When finally the ship pulls up to the dock and the deckhands lash it in place with thick ropes, a gangway is put down. The crowd of passengers eager to stand on land again surges ahead. She slips her hand into her husband’s and prepares to walk off into their next adventure together.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
The Last Garden in England grew out of a garden. For years I carried around with me the idea that I wanted to write a book about several different generations of women, all connected by a single garden. I didn’t know where it was, what it looked like, or why any of the characters felt pulled to it, but I knew that at some point it would mature into something special.
I found the key to that story when I began to learn about requisitioned houses. Just as in World War I, during World War II the British government needed space for training grounds, hospitals, barracks, and administrative headquarters. Some of the country’s great estates that would have served as perfect backdrops for Downton Abbey played host to schools, orphanages, and maternity wards for expectant mothers evacuated from the country’s urban centers for fear of bombing raids. But it wasn’t only the huge houses with dozens of bedrooms that were requisitioned. Even dower houses, village houses, and inns were snapped up for use, and my parents’ home served as a WAAF barracks for a period of time.
This was all allowed thanks to the Defence （General） Regulations 1939 under the Emergency Powers （Defence） Act 1939. When orders came, some homeowners tried their best to fend off the invading strangers, as detailed in Julie Summers’s excellent history, Our Uninvited Guests: Ordinary Lives in Extraordinary Times in the Country Houses of Wartime Britain. Some had good reason to be fearful of the military coming into their homes. Sir William and Lady Hyde Parker’s home at Melford Hall in Suffolk burned down in 1942 after the officers stationed there let their nighttime revelries escalate dangerously. However, others, like Lady Mabel Grey at Howick Hall in Northumberland, embraced their contribution to the war effort.
Lady Grey, who was the model for the best parts of Cynthia Symonds, served as the commandant for a military hospital in her home during two world wars. At the start of the war, the War Office estimated that it would require twenty thousand beds. It found them in convalescent hospitals like Howick Hall, where women like Lady Grey, who were used to running large country houses and staffs of dozens, made the ideal commandants. She would have had a quartermaster to handle operations as they worked with the doctors, matron, and other senior staff of the hospital to ensure everything ran smoothly. It was a vital bit of war work, as the facilities in requisitioned homes allowed casualty hospitals to treat injured servicemen and women and then move them along to convalesce in the countryside.
While researching this book, I paid a visit to Upton House and Gardens in Warwickshire. Lord Bearsted housed his family’s bank and its staff on the beautiful grounds of his country residence, which is now a National Trust property. However, it wasn’t just Upton House’s wartime history that drew me in but its gardens as well, which combine beautiful, classically English borders with a wild-seeming Bog Garden. All the better that it was designed by a young woman named Kitty Lloyd-Jones, who, according to her biographer, was hired by clients in the 1920s and 1930s to lend a sense of good taste to the grand gardens they’d acquired with their new houses bought with new fortunes. Venetia became an amalgamation of the talented female gardeners of the past like Lloyd-Jones and the far more famous Gertrude Jekyll, whose influence on gardening was so deep that many of her principles are still used today.
Not far off from Upton House is Hidcote Manor in Chipping Campden, the product of the real-life Lawrence Johnston, who Venetia and Matthew pay a visit to in the early days of their courtship. It was after a visit to Hidcote on a hot August day that I decided to focus Venetia’s vision for Highbury House around a series of garden rooms. Hidcote is laid out in much the same way, with hedges dividing the rooms in which Johnston focused on a single color or theme. The red borders were in full bloom when I visited and served as inspiration for the lovers’ garden in this book. In fact, it was when I saw the red borders that I started to see the possibility of what Highbury’s fictional gardens could be.
I learned to love gardens as a little girl when I would dig in the dirt next to Dad. Living most of my adult life in New York City and central-ish London meant that, when I was writing this book, I hadn’t yet had the pleasure of creating my own garden—except for the little set of container-bound plants that bloom in front of my house. If there are any errors in the plantings, they are all my own. However, my very limited experience with my own plants has taught me that there are no real mistakes when it comes to gardening. Sometimes perfectly well-suited plants that are fussed over and tended to die for no good reason. Other times I’ve found that a neglected plant will take off like a weed, defying all expectations even when it is in the wrong soil, sun, or situation.