Coming Up Roses : Stories of Gardens and Life

This fiction anthology collects Welsh women’s writing about gardens: what they mean, what happens in them, and where they take them. In “Yellow Ribbons on a Pear Tree” an Italian POW returns home to a mixed welcome from his wife and family. “Gift” is a tale of loss, love, and misunderstandings set around a memorial oak sapling. “Rosemary and Rue” concerns memory and what it means to lose it. “Seasons of Brews and Roses” tells of the love between mother and daughter and its waxing and waning, in good times and bad. There are sad stories, happy ones, tales from home, and those from abroad; all share a love for plants and planting, flowers and seeds, and a real sense of the power of growing things to change lives.

Caroline Oakley is the coeditor of the anthology Written in Blood, and is a former editorial director at Orion Books in London.