Elizabeth and Her German Garden

[2] Although the book is semi-autobiographical, the novelist E.M. Forster, who lived at the von Arnim estate in 1905,[4] working as a tutor to the family's children, wrote that there was in fact not much of a garden.

Elizabeth gently mocks her husband, family and others around her as she describes her efforts to develop a garden on the estate.

It includes commentary on nature and bourgeois German society, but is primarily humorous due to Elizabeth's frequent mistakes and her idiosyncratic outlook on life.

She looked down upon the frivolous fashions of her time writing “I believe all needlework and dressmaking is of the devil, designed to keep women from study.” In the ITV series Downton Abbey, in the second episode of the second season, Joseph Molesley, Matthew Crawley's valet, lends a copy of Elizabeth and her German Garden to the head housemaid Anna Smith as a tentative romantic gesture.

[2][3] In July 2015, it was adapted in five episodes for the Book at Bedtime series on BBC Radio 4, and read by Caroline Martin.