Introduced to this world in Llandyssul, Cardiganshire, Wales, November 14, 1843, I celebrated my first anniversary by landing at Castle Garden, in New York City.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
My earliest memory is a picnic in the park near our house, which was next to Wimbledon Common. Why on earth we went to a park when we lived so near the common is a mystery, but it had formal gardens and lawns - perhaps it was that very difference that took my parents there.
I lived in upstate New York until I was ten years old and we moved overseas. I have a lot of nostalgic memories of that part of the world, and I love going back there by writing the Lakeshore books.
I spent my earliest years in Colwyn Bay in north Wales with my mother and grandmother, while my father was stationed with the RAF in India.
I love England though; I've been back a few times and just love it. My favorite thing to do there is going to museums and all the castles. Oh, and my husband and I went mountain biking across England on our honeymoon!
Living in Edinburgh, I consider myself particularly lucky - we have the biggest book festival in the world, a plethora of fascinating libraries and museums, and some of the greatest architecture in Europe.
One of the first gardens I did outside the family was for the designer Hattie Carnegie. I was 23 then, and I went to her salon, but could not afford any of her dresses myself, though I loved them. Miss Carnegie suggested I do a garden in exchange for a coat and dress, and so I designed and planted a garden for her.
I was born in the shadow of World War II, on December 18, 1939, on the South Shore of Long Island, a product of the early -wentieth-century emigration of Eastern European Jewry to New York City and its environs.
On March 4th, 1830, I arrived in London, where a new world seemed opened to me.
I was born in London 1947, after the war. A real wartime baby. I went to school in Brixton, and then I moved up to Yorkshire, which is in the north of England. I lived on the farms up there.
I was born on the first day of January 1941 in the front bedroom of my grandparents' house in Rodborough near Stroud in Gloucestershire where my mother had come to escape the bombing in London.