Last Garden in England

 by Julia Kelly

This is the story of a British garden and its history in three time periods, early 1900s, 1940's and the present.

The story starts with a young woman being hired to design a massive garden on an estate in England.  This job ends up being her last garden in England.  After this she moves to the U.S. where she makes a name for herself.  As the story progresses we find out the garden designer has fallen in love with the brother of the family that owns the estate.  She gets pregnant but loses the baby.  To escape the shame of her affair and to be allowed to marry the couple leave England, changing their names to avoid scandal to the family.

The second story is about the same estate in world war II.  The house has been taken over to be a hospital for recovering soldiers.  The woman of the estate, recently widowed, is struggling from the death of her husband in the war and the "invasion" of her house.  The widow has a young son whom she is overprotective of.  Her sister-in-law has come to be Matron of the hospital and they often tangle over things.  As the story goes on the woman realizes how much she gave up to be a wife, including playing her harp, which she loved doing.

Some "land girls", girls sent to work on farms to help wartime food production also figure in the story.  There is one girl who hates the life there, another really thrives on it.  She becomes friends with the cook on the estate through delivering produce there from the farm and she becomes acquainted with the owner who gives her permission to draw the gardens as a hobby.  This young woman eventually falls in love with and marries one of the soldiers.

There is another young woman on the estate, a young cook.  One day her sister arrives, a recent widow also, with her young son in tow.  She wants to leave the boy with her sister as she fears London is not safe and she is working in a factory.  She does not provide any money for the boy's upkeep.  The lady of the house agrees he can stay and this boy and the owner's son become fast friends.  The young cook really resents having the boy their, she doesn't know how to be a mother.  Eventually the boy's mother is killed in a bombing in London.  The young cook is devastated.  She had hoped to get a career as a secretary and eventually be able to travel a bit but now her dreams are shattered as she has the responsibility for the boy.

The young master one day eats a poisonous plant and dies.  Why would a gardener plant poisonous plants in a garden??? His mother withdraws to her room.  But eventually she offers to adopt the other boy as her son.  She locks the garden where her son died, only after burying a box with pix of him, a favourite toy, and the adoption papers for the othter boy, then throws the key to the gate in a pond.

The third story has a young woman who has been hired to re-establish the garden on the estate as it was originally designed.  Part of it is overgrown, part of it has been destroyed in the past, she has a lot of research to do to figure things out but the owners do find some drawings and a neighbour finds some paintings his grandmother (the land girl artist) did of the garden.  Eventually the woman and her partner climb over the wall into the garden and start bringing it back to life.  They uncover the buried box.  The owners of the house are shocked to learn that the man they thought of as their grandfather was actually an adopted boy. The woman and her partner also piece together why the original garden designer likely left England.  The present day garden designer had been a bit of a gypsy with no  fixed address but she meets someone on this job and decides to settle down in that area.

It was an interesting read, certainly gave a good sense of what was going on in the war years in England.  An okay way to fill the time in pandemic days.