Jojo Moyes
My gardening world
Best-selling novelist Jojo Moyes hit the big time in 2012 with Me Before You, which was later adapted into a highly successful film starring Emilia Clarke. Formerly a newspaper journalist, her books have now sold 38 million copies worldwide and have been translated into 46 languages. She lives in Essex and London.
What’s your garden like?
We moved to our house in the country seven years ago and it’s got several acres of formal garden, a vegetable garden, an orchard and lawns. At first I thought I would get rid of the vegetable garden as it was enormous, but then I restored the borders and layout and it became the place I loved the most.
Who has inspired your gardening?
My mother was a passionate gardener and could tell you the Latin name for everything. That’s when I miss her the most; you could point to anything in the garden and she would know the name for it. She helped me restore the vegetable garden – if I have gardening genes, they come from her.
In Me Before You, the character Camilla says “you only appreciate a garden once you reach a certain age” – is that what you’ve found yourself? As you get older, you understand the fullness of things dying down and growing up again. It has resonance in middle life, especially when people around you are dying, or if you’re raising children.
Do you draw inspiration for your writing from being outdoors?
When I was writing The Giver of Stars,
I lived in a cabin in a valley in Kentucky to experience which plants were growing when and what it felt like to be in that place. Those women would have spent their whole lives on that mountain, so it was important to smell the same smells and see the same things as they would have.
Gardens are a symbol of life and renewal in your books – is that something you’ve found yourself?
I am an entirely emotional person: I feel things very deeply. And when you’ve been through the things we’ve all been through recently it peels away a layer of skin. In lockdown I suddenly understood the garden in a whole new way – all those small things that might otherwise have escaped me suddenly became immensely important. How impossible it would have been to get through lockdown without a garden.
■ Someone Else’s Shoes (Michael Joseph, £22) by Jojo Moyes is out now in hardback