To Garden With God Garden Manual

Hello Christine,
I like your website and I was particularly interested in your ‘GARDENING WITH GOD’ page. I am the author of ‘Smiles of God’ the flowers of St Thérèse of Lisieux. (Burns & Oates, Continuum 2003) which is still available via the internet.

St Thérèse is the patron saint of florists and gardeners and the title of the book came from one of her poems in which she described flowers as the smiles of God. The book came about because I was captivated by this image and I also wanted to investigate why she was always known as ‘the little flower’ in the anglo-saxon speaking world. Strangely enough, even though there have been over 4300 books written about Saint Thérèse, no one had written about this aspect of her oeuvre, despite there being numerous references to flowers, especially roses throughout her work.

As a result my book was a three part study of the floral imagery used by Thérèse. The first part deals with the symbolism of flowers, the 2nd part is a brief biography of Thérèse and the part flowers played in her life and the final part is an account of some of the miracles ascribed to her, as she said she would spend her heaven helping those still on earth.

With best wishes,
Felicity Leng