In Your Garden: Ova's Cambridge garden

Posted on 10 Apr 2026

Gardens

In our series #GMinyourgarden, we’re peeking over the fence into gardens around the world to explore their places in our lives today. This week, Ova's writer's garden in Cambridge:

When a doctor told me I couldn’t have another child, not even with IVF, I spiralled into depression. Looking back I don’t quite understand myself, I wasn’t even keen on the idea of a second baby. But I was 36, stuck in an IT job I didn’t like, in a foreign country with very few friends. I was lonely. And in that loneliness I decided to change my life.

People change their hair. We moved houses, and I built myself a writing office in the garden: a black shed with a pink door in Cambridge. So there I was, Jekyll and Hyde: writing code inside the house, writing fiction outside it.

The garden had to match my novel, whimsical, colourful, a little unhinged. I’m not a seasoned gardener. I choose plants that forgive neglect, roses, peonies, geums. I added a lot of colourful solar lights and mushroom ornaments so I could create a wildly different environment from the corporate office. My own heaven.

I planted a rose on the day my agent sent my manuscript to editors. It sold. That rose is now the happiest plant in the garden, blooming all summer.
We can’t have animals indoors, so ducks and chickens have the run of it instead.