Talkback: Wordsworth's garden at Dove Cottage

Hi Kate,Back in 1966 England won the world cup and we looked at a cottage just out side St Ives in Cornwall without running water or electricity the water would be laid on in 1967 and the electrics 1968 so we didn't buy it,But it had 3/4acre of garden,So it's not unusual not having services we rely on today,
Oldchippy.

Another garden and environment which certainly shaped English Literature is John Clare's Cottage and garden at Helpston http://www.clarecottage.org/pages/Gardens

It gives reality to our understanding of life as it was lived in John Clare's days, with straw mattresses on the floor and a never-ending family of children filling a tiny space. What appears to us now as a home of calm simplicity must have been full of life, noise, children and never ending household tasks.  

But the garden .... the garden is wonderful, full of plants, herbs and flowers grown at the time, and reveals just a little of the reason that John Clare had the countryside coursing through his veins.

My poems usually wake me up in the middle of the night begging to be written and refusing to let me go back to sleep, but the hours I spend in my own garden and the Bristol Botanic Garden doing repetitive but pleasant tasks like weeding are when the thoughts that demand to be written down are formed in my mind. As a younger woman going for a long country walk would do the same. As for mod. cons, Kate, I had no electricity or running water in our tenement till I was 15 and my parents rented a council flat. Hard work for my mother with three children to keep clean but she managed it. There was no garden but plenty of hills to roam around and pick blackberries in. I managed to write poems then too - you can do a lot of thinking picking blackberries.