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“I just want to look out my window and see a riot of indefensible beauty,” Gilbert says over lunch at a pc28����hotel. A place of entertainment and delight, she adds.

“I would say it’s a novelist’s garden.”

Leave it to a writer to serve up just the right image for the topic at hand: Gilbert’s return, after 13 years, to writing fiction; and her new novel, in which plants feature prominently.

If you know the phenomenon that is , then you know Gilbert has never been one to shy away from transformation. Since the 2006 memoir about her angst-ridden search for self in Italy, India and Indonesia exploded onto the scene, leading to frequent Oprah dates, legions of disciples and a place on list, it’s been her trademark.

Later, after buying her house in Frenchtown, N.J., with the Brazilian husband she first met at the end of that book, another sort of transformation began. As she dug and planted, an idea emerged, then a story, a voice and a cast of characters.

The result, four years later, is , a grand 19th-century tale about a female botanist of towering intellect and adventurous spirit who travels the world searching for answers about science and love. The book, released Tuesday, is her sixth and her first novel since The Stern Men in 2000.

Gilbert says it was the right time to return to fiction, her first love before she got sidetracked into journalism, biography and the locomotive of Eat, Pray, Love, .

“I felt like if I didn’t do it soon, it would be a language I had lost and could never learn to speak again,” she says between bites of salmon.

But once she got rolling, “it felt like a homecoming.”

Across the restaurant table, Gilbert eats and talks with equal gusto. A girlish 44, she is gracious and witty and awfully down to earth for someone who has, after all, been played by Julia Roberts on the big screen. She loves that turquoise scarf and oh, by the way “do I have pesto between my teeth?” she asks the publicist beside her before heading off for a photo shoot.

When it comes to The Signature of All Things, Gilbert’s garden is more than a handy metaphor. It was also a starting point. Shoots and leaves play a starring role in the 500-page epic. Working in the garden fuelled her curiosity about botany and tracing the origins of everything that grows.

“I just found myself in a kind of obsessive state where I didn’t want to think or read anything that was not about plants.”

At around that time, she rediscovered her childhood copy of Captain Cook’s Voyages.

Once she put botany and exploration together, “the story started to build.”

The era was a perfect fit. Her favourite writers are from that period: Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters, Henry James.

“I wanted to romp around in their language and their world.”

It suited a story about a female scientist, she adds, because the first half of the 19th century was a time when literate and intelligent men and women could converse about biology, botany and physics and even contribute. You didn’t have to be a genius with charts or numbers. Anything later and she couldn’t have tackled it.

“So much of it was narrative, people writing long letters trying to sort out ideas that were poetic,” she says.

But Gilbert was also determined to create a protagonist within a more nuanced and feminist framework. Alma has sexual desires and frustrations, but she doesn’t pay the price for them à la Emma Bovary or Anna Karenina. Neither is she a raven-haired beauty of heaving bosom. She is plain, ambitious and independent.

Heroines of that time tended to end up either living happily ever after (married) or doomed to misery. Not Alma. Her dreams don’t all come true and she has heartbreak, but she lives a dignified and accomplished life.

“Most of us don’t have lives that are that black or white, happy or tragic. Most of us imbibe tremendous disappointments in our lives. We don’t get everything we want, but we get things we weren’t expecting and we end up, most of us, making really interesting lives out of a combination of successes and errors,” Gilbert says.

“I feel like that’s a story about women’s lives that has not been told that often in novels.”

At first, it’s hard to fathom Gilbert’s leap from the thirty-something narrator of Eat, Pray, Love drowning in snot and tears on the bathroom floor to her creating a commanding character who writes scholarly dissertations on moss. Her imagination seems about as far as you can get from the self-help shelves.

But then again, Alma is a seeker. And “seeking is my gig,” says Gilbert.

In the end, what holds Alma back is her own perfectionism, a notion that many women readers will recognize.

Bringing Alma to life took three solid years of research, boxes of index cards to keep the plot lines, science and characters straight, and treks to London, Amsterdam and the South Pacific.

“Mostly,” says Gilbert, “I just read my ass off.” That included poring over letters, archives, missionaries’ memoirs, scientific works and anything else that would help her nail the voice.

What she rediscovered in writing fiction were “pleasures I wasn’t expecting and delights I had forgotten about.”

Yes, Eat, Pray, Love will probably always be Gilbert’s signature book. “But I want to give this time to Alma,” she adds as she heads into an autumn of readings and appearances.

After that, she wants to stick with fiction . . . and gardening. A new novel is already percolating “about girls behaving recklessly.” That’s all she’ll say, other than no vampires are involved.