Kate Forsyth

You know, she also wrote A Little Princess and Little Lord Fontoy is what she's mostly known for.

But A Secret Garden is probably her masterpiece.

Beautiful book set up in Yorkshire about an orphan girl who discovers a key to a hidden garden.

And, you know, by bringing this garden back to life, she and the other little boy in the story are also brought back to life.

It's beautiful.

Are there other gardens?

Look, you know, I'm a garden lover.

And so I plant my own garden as well as I can for someone who lives by the sea in Sydney.

I love roses and apples and foxgloves and all the old fashioned flowers, which are quite hard to grow here.

But, you know, literature is full, is full of gardens.

And so, of course, our poetry, just off the top of my head, I think of Jane Austen and how much, you know, she loved her garden.

I think of Emily Dickinson, who only left her father's house to go out and tend her plants in the glass house and in the garden.

And I think about all those wonderful romantic poets who were drawn

to nature and to the forest and to the meadow and to gardens.

You know, they all speak to me very, very powerfully.

The Scarlet Pimpernel is an extraordinarily romantic novel of intrigue and adventure and love set during the French Revolution.

At that time, France is gripped in these tumultuous years where the common people rose up and overthrew the king and his nobles who had ruled for so long and with so little care for them.

that they were driven by, you know, the Enlightenment ideals of equality and, you know, egality and fraternity.

Their philosophy was wonderful, but as so often happens in bloody revolution, it spun out of control.

And soon anyone of noble blood and anyone who hid them or supported them or helped them or spoke out against the revolutionaries found themselves in a tumble, being dragged into...