Hi, I’m Ciar, thanks for visiting my website!
I’ve been a journalist for over 25 years - I’m a former Arts & Media Correspondent for The Independent and before that I worked as a staff journalist for The Guardian website and Private Eye. Since 2009, I’ve been freelance and I now write a weekly gardening column in the Daily Mail on Saturday as well as features for magazines including Gardens Illustrated and InPublishing.
My debut novel, A Deadly Discovery, is set in my hometown of Lewes, East Sussex, in 1928. It is a Golden Age murder mystery starring Virginia Woolf and her sister Vanessa Bell as a pair of unlikely amateur sleuths investigating the murder of a glamorous young archaeologist. The second book in the series, A Lethal Cocktail, starts with a society wedding gone wrong in the Sussex seaside town of Rottingdean, at a glamorous hotel which was the original inspiration for Cluedo.
I have a Garden Design Diploma from the English Gardening School at Chelsea Physic Garden and an RHS Level 2 Certificate in the Principles of Horticulture from Plumpton College in East Sussex. For three years I spent one day a week volunteering in the garden at Charleston farmhouse, the country retreat of Vanessa and Duncan Grant. It was while weeding in the borders that I first began to imagine what life must have been like when they were living there and Virginia came to visit, and the seed of an idea was born…