Michael Bullock was born in 1916 in London, England where he worked for many years as a freelance writer and translator. His prolific, life long writing career was not limited, it seems, by genre, and he was to produce essays, plays, works in translation, prose, and poetry throughout his career. As well as being a prolific writer and translator, Bullock was the founder, and for five years editor, of the British poetry magazine Expression, as well as editor-in-chief of Prism International. Considered a surrealist (he was a founding member of Melmoth Vancouver, originally titled The Vancouver Surrealist Newsletter) Bullock was unafraid to push the limits of creative writing, often blending poems with music and visual art. Bullock has, in fact, displayed his own artwork in exhibitions and galleries, as well as using it to augment his textual works. He was educated at the Hornsey College of Art and the Polytechnic School of Language, and was, in fact, chosen as chairman of the British Translators Association in 1963. Bullock came to Canada in 1968 as a Commonwealth Fellow, and in 1969 became a member of The University of British Columbias Creative Writing Department. He retired from the University in 1983 with the rank of Professor Emeritus.

An important achievement from a writer who has explored the unconscious in poetry and fiction for fifty years, The Walled Garden belongs to a developing tradition on the Pacific Coast of exploring landscape as inner and outer worlds. At the centre of the book is Bullock's eye for the image, his command of metaphor, and his intense, often elliptical method of transfiguring inanimate objects into powerful symbols of consciousness. Through a series of poems and short prose passages the book is fashioned into a mystical-gothic-romantic poetic ritual: behind the walled garden of consciousness, of love and myth, lies the mind's desire to transcend itself, and ordinary reality.