DIGGING IN (provisional title) is a memoir about feeling out of place. It tells the story of how, uprooted in middle life, Beth Lynch tried to forge a sense of belonging, to make herself at home, in the way she knew best – by nurturing a garden, this time in the mountains of the Swiss Jura. You don’t have to travel far in order to feel out of place, to find yourself wondering where and how you fit into the world. DIGGING IN is about carrying a garden through loss, dislocation and relocation. Taking the garden with her inwardly, whilst also carting bits of plants quite literally around England and mainland Europe, Beth Lynch describes a journey that shook her assumptions about integration and tested to the full the healing power of the natural world, and of the soil.

Beth Lynch grew up in rural East Sussex, where she became a gardener at a young age. She read English at Cambridge, graduating with first-class honours, and went on to complete an M.Phil in Renaissance Literature, followed by a Ph.D. For the next decade she lectured and directed studies in English at Trinity and Newnham Colleges, Cambridge. In her spare time, she created gardens. She then left academia, qualified as a garden designer, and moved unexpectedly to Switzerland. Beth currently lives in Switzerland, where she spends her time gardening and writing.