An uplifting story of healing and recovery that will warm your soul…and get you into the garden.

Eleanor Oliphant meets The Authenticity Project on a well-being retreat in this story of one loner, two secrets and three weeks at Pinewoods Retreat.

When Holly Bush (yes, she still hasn’t forgiven her mother for that combination) is made redundant with gardening leave, after a brutal attack, she decides to visit a retreat not far from home. There she finds friendship and a garden in need of love, she ends up doing literal gardening leave, bringing the community of guests together. Journaling her way through her holiday, Holly works on both her mental and physical scars and discovers an inner strength as her secrets are revealed.

Perfect for readers who enjoy an uplifting story of self-love, friendship and community, with a hint of romance.

My Review

I’m totally in love with this book. It’s not my usual genre, but I just adore it. I even woke up in the night and read it. Maybe it’s because I would love to go to a retreat like this. The only retreat I have ever been on was at my Catholic Convent School when I was 16, and the priest told us that animals didn’t have souls. My flirtation with Catholicism was well and truly over.

My friend goes to Champneys all the time, but it’s not the same, is it. Wearing an oversized towelling robe and slippers for bigger feet than mine, lolling around in the sauna and having facials and pedicures. Pinewoods is more spiritual. It’s a place where people go to find themselves (without sounding pretentious).

Holly’s life is on hold. After a tempestuous and traumatic childhood, and an attack which has left her with a facial scar, she is made redundant from her job of 15 years in a travel agents, and put on gardening leave. She had been living with her grandparents since a teenager, but they have both died and she is alone in the house they left her.

In order to sweeten the bitter pill of redundancy, she is offered a holiday anywhere in the world but instead she chooses three weeks at Pinewoods retreat just up the road in Formby. It is here that she makes friends with Bex and journalist San, the owners Lorraine and Dee, and discovers a garden that needs a lot of love and care.

But what will she do about the dreadful Dylan, another journalist, but unlike San, who is only there to write about the retreat, he has decided to rake up Holly’s past, because it is in the ‘public interest’. They will want to know what happened to her. Except they really don’t.

And is romance in the air? Or in the sand dunes more likely. We’ll have to wait and see.

Many thanks to The Pigeonhole, the author, and my fellow Pigeons for making this such an enjoyable read.

About the Author

Zoë Richards was inspired to write Garden of Her Heart by being a suicide survivor from which she learned the healing that worked best for her, which is not the same for everyone. Dog walks around the Formby pinewoods, not far from her home, gave her the location, in an area known locally as The Lost Resort, a town that never came into existence, close to the sea. In the woods there is a sole Victorian house, standing alone on a cinder track, and this is the inspiration for the location of Pinewoods Retreat.

She lives in Southport, near Liverpool, has been married to Rob for 34 years, and they have a grown-up daughter and a cockapoo who will never grow up. She worked for the NHS as an improvement programme manager, reforming how children and young people with special educational needs and disabilities are supported in healthcare. Writing gives her an escape from the intensity of work and from caring for her elderly mother.