C.S. Lewis' Garden at the Kilns

Oxfordian Author Gardens Series: Part 2

The Kilns, home of author CS Lewis.

“Who knows, indeed, but that a great deal even of the inanimate creation is raised in the redeemed souls who have, during this life, taken its beauty into themselves? That may be the way in which the ‘new heaven and the new earth’ are formed.”

CS Lewis, Letters to an American Lady

Sign for Kiln Lane

Rose trellis on the top terrace outside the Kilns, home of CS Lewis.

Welcome gate into the garden at the Kilns

Part 2: For the second of our visits to Oxfordian author gardens, we will travel south on the M40 from Juniper Hill to Headington and the Lewis Close to find the home of C.S Lewis, author of the Chronicles of Narnia and many other books.

The Kilns, home of CS Lewis, from the back view

Location: The Kilns, Lewis Close, Headington Quarry, Oxford

Down a little suburban cul-de-sac, in a village just north of Oxford, sits a wisteria-covered brick house that was the perfect setting for entertaining. Lewis led an extremely open social life, and his garden, with its two distinct parts, reflects both his comforting generosity and his quiet love for retreat.

Entrance garden at the Kilns

Garden gate into the Kilns

A generous welcome

The first part of Lewis’ garden was all generosity: Colorful borders brimmed with exuberant daylilies and practical sedums, short green hedging enclosed it providing cozy shelter, while smaller trees shaded and shaped the space. There were small lawns for gatherings in front and back, a few fruit trees, and old roses climbed over an open trellis. None of the plants were exotic, none of the spaces were extravagant. Everything conformed to its modest suburban proportions. But like the tall-yet-dowdy professor Lewis, their true goodness appeared to the people they served.

The blue plaque for CS Lewis on the Kilns.

The blue plaque reads: “CS Lewis 1898-1963, Scholar and Author lived here 1930-1963”

Window view from Lewis’ room to the front garden gate entrance. He would climb the metal stairs on the outside of the building in all weathers.

“You cannot go on 'seeing through' things for ever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it. It is good that the window should be transparent, because the street or garden beyond it is opaque.”

C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man

Kitchen view into the garden at the Kilns, home of CS Lewis.

Windows into life at the Kilns

During the war, a time when his letters often admit to illness and weariness, Jack Lewis volunteered hour upon hour to teach a local boy with special needs to read, smoked and talked in the study with his brother, hosted refugee children all throughout the house, and climbed up and down stairs caring for an invalid mother-figure.

Later, a gardener was also part of the hubbub (who can be found in Lewis’ Narnia stories as the dour-but-noble Puddleglum). If you stop and look at the garden at the Kilns, it is easy to imagine little girls having tea on the lawn, boys climbing the tree, and Jack and his wife Joy walking with friends around the flower borders. 

Perhaps Lewis was inspired to share his space when he remembered his own first glimpse of beauty was found in an indoor, fairy garden:

“Once in those very early days my brother brought into the nursery the lid of a biscuit tin which he had covered with moss and garnished with twigs and flowers so as to make it a toy garden or a toy forest. That was the first beauty I ever knew. What the real garden had failed to do, the toy garden did. It made me aware of nature-not, indeed, as a storehouse of forms and colors but as something cool, dewy, fresh, exuberant....As long as I live my imagination of Paradise will retain something of my brother's toy garden.”

C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy

“It is no disparagement to the garden to say it will not fence and weed itself, nor prune its own fruit trees, nor roll and cut its own lawns...It will remain a garden only if someone does all these things to it.”

C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

C.S. Lewis Nature Reserve

Behind the homely welcome near the house, there is a hidden retreat at the Kilns which is further up and further in: a walk down a wooded path, which opens to a verdant miniature wonderland of trails, pond, and cave. This is a wild and magical place for dreaming. This once-scarred space—a flooded clay-mining pit and an air-raid shelter—became a leafy, green haven for birds and for the Lewises after the war. Joy loved to watch the ducks and hedge sparrows near the pond.

The C.S. Lewis Nature Reserve: 8 magical acres just behind the Kilns that helped to inspire Narnia.

There are many bits of story to pick up along these paths: The low, small door to the underground air-raid shelter inspired the tunnel where Prince Rillian emerges at the end of The Silver Chair. And WWI veteran Clive Staples Lewis reportedly said that the most courageous act of his long life was allowing his step-son to paddle him on a home-made raft across the deep mine-pond. If Lewis was right about the redemption of creation, perhaps someday he will  paddle in its peaceful waters once again. 

The pond on the nature reserve which once held Jack and his stepson in their small raft.

“We are a seed patiently waiting in the earth: waiting to come up a flower in the Gardener's good time, up into the real world, the real waking. I suppose that our whole present life, looked back on from there, will seem only a drowsy half-waking. We are here in the land of dreams. But cock-crow is coming.”

C.S. Lewis, from The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis, Volume III: Narnia, Cambridge, and Joy 1950-1963

Lewis' grave and the Narnian window at Holy Trinity Church, Headington, UK

Gravestones in the daisies at Holy Trinity, Headington, UK.

More on Lewis’ books and home:

The Kilns’ tour for Becoming Mrs Lewis with some beautiful views of the garden

The history of the Kilns from the CS Lewis Foundation, and includes a younger Aidan Mackey who was our guide in 2017

Poetry at the Kilns with Malcolm Guite

Lewis’ Blue Plaque

C.S. Lewis book list on Amazon

Do you have a favorite book by Lewis? Or would you enjoy at day trip to the Kilns? Love to hear!

Oxfordian Author Gardens Series:

Introduction at Oxford Botanic Garden

Part 1: Flora Thompson’s Childhood Garden

Part 2: C.S. Lewis’ Garden at the Kilns

Part 3: J.R.R. Tolkien's Oxford Garden

Part 4: Elizabeth Goudge’s Garden

All photos © Julie Witmer 2017

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