory is long gone, a casualty of the Reformation, and it is no longer known exactly where the buildings stood. A Roman road passes nearby, and there is evidence of much older habitation. Digging the ground in her new garden Swift would find traces of previous occupants of the land: flints, pipes, glass and pottery. Among her neighbours were people who remembered the old village families and the agrarian practices now on the edge of extinction.

Swift set out to research the history of Morville, back to the creation of the landscape, the reasons for the variation in soil and rock, forward through the lives of various people who would have had a material influence on the estate. She then created a series of gardens together making a coherent whole, but individually planted especially for some previous inhabitant, with plants and planting style appropriate to the style, period, and interests of the selected people.

Books of Hours were produced for the laity throughout the Middle Ages, an abbreviated, portable version of the Hours of The Divine Office which, though pre-dating him, were codified by St Benedict in his rule, a practical guide to monastic life. The prayers, psalms, hymns and readings appropriate to the monastic hours change through the year, and thus books of hours also operate like calendars, with their illustrations showing the activities appropriate to the month; both the day and the year are measured and divided. There are seven Day Hours, plus Vigils, the Night Office, also, confusingly, known as Matins. The length of the 'Hours' would change with the seasons.

Swift's book follows the same division, with the chapters being named for the Hours, moving forward from Vigils, celebrated at 2 a.m., the vigil before dawn, Te deum laudamus, when one would consider the day ahead, - January, the begining of the year and of the garden, the inquiry into the oldest inhabitaants, through to Compline, celebrated at 9pm, the word derived from the Old French meaning 'complete', a time of facing the dark at the end of the day before retiring to bed. Nunc dimittis - now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace. December, the present. As the hours construct the day so the hours of Swift's book track the creation of her garden, the seasons of the year, the history of the previous owners, the history of the plants or planting styles they would have used. Along the way she discusses calendars, time, celestial bodies, classical mythology, changes in farming methods and gardening styles over the years and our relationship with nature. Every once and a while fragments of her own family history.

I had resisted this book for a long time, fearing I was just succumbing to the clever cover design, but it was a fascinating and inspiring read. It is lifted above the dry by Swift's extraordinary passion for her subject and her lyrical imaginative descriptions. She has an unashamedly childlike enthusiasm for her plants. The windows and door of the house are frequently thrown wide open all year round so that she can smell the garden. She gets down on her hands and knees to snuffle at low lying scented flowers. Towards the end of the book I began to wish that Swift's descriptions would occasionally be less imaginative, but I think that was just because I read so slowly the richness of the language was becoming occasionally too much. Definitely one to keep.
2 vota Oandthegang | Jan 22, 2015 |
I felt that what this author really wanted to write about was her parents and in particular her father. These were the parts of this book which I think I enjoyed the most. This is a very detailed gardening book about the way the author constructed a garden in a property in Shropshire, England which she and her husband Ken had taken a lease on for 20 years. I found it unbelievable that one would put so much effort into a garden which one didn't own.

I appreciated both the map of Shropshire and the map of the garden which were at the front of the book.
  louis69 | Nov 17, 2014 |
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In 1988 Katherine Swift arrived at the Dower House at Morville to create a garden of her own. This beautifully written, utterly absorbing book is the history of the many people who have lived in the same Shropshire house, tending the same soil, passing down stories over the generations. Spanning thousands of years, The Morville Hours takes the form of a medieval Book of Hours. It is a meditative 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.

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