A Garden of Your Own

A Garden of Your Own takes as its premise the dialogue between a granddaughter and her grandmother to explore, with apparent simplicity, the deepest questions about how to build a meaningful life. As Virginia Woolf said, one needs a room of one’s own to create: a physical space of one’s own to work in and an inner space of one’s own to cultivate our interior and express ourselves artistically and creatively. This picture book advocates for a garden of one’s own where we can develop a creative and free way of being in the world.
Varela’s illustrations provide infinite layers of meaning and generate, together with the text, dialogues about creativity and the importance of knowing ourselves in order to express ourselves. In this way, each page reveals how the creative act works.
The final section includes artistic references (from Hilma af Klint to Matisse, from Klimt to Sonia Delaunay) and curiosities about gardens from different cultures (Japanese, Persian, Arabic, French, English) as well as fascinating facts about plant intelligence, including the discovery of the Wood Wide Web, the underground network that connects trees. This material turns the book into a starting point for further exploration and for sowing new questions.

Key points

2026 – Finalist in the Illustrators Exhibition, Bologna Children’s Book Fair
2025 – Outstanding Books in Children’s and Youth Literature from Spain, OEPLi’s Selection, IBBY Spain

• It uses the metaphor of the garden to address self-knowledge, creativity, and the care of one’s inner world.
• It offers a message of resilience and self-affirmation in the face of comparison and external voices that sow doubt.
• It is an invitation to cultivate creativity as an inner garden that can always bloom in new ways.