Piesse's take on Darwin goes to Scribe

Scribe has landed an exploration of Charles Darwin's garden, entitled The Ghost in the Garden by Jude Piesse.

In 2015, university lecturer Piesse and her young family moved in next door to the former home of Charles Darwin. The garden on the banks of the river Severn in Shrewsbury that surrounded his much-loved childhood home, The Mount, was to be the seedbed for the ideas that would come to cohere into his theory of evolution. 

Piesse’s The Ghost in the Garden "explores this unsung site of scientific significance, and finds even more there than might be expected, in a fusion of several classic British subjects – Darwin, nature, history, gardening – given interesting new twists by the addition of a strand of memoir that allows lyrical writing on nature and motherhood, a feminist reappraisal of the women written out of the early history of evolutionary science [the house’s less famous residents: Charles’ mother and his sisters], and, likewise, an overdue reappraisal of the key role played by the servant-gardeners who did so much of the spadework of evolutionary theory," reads the synopsis. 

Philip Gwyn Jones of Scribe acquired world English language rights in the book at auction from Jonathan Ruppin of The Ruppin Agency. Scribe will publish in 2021, for the 150th anniversary of Darwin's The Descent of Man.