Where the Hornbeam Grows : A Journey in Search of a Garden

When Beth Lynch moved to Switzerland in middle life, she unexpectedly found herself out of place and lonely. Knowing she needs to get her hands dirty if she is to put down roots, she sets about making herself at home in the way she knows best - by tending a garden, growing things. The search for a garden takes her across the country, through meadows and on mountain paths to the rugged hills of the Swiss Jura. In this remote and unfamiliar place she learns to garden in a new way, and forges deepening connections: to her new soil, to her old life in England, and to her deceased parents, whose Sussex garden continues to flourish in her heart.

Where The Hornbeam Grows is a memoir about carrying a garden inwardly through loss, dislocation and relocation, about finding a sense of wellbeing in a green place of your own, and about the limits of paradise in a peopled world.