British Garden Guru Joins Body in the Garden Festival Line-up
By: Robert Diamond Jul. 14, 2013
The Body in the Garden, the crime and garden writers' festival being held in the Botanic Gardens 25-27 October, has announced the addition of the British garden writer Charles Elliott to its line-up of international guests.
Charles's first appearance for The Body in the Garden will be at the opening session, to be held at Elder Hall on Friday 25 October at 7.30 pm. The session, which is entitled 'Burying the body: Compost or a crime?' introduces the four international guests participating in the festival to Adelaide audiences. Tickets for this session are $25.00 and may be purchased through all BASS outlets. This is the only ticketed session in the otherwise free festival.
Charles Elliott was born and raised in the US and after a time in the Army joined Time magazine, progressing from 'office boy to editor in charge of words'. In 1972 he became a senior editor at the publishing house of Alfred A. Knopf, continuing in this role until his retirement in 1995.
Charles has lived in Britain since 1985, dividing his time between a house in London and a cottage on the Welsh borders near Monmouth, where he and his wife have an expansive garden. His first book, a collection of essays entitled The Transplanted Gardener, was published in 1995. Among his other books are three more collections of essays and a number of anthologies on subjects ranging from trees to treasure-hunting. He is also a regular contributor to Hortus, a British gardening quarterly.
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Arguing the case for crime will be Hakan Nesser, one of Sweden's most popular crime writers. His partner in crime will be Ann Cleeves from Northern England and the creator of the Vera Stanhope series, the television series of which was recently screened in Australia |
Although most of his writings are in some way connected to gardening and plants, Charles Elliott does not think of himself as primarily a 'garden writer'. Charles says, 'What interests me is the variety of extraordinary, often bizarre, stories associated with gardening and botany, stories about people as much or more than about growing things.' The directors of The Body in the Garden, Penelope Curtin and Rose Wight, OAM, are thrilled to have secured the participation of Charles Elliott, commenting that he is exactly the kind of interesting and unusual writer the festival had set out to attract. 'When Charles Elliott wrote that he could speak about the strange German explorer and plant hunter upon whom Patrick White based Voss, or the role of time in the garden, or the menace involved in the deceptively innocent wild rose, we knew immediately that he was our man!' Joining Charles Elliott on the team promoting the virtues of compost in the Friday 25 October session, will be Toby Musgrave, a leading authority on garden history and design, who divides his time between the UK and Denmark. |
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