Meet Sarah

Writer in the Garden was originally started by me, Sarah Salway, back in 2011 when I was appointed Canterbury Laureate. I began it as a way of documenting my creative exploration of the many beautiful gardens in Kent, my home county, and this resulted in my book, Digging Up Paradise: Potatoes, People and Poetry in the Garden Of England. Since then, I’ve explored gardens in London, Florence, America, St Lucia and even Uganda on here.

Growing up, my childhood home had a garden that was open to the public, and my mother, Elizabeth Peplow, was a garden historian, designing herb gardens for many of the cathedrals in England. And like her, it always the eccentric, the extraordinary and the overlooked elements of the gardens we visited together to were the most fascinating. This certainly proved a rich foundation for my own fiction and creative writing.