Proud to partner with the Jewish Chronicle Gardens Of Delight
Penelope Lively, Rachel de Thame, Rabbi Jonathan Wittenberg
Gardens have been a source of enchantment since the dawn of time. Today’s speakers illuminate why gardening can be as vital an expression of the creative impulse as reading, writing or praying, and why designing, planting, tending, sharing produce, or simply looking, are so rewarding. In literature gardens can be oases or jungles, magical places where supernatural events happen and passions are aroused.
Rachel de Thame
Rabbi Jonathan Wittenberg
Rabbi Jonathan Wittenberg is the Senior Rabbi of Masorti Judaism UK and a leading writer and thinker on Judaism. He is Rabbi of the New North London Synagogue and is also the author of several books including Walking with the Light – From Frankfurt to Finchley.
Charlotte Mendelson
Charlotte Mendelson has written four novels, one non-fiction book about her tragic gardening obsession, Rhapsody in Green, much literary journalism and work for radio, and is Gardening Correspondent for the New Yorker.
Her most recent novel, Almost English, was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction. When We Were Bad was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction, and was chosen as a book of the year in the Observer, Guardian, Sunday Times, New Statesman and Spectator. Her second novel, Daughters of Jerusalem, won both the Somerset Maugham Award and the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, and she was shortlisted for the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year award.
