In the second day of the Garden Museum Literary Festival, Mary Keen gave a charming talk about her education as a gardener: reacting against her grandmother’s garden designed by Harold Peto; reading Alain Fournier’s Le Grand Meaulnes; much influenced by painters, including Hogarth’s Line of Beauty, Samuel Palmer’s In a Shoreham Garden, Klimt and, most of all, Paul Nash; admiring Lutyens’s work at Lambay Island off the coast of Ireland and Lady Salisbury’s garden at Cranborne; introducing informality, stones as well as rough grasses and not too much planting, the picturesque aesthetic of the sharawadgi, to the gardens of the rich, as well as her own former garden in Duntisbourne Rous; and supporting the work of younger gardeners like Dan Pearson and Pip Morrison.