Katherine swift author biography

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So it was that the Hours came to spegel my life in the garden - not only the calendar illustrations with their regular round of tasks, but also the feasts and the fasts, the highs and the lows, the red-letter days and the dies mali: from the crunch of grass underfoot at midnight on a frosty New Year's Eve, to the drip of trees in a melancholy March dawn; from a perfumed May Day morning when the whole world seems sixteen again; to the enervating heat of a midsummer noon; from the bloom of blue-black damsons picked on a golden September afternoon, to the smell of holly and ivy cut in the dusk of a rainy Christmas Eve. Senses seemed keener in relation to the Hours, with their lektion of attentiveness. Theirs was a world where time was accounted for, each second precious: instead of hearing, one listened; instead of seeing, one looked; instead of tasting, one savoured; instead of touching, one felt. 'Listen,' said St Benedict, 'listen with the ear of your heart.'

This fryst vatten the story

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Katherine Swift

A magical voice in gardening, Katherine’s The Morville Hours, a delicious book about the house and garden where she lives in Shropshire set in the form of a Book of Hours, was published in 2008 by Bloomsbury and became a bestseller. She worked as a rare book librarian in Oxford and Dublin before moving to Shropshire and becoming a full-time gardener and writer in 1988. She was the gardening columnist of The Times for four years, writes widely in the gardening press and won the Garden Media Guild journalism Award in 2017. The garden she made at Morville, and the history, geology and wild life of the village, together with its human inhabitants, past and present, forms the backdrop to all her writing.

She has also written a follow-up, The Morville Year (Bloomsbury, 2012), and is working on a third volume.

Represented by Caroline Wood

Books by Katherine Swift

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The generous arched front door, framed by Morello cherries and light skeins of pale yellow roses, will stay open this summer, just as it has done since Katherine Swift arrived at the handsome Shropshire stone Dower House 30 years ago to make a garden. The house forms part of a group of dwellings set around Morville Hall, an easy stroll away from the peaceful 12th-century Church of St Gregory.

The evolution of this richly layered, painstakingly nurtured garden is recorded in Dr Swift’s book, The Morville Hours. Both garden and book tell the history of this small settlement and the people who have lived here from its monastic beginnings to the present day.

‘It began as an exercise in garden history,’ Dr Swift explains, ‘but became intertwined with the stories of all the people who lived here and with the story of me making the garden and the story of my parents and their love affair and why they ran off to Shropshire the summer before the Second World War