Common Table

In their first book, Common Ground, Janice Marriott and Virginia Pawsey wrote about their very different gardens and lives. In this, their eagerly awaited second book, their wonderful, wise, witty and utterly human letters trace a seasonal journey through their very different kitchens - one in a small inner-city cottage, the other a rambling country kitchen on a busy working hill country farm.

Their friendship provides sustenance on many levels, as their skilful and complementary cooking and writing styles encompass details of everyday life that are both engaging and illuminating. Effortlessly, readers are invited to see how Janice and Virginia's respective kitchens have become a refuge from life's troubles as well as a wonderful, sustaining obsession. And each has provided a means by which family and friends are nurtured and nourished by two very wise women, through a challenging year which sees each forced to make significant and life-changing decisions.

Common Ground

Two very different women who garden two very different properties, meet at a school reunion after nearly 40 years. Their passion for gardening and writing, and the realisation that they are both dealing with unexpected deaths, rekindles their friendship and they begin writing to each other.

As the seasons unfold, the stories of their gardens become metaphors for life. Beautifully written, their letters are funny, clever, poignant and perceptive, as two wise women provide a delightful insight into a wonderful friendship that will warm the coldest soul. Ultimately a celebration of friendship, and a love of making things grow, Common Ground is the perfect book for people who love gardening, from two gardeners who love life.

The letters in Common Ground follow the friend's gardens and lives through a whole year.

Virginia, with her husband Harry, runs a hill country North Canterbury farm, where she feeds shearers and farm workers, as well as copes with runaway livestock and other challenges of rural life.

Here, life is about plodding behind cows at cow pace with time to think, it's about planting seeds and watching them grow into lettuces and corn and pansies and poppies, it's about cooking food for shearers and making jam.

It is about sitting down and sharing these things by letter with Janice, a friend in the city; a friend who words a city job under fluorescent lights and who still finds time to take her dog for walks in the pine forest and grow a wild cottage garden with flowers and fruit and vegetables.

Common Ground is about the common ground these friends share in the joy of growing plants and it's about difference, the difference between city and country, between the shepherd and the writer, the difference in pace of life, one dictated by cows and sheep, the other by key performance indicators and time sheets.

Poignant and beautifully written, Common Ground has the makings of a classic in the canon of writing about gardening and about lives lived thoughtfully with a sharp edge of humour.

Janice Marriott is an award-winning author, who lives in Wellington. Virginia Pawsey is a farmer, and lives in Hawarden, in Canterbury: this is her first book.

The only wildlife I've had in my city garden lately has been a bizarre neighbour who has been in the garden gate, while I was away, and shut the cat door from the outside, thus trapping the cat inside. Very strange. Oh, and all the grapes have disappeared. I have consequently wrapped Bunsen's choke chain round the gate post and padlocked the gate shut. I can't imagine you would have these sorts of problems. - Janice

I was terribly sorry to hear of your grape loss. It is the sort of thing intruders do, steal ripe grapes. It must be very hard to protect your crop from human predation in the city. I could send you a point 22 rifle and some ammunition but feel our old ferret traps would be a more user-friendly deterrent. - Virginia