Elizabeth and Her German Garden

Elizabeth begins this book on a quiet May afternoon, sitting outdoors with pen and paper in the one place she loves best: her own garden.The garden had been wild and neglected for twenty-five years before she found it, lost on a flat, lonely plain in Germany, surrounded by cornfields, meadows, and dark pine forest.Her gray stone house stood among bird-cherry trees, and it still had an old vaulted chapel that had once been part of a convent, long before the wars of the seventeenth century.

From the western windows, nothing blocked the view — only open plain reaching all the way to a distant forest, where the sun went down each evening in a blaze of color.Elizabeth believed that view alone was worth more than anything else the house could offer.She was far happier outside among plants and birds than indoors among servants and furniture, and she made no secret of it.

She admitted, almost proudly, that she would abandon any duty at all for an hour with a book of poetry beneath the trees.The respectable ladies of the German countryside thought this very strange indeed, since a proper lady, in their opinion, ought to be sewing or managing her kitchen, not reading alone in a garden.Elizabeth did not care in the least what they thought of her.

For years, her husband — whom she called, half fondly, "the Man of Wrath" — refused to see the charm of the old country house and kept the family living in town instead.Only after five years did he finally agree to visit, just as Elizabeth was pulling the garden back from its wild neglect with her own hands.She had hoped he would fall in love with it exactly as she had.

Instead, he called her whole passion for the garden pure selfishness, and remarked only that the lilacs badly needed pruning.Elizabeth was quietly disappointed, but it did not shake her devotion to the place even a little.

She loved the owls that seemed to talk to one another above her head at dusk, the bird-cherry trees wreathed all over in white blossom, and the great clouds of lilac that made the garden look dressed for a wedding.Deep in the pine forest nearby, she found a silence so complete it felt almost sacred.After years spent elsewhere feeling restless and out of place, Elizabeth had finally found what she called her own kingdom of heaven — a small green world where nothing from the outside could ever really disappoint her.