The Sea Garden: UK cover

 

Here it is...the Orion cover for The Sea Garden, to be published in a few months' time. I think it's beautiful, and that old house is almost exactly what was in my head as I invented a villa on the southern French island of Porquerolles, with its garden on the cusp of running to wilderness above the sea. 

 

There are some very clever detailed touches, and I particularly like the painterly effect in the sky and the bay behind with background hills. It seems to me to have just the right atmosphere of slight foreboding despite the sun and bright blue, with that dense bank of trees and bushes casting shadows all the way up the path. The grey band around it seems to give the impression of looking into an old bevelled-edged mirror.

 

But over to you...what do you think? Are you interested, as I am, in how it reflects the differences between the US and UK markets? (The US cover is in the blog's column to the right.) Will you be intrigued and want to pick it up in a bookshop, even if you knew nothing about it? Perhaps this blurb from Sarah Blake, who wrote one of my favourite reads of recent years, The Postmistress, might clinch it: 

 

"THE SEA GARDEN weaves a double spell, and honestly, it got me right from the start. Lawrenson steeps her story of the invisible heroes of the French Resistance crossing borders - and here, crossing time - deep in the eerie beauty of the South of France. The result is a marvellous strange fruit: think Graham Greene served up with a dash of Poe."

The Sea Garden

As part of the work-in-progress I am taking great pleasure in "designing" a garden above the sea on the French island of Porquerolles. And as I have barely lifted my eyes from the manuscript these past two weeks - let alone written anything new for the blog - I thought I would share the mood board of this imaginary garden as I put it together this morning.

The setting is among rocks and Mediterranean pines and scrub, where paths wind down to the sea - or end in precipitous cliffs, or calanques.

 

The grounds surround an old estate house, grand but decaying, with a honey stucco facade and a pillared terrace at the rear which overlooks the gardens.

The garden needs restoration: old pictures show cypress walks and formal garden rooms but in the present they are overgrown and gloomy. The art of the designer will be to recapture the mood of the original while bringing back light and health to the planting.

Key to one part of the garden is a topiary arch that looks out over the sea, holding a clue to its meaning in the view it frames.

 

 

An old bassin, a raised pond edged with stone, lies before the arch. It has been neglected and so tall are the yew hedges all around that the water it holds is a glassy black, not nearly as inviting as this one...



 

...more like this in atmosphere...



 

I'd like a tunnel of purple bougainvillea, too...

 

 

..and some datura - or devil's trumpet - that dangerous exotic with poison lurking under its intoxicating night fragrance and its hallucinogenic properties.





 

The garden will have dark corners and surprises - so that when you emerge from the garden it feels like a release into the lightness and colour of the island.



 

What do you think - would this be somewhere you'd like to explore further?