The Garden of the Gods

What the Book Does

The Garden of the Gods by Gerald Durrell is a work of memoir, nature writing, comedy that the third and final volume of Gerald Durrell’s Corfu trilogy, completing the story of the family’s years on the Greek island before the outbreak of World War II drove them back to England.. A poignant conclusion to the Corfu trilogy, suffused with the knowledge that this paradise is about to be lost. Durrell’s most elegiac and perhaps most beautiful volume.

Particular Strengths

The qualities that distinguish this book from others covering similar ground: Emotionally resonant conclusion; Richer in retrospective feeling; and Beautiful evocation of pre-war Corfu. These are not incidental features but the product of Gerald Durrell’s specific approach to the subject.

The Central Arguments

The book’s core intellectual contributions can be summarised as follows. The end of an idyll. Nature as consolation for loss. Corfu as paradise before the war. These ideas are developed with evidence and example rather than assertion, which is what makes the book worth reading rather than merely skimming.

The Writing

Gerald Durrell’s prose in The Garden of the Gods reflects a writer who has thought hard about how to make complex ideas accessible without sacrificing precision. The structure is clear and the arguments are built incrementally, giving the reader time to absorb each point before the next develops. This is non-fiction that earns its conclusions rather than asserting them.

Limitations

The book is not without weaknesses. Shorter than the first two volumes. Bittersweet tone may surprise readers expecting pure comedy. These are minor qualifications rather than fundamental criticisms.

Who This Is For

Readers who have completed My Family and Other Animals and Birds, Beasts, and Relatives

Durrell’s Corfu Trilogy in Context

The Garden of the Gods is the final volume of Gerald Durrell’s Corfu trilogy, preceded by My Family and Other Animals (1956) and Birds, Beasts and Relatives (1969). The trilogy records Durrell’s childhood on Corfu in the 1930s with a mixture of natural history observation, family comedy, and the kind of atmospheric writing that makes the island itself a character. By the third volume, the Durrell family is established and the book can move at a more leisurely pace, dwelling on the wildlife and the landscape with less need to establish the world for new readers. It works best read in sequence.

The Third Volume and Its Particular Tone

The Garden of the Gods was published in 1978, nine years after Birds, Beasts and Relatives, and the gap is audible in the prose. Durrell was writing with a retrospective knowledge that the earlier volumes did not carry: he knew, by 1978, that the world he was describing had entirely disappeared. Corfu in the 1930s — before mass tourism, before the war’s disruption of the island’s communities, before the agricultural and ecological changes of the post-war decades — was a genuinely vanished place, and the final volume of the trilogy has the quality of something preserved in amber. The comedy is still there, but it is comedy with an elegy embedded in it.

The book covers the final period of the Durrell family’s years on Corfu, before the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939 forced their return to England. Gerald is now in his early teens rather than the ten-year-old of My Family and Other Animals, and his observations of the wildlife have the greater depth of a few more years’ systematic attention. The animals he encounters — a giant tortoise of extreme antiquity, various birds, a collection of insects studied with increasing scientific rigour — are rendered with the same comic precision as before, but the emotional register has darkened slightly in the knowledge that this is the last of it.

The Wildlife and the Landscape

The Corfu that Durrell describes across all three volumes is a Mediterranean island at what was, in retrospect, its ecological peak — before the pressures that have since reduced the biodiversity of the Ionian islands substantially. The olive groves, the macquis, the rocky coastlines, the seasonal wetlands: all of these provided habitats for the variety of reptiles, mammals, and invertebrates that fill the trilogy’s pages. Durrell was, without knowing it, writing a baseline natural history document of a landscape that would soon change beyond recognition.

This quality — the inadvertent natural history record — is most strongly felt in the final volume, where the descriptions of particular locations have the specificity of a man trying to fix them permanently in language before they are lost. The garden of the title is not a metaphor but a real place, and Durrell’s description of it carries the weight of something known to be ending.

Context: Durrell’s Conservation Vision

By 1978, Gerald Durrell had founded the Jersey Zoo (1959) and the Wildlife Preservation Trust, and was one of the world’s leading voices for captive breeding as a conservation strategy. Reading the Corfu trilogy in the light of his later work, it is possible to see the trilogy as origin story: the child who observed these animals with such intensity became the man who dedicated his life to ensuring that other children would have animals left to observe. The Garden of the Gods closes the circle of that origin, giving the trilogy its proper conclusion — the end of the idyll that made everything else possible.

The book works best read as part of the trilogy rather than alone, and the experience of reading all three in sequence — from the ten-year-old’s first Corfu summer to the family’s departure on the eve of the war — is one of the most sustained pleasures in English nature writing.

Final Verdict

Our rating: 4.3/5 — A poignant conclusion to the Corfu trilogy, suffused with the knowledge that this paradise is about to be lost. Durrell’s most elegiac and perhaps most beautiful volume.