The Essex Gardens Trust and Beth Chatto Gardens Writing Competition was held in the summer of 2022 and the winners and highly commended entries are listed below. Please click on the link to read each entry.

Winner

Bill’s Garden by Clare Shaw

Highly commended

The Restorative Gardens by Siobhan Pierce

Guerrilla Gardening by Nancy Stevenson

Further shortlisted entries

The Threat of the Seaxe by Christina Collins

The Rose Arch by Suzanne Gates

Gwyneth’s Border by Samantha Pyrah

Many thanks to all who submitted entries and sincere congratulations to the winners and shortlisted entries.

Essex Gardens Trust in association with Beth Chatto Education Trust invited entries to a competition for creative garden writing. This could be either fiction (short story or novel extract) or a life-writing/memoir, in which the garden/landscape was an essential element of character development, plot, or created a specific atmosphere. The competition was held in memory of Beth Chatto and in tribute to the late Bella d’Arcy Reed whose idea this competition was.

The competition was open to writers who lived, worked or studied in the historic area of Essex.

THE JUDGES were:  

Chair, Seona Ford, chair of the Essex Book Festival, was born and bred in Essex of Scottish Parents.  Seona has spent much of her career working in education in the county.  Throughout her life she has nurtured and developed a tremendous interest in books and writing.  She belongs to several literary societies, writes poetry and is very proud to be Chair of the Essex Book Festival.  

Chris Penhall is an author, freelance radio producer and podcast producer who has worked with BBC Essex and written for Essex Life magazine.  Whilst living nearing Lisbon she began to dabble in writing fiction, but it was many years later that she was confident enough to start writing her first novel and many years after that she finally finished it.  That novel, The House That Alice Built, won the Choc Lit Search for a Star Competition in 2019, and was followed by a sequel, New Beginnings at the Little House in the Sun. Finding Summer Happiness was published in May 2021.

James Canton is a writer and lecturer who has written widely in creative non-fiction forms and taught on the MA in Wild Writing at the University of Essex since its inception in 2009, exploring the fascinating ties between the literature and landscape of East Anglia. His latest book The Oak Papers was published in July 2020. It chronicles the insights he gained about the natural world through spending time beside one aged oak tree, the Honywood Oak at Markshall Estate, through the seasons and in all weathers.

Any questions to Laura Chase, Essex Gardens Trust Trustee, laura@guesswhere.co.uk