Grounding: Finding home in a garden is my second memoir. It tells the story of a growing season in my garden in Sussex in the wake of my mother’s death and a threatened eviction. It’s about why we garden, how we can create a sense of home and belonging through tending plants and working the soil, and the connections between gardens and creativity. From local fêted gardens like Charleston and Sissinghurt, to the ruins of a seaside village, the book explores the human urge to create beauty.
The Observer called it ‘a literary hymn to gardening’ and the Daily Mail said it ‘Beautifully capture[s] just how important our own patch of ground is to our sense of identity’.
Here are some other reviews:
A deeply moving book that begins in shadow - with a recently-bereaved mother under threat of eviction - and becomes a light-seeking, hope-giving exploration of what it means to cultivate a garden, a life, a legacy, at a time when so many of us will forever rent, never own, the ground we hold dear. Exquisitely-written and full of tender feeling... It is a book like a secret garden, opening doors onto alternative ways of growing and grounding a life
-- Tanya Shadrick
We all make our little utopias in our gardens, our attempts to reclaim memories we never had, the futures we hope for implicit in seasons of growth. They are perpetually renewed, here too, in Lulah Ellender's elegant prose and her gathering of personal histories and defiant rites, as the author proposes that optimism which is the garden, our lives, our homes, our hopes, reborn again and again
-- Philip Hoare
There are turns of phrase to die for in GROUNDING, and I felt like I was given a guided tour through the gardens of others by Lulah's curious eye. .A much-needed book that offers a deep and moving insight on motherhood, letting go, and how our gardens can help us-- Alice Vincent, author of Rootbound
I read GROUNDING as I moved through a period of deep uncertainty; leaving my first garden to step towards a great unknown as a new mother with my small family in tow. Ellender's words delivered such solace; a quiet, soothing reminder that we make home through the way we spend our days - each season we pass through leaving its mark on us - allowing our story to unfurl. This story is one of resilience, honesty, hope and healing. Ellender leads us by the hand through all the gardens we both know and do not; reminding us that to sow is a way to carve a life out of uncertainty; to make room for the returning light, always -- Kerri ní Dochartaigh, author of The Thin Places
An intimate exploration of what it means to be rooted in place and of how a garden can become a safe haven in uncertain times -- Sue Stuart-Smith, author of The Well Gardened Mind
As Lulah sows, deadheads and weeds she explores her feelings of place and identity, fear and loss. A lyrical delve into how gardening literally roots us to places and helps us look towards an uncertain future with hope-- Kathy Clugston, presenter of BBC Radio 4's Gardeners' Question Time
An admirer of Ellender's debut Elisabeth's Lists, I also much enjoyed this beguiling blend of memoir and cultural history, in which she describes how she found deep solace in her Sussex garden, even with the threat of eviction from their rented home hanging over her family. While her first instinct was to stop cultivating altogether, she soon went back to putting down roots, even though she knew she might not see the shoots emerge. The result is an absorbing meditation on the reasons that any of us gardens, which had me longing for spring (and ordering a shedload of seeds) -- Caroline Sanderson ―Bookseller
Wonderful ... Filled with such a love, such an ache, the child-like need to be understood, the human urge to foster growth -- Jen Campbell ― Toast
Elisabeth’s Lists: A Life Between the Lines is a memoir telling my grandmother’s extraordinary life through a book of lists she left behind. Elisabeth was a diplomat’s daughter and, later, wife, and she lived a nomadic life moving around the world – from China in the 1930s to Franco’s Spain, to Lebanon and Brazil in the 1940s. She died aged just 42, when my mother was nine, and I use Elisabeth’s book of handwritten to-do lists and inventories to piece together her fascinating story. The book also explores the way we try to make sense of the chaos of life, the connections between different generations, grief and how I try to come to terms with her mother’s terminal illness.
This is the cover blurb:
Many years after the death of her grandmother, Lulah Ellender inherited a curious object - a book of handwritten lists. On the face of it, Elisabeth's lists seemed rather ordinary - shopping lists, items to be packed for a foreign trip, a tally of the eggs laid by her hens.
But from these everyday fragments, Lulah began to weave together the extraordinary life of the grandmother she never knew. A life lived in the most rarefied and glamorous of circles, from Elisabeth's early years as an ambassador's daughter in 1930s China, to her marriage to a British diplomat and postings in Madrid under Franco's regime, post-war Beirut, Rio de Janeiro and Paris.
It was also a life of stark contrasts - between the opulent excess of embassy banquets and the deprivations of wartime rationing in England, between the unfailing charm she displayed in public and the dark depressions that blanketed her in private, between her great appetite for life and her sudden, early death.
Throughout Elisabeth's adult life, the lists were a source of structure and comfort. And now, as Lulah learns that she is losing her own mother, she finds herself turning to her grandmother's life, and to her much-travelled book of lists, in search of meaning and solace. Elisabeth's Lists is both a vivid memoir and a moving study of the familial threads that binds us, even beyond death.
Here’s what reviewers said about it:
The Guardian: ‘A hauntingly beautiful meditation on life and death spanning three generations’
London Review of Books: ‘A perceptive and original book. It is as much a meditation on the meaning of lists as it is a biography’
The Spectator: ‘Powerful and enriching’
Sunday Express: ‘Poignant… a moving, evocative read’
Daily Mail: ‘Fascinating as well as moving’
The Express: ‘A story of vulnerability, love and resilience, quietly and beautifully told’
Jen Campbell in the Toast magazine book club: ‘… a beautiful tapestry of family life’
Damian Barr, author of Maggie and Me and You Will Be Safe Here: ‘Go to your ‘books to read’ list and put Elisabeth’s Lists right at the top’
Elisa Segrave, author of The Girl From Station X: ‘With great compassion and imagination Elisabeth’s granddaughter Lulah tenderly brings to life the grandmother she never knew’
