Creativity is a place. Memory is an image. The artistic process itself is a journey, a specific one, the return to a lost and cherished childhood realm, the original source of inspiration and identity.

For the artists and writers in this book - Claude Monet, Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Karen Blixen, Ernest Hemingway, Georgia O'Keeffe, Jackson Pollock, Pablo Picasso and Emily Kame Kngwarreye - the act of re-creating Eden was a life-changing, art-making, healing rite that becomes both a map of their careers and an index of their subject matter.

What unites these artists and writers is a journey of return, of rediscovery, that leads them to the creation of a personal paradise. Upon arriving at that place, whether it was Georgia O'Keeffe in New Mexico, Monet in Giverny or Picasso in Provence, iconic new work emerged, inspired by that terrain, from its light, its colours, its landscape. Each of these artists had recovered the place they’d been unconsciously seeking for years.

In this engaging and ground-breaking book, acclaimed biographer and art historian Janine Burke explores how art and landscape, love and companionship, home and garden are entwined. Nature is culture, and its most insistent inspiration.