by Julia Kelly
She placed the box in the earth, and she and Bobby pushed dirt over it until a shallow mound of disturbed earth was all that was left.
Silently they left the winter garden, stopping only to lock the gate behind them for the final time. Then Diana took Bobby by the hand and led him down to the lake’s edge.
There was a small outcropping of rocks that jutted out into the water. The key felt heavy in her hand as she turned it over and over again.
“Are you ready to say goodbye?” she asked.
Bobby nodded.
Taking a deep breath, she threw the key as far as she could. When it hit the water, it sent ripples spilling out after it.
“Mrs. Symonds?” he asked.
She glanced down at him. “Yes?”
He hesitated before looking up at her. “Can I call you Mummy?”
“Why would you want to do that?” she asked.
“Because you do all of the things that mummys do.”
The sob broke from her before she could stop it, and she clapped her free hand over her mouth.
“Yes,” she whispered. “Of course you can.”
“Mummy,” he said as though testing the name out, “could we have cocoa?”
She gave a watery laugh and swung him up into a hug. “Let’s go see what’s in the larder.”
• EPILOGUE •
MARCH 1908
She steps off the boat, glad to be on solid ground. The Atlantic crossing hasn’t been as arduous as she’s been warned, but five days on the water was enough.
A gentle hand on her elbow makes her look up. He is smiling down at her. “Are you ready?”
“I think so.”
Her heart still aches to think of all she’s left behind in England—her brother, her home, her memories—but she finds that the ache dulls a little bit each day.
They’d stolen back there one frozen January Sunday when they knew that the Melcourts would not be at home. They crossed Highbury House Farm’s fields and let themselves in through the gate by her old cottage.
They crossed the lavender walk to the yew path that went straight to Celeste’s garden. He hung back a little, but she went to the gate. The head gardener—dear, dear man—had written to tell her where she might find the key. It was under the rock just as he’d described. She let herself in, slipping it into her pocket as she went.
Much of the garden was still freshly planted, but she could see how it would grow and fill the space. Already the grasses looked tall and noble against the red brick. The hellebores bloomed an impossible white, and the green stalks of snowdrops and crocuses stood strong with tight buds that would open in the coming weeks and days.
A part of her heart will always remain in Celeste’s garden.
But now she turns her sights to her new home. I will do great things here, she thinks as she touches the letter of introduction a Mr. Schoot has sent her with a note enclosed: The Royal Botanical Heritage Society had voted to begin admitting women to its ranks this May. And so she will write for Mr. Schoot and his journal as she establishes herself and starts a new life with the man she loves. Matthew.
Only she mustn’t call him that any longer. He’d told her as they lay in their cabin on their first night at sea that he thought it best to go by his middle name, Spencer. They cannot cultivate speculation about what happened between the gardener and the brother of her employer.
“I thought about changing my surname, too. I have little attachment to it,” he said, cupping her face.
“Who will you become?” she asked as the boat rocked back and forth under them.
“I thought perhaps I will be a Smith. There are so many Smiths, what is one more?” He paused. “And it’s your name. What more could I wish for?”
She kissed him, grateful to have such an unconventional husband.
Over the painful autumn months, she has learned to collect perfect moments of hope and joy to hold close. That night in the cabin was one of those moments, and she will think of it when grief and pain became too much.
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.
I believe that, much like books, gardens are organic, unpredictable things, revealing their beauty how and when they choose. It is up to us to remember to pause and enjoy that beauty every day.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Whenever I write the acknowledgments for a book, I am always awed thinking back on the generosity of my friends and family.
Thank you to Alexis Anne, Lindsay Emory, Mary Chris Escobar, Alexandra Haughton, and Laura von Holt, my friends and writing retreat companions who encouraged me to press on with this book when I needed it most.
Thank you, Sonia, Eric, Zara, Jenn, Jackie, Ben, Mila, Sloane, Jemima, Mary, Beatrice, Christy, Kather, Sean, Amanda, Liam, and Andy, for keeping me grounded from near and far.
Thank you to my wonderful agent, Emily Sylvan Kim. I still laugh when I think about that long pitch session of not-quite-right ideas that was just wrapping up when I said, “There is this one idea I had about writing a book set around a historic garden that crosses a few time periods.” I’m glad we got there in the end!
To Kate Dresser, Molly Gregory, Jen Bergstrom, Aimée Bell, Jen Long, Abby Zidle, Michelle Podberezniak, Caroline Pallotta, Christine Masters, Jaime Putorti, Anabel Jimenez, Lisa Litwack, and the entire team at Gallery Books: I’m so grateful that I’ve been able to work with you on this book.
My family has been my biggest group of cheerleaders since long before a reader ever held one of my books in their hands. Thank you, Mum, Justine, and Mark, for listening to my frustrations, helping me work through plot points, reading early drafts, and generally being the most wonderful people I could ever have asked for.
I could not have written this book without a lifetime of inspiration from Dad, who let me play around in the dirt and deadhead the roses next to him when I was a little girl. Thank you for lending me your knowledge, playing research assistant, and letting me ransack your gardening books for inspiration. I can’t wait to keep learning from you in your own beautiful garden.
A Gallery Books Reading Group Guide
The Last Garden in England
Julia Kelly
This reading group guide for The Last Garden in England includes an introduction, discussion questions, and ideas for enhancing your book club. The suggested questions are intended to help your reading group find new and interesting angles and topics for your discussion. We hope that these ideas will enrich your conversation and increase your enjoyment of the book.
Introduction
Present day: Emma Lovell, who has dedicated her career to breathing new life into long-neglected gardens, has just been given the opportunity of a lifetime: to restore the gardens of the famed Highbury House, designed in 1907 by her hero, Venetia Smith. But as Emma dives deeper into the gardens’ past, she begins to uncover secrets that have long lain buried.
1907: A talented artist with a growing reputation for her ambitious work, Venetia Smith has carved out a niche for herself as a garden designer to industrialists, solicitors, and bankers looking to show off their wealth with sumptuous country houses. When she is hired to design the gardens of Highbury House, she is determined to make them a triumph, but the gardens—and the people she meets—promise to change her life forever.
1944: When land girl Beth Pedley arrives at a farm on the outskirts of the village of Highbury, all she wants is to find a place she can call home. Cook Stella Adderton, on the other hand, is desperate to leave Highbury House to pursue her own dreams. And widow Diana Symonds, the mistress of the grand house, is anxiously trying to cling to her pre-war life now that her home has been requisitioned and transformed into a convalescent hospital for wounded soldiers. But within the walls of Highbury House’s treasured gardens blooms a secret that will tie these women together for decades.
Topics & Questions for Discussion
1. Each of our heroines—Venetia, Beth, Diana, Stella, and Emma—is a transplant to Highbury. Discuss how each of them found “home” in Highbury. What pivotal moments do they share? How do the relationships they form help them each finally put down roots?
2. Class plays a significant role in each of the time periods. How is Venetia’s relationship with Mr. and Mrs. Melcourt different from the relationship Beth and Stella have with Diana? How is it different from the relationship between Emma and Sydney and Andrew? How are the relationships the same? Are you surprised by how much or how little changed over the course of 114 years?
3. Venetia suffers a miscarriage, Diana loses her son in an accident and adopts another, Stella never wanted to be a mother but finds herself a de facto mother to Bobby, and Emma has a complicated relationship with her own mother. Discuss how each woman navigates motherhood and how expectations of motherhood shift from Venetia’s time to Diana and Stella’s and finally to Emma’s in the present day. Do any of their challenges remind you of your own mother or your experience with motherhood? How have society’s expectations around motherhood changed? How have they stayed the same?
4. All of the women in the novel work and have ambition. Venetia writes that she appreciates how Matthew “doesn’t treat me as though I’m made of bone china or an oddity playing at being a gardener” (page 126). Stella expresses to Diana, “I wanted to go to London. To work and then maybe do more” (page 304). Diana herself is counseled by Father Devlin, “you are a woman of independent means. You may choose to live the life you want to lead. You could play the harp at every hour of the day, or you could run this hospital” (page 293). On Beth’s first day as a land girl, she “felt vital and useful for the first time in a long time” (page 33). And in present day, Emma proudly runs her own business. Discuss how each of these women breaks from expectation in order to pursue her ambitions. How are their struggles the same, even a hundred years apart? How are they different?
5. Matthew and Henry (and Charlie, to some extent) support the creativity and ambition of Venetia and Emma as they craft the gardens of Highbury House. Compare these relationships, and how these men assume a role secondary to the women. How does their support further the visions of each woman? Can you think of moments of hindrance?
6. Diana and Cynthia have a tense relationship. Cynthia is critical of Diana’s grief, and Diana strains under Cynthia’s attempts to seize control of her home and hospital in spite of Diana having once “been convinced that her future sister-in-law was perfect” (page 263). Discuss how this relationship differs from the other female relationships in 1944 (Diana and Stella, Stella and Beth, Beth and Ruth) and what you think it reveals about each of them. Where does their contempt come from, and how do they each use it to compensate for frustrations they have? Is their tension ultimately productive?
7. Which time period do you wish you could visit? Who from the novel would you most like to meet? Why?
8. Highbury House and its gardens is the only constant through each of the timelines in the novel. How is the house a character in its own right? What does it teach and give to all of the people who call it home—temporarily or otherwise? How is the pull of it the same or different for each of the characters? Are there any characters for
whom it is more a prison than a sanctuary? Is there a place in your life that you feel has given you purpose, or perhaps driven you to look for more?
9. As Venetia is designing Highbury House gardens, Matthew discovers her theme for each of the garden rooms, remarking: “Each room represents the life of a woman. The tea garden is where polite company comes to meet, all with the purpose of marrying a girl off. The lovers’ garden speaks for itself, I should think, and the bridal garden is her movement from girl to wife. The children’s garden comes next. I would guess that the lavender walk represents her femininity, and the poet’s garden stands for a different sort of romance than the lovers’ garden.… Aphrodite, Athena, Hera. All of the pieces in the statue garden will be depictions of the female form” (page 149). And Venetia reveals that the winter garden represents her death. Discuss how each of our heroines—Venetia, Beth, Diana, Stella, and Emma—fulfill each of these seasons of a woman’s life. How do their embodiments of these stages differ? How are they the same? Is there a universality to their experiences of womanhood that are reflected in the garden plans?
10. The book is divided into four sections, one for each season. Do the lives of each narrator fit with each season? Discuss Venetia’s, Beth’s, Diana’s, Stella’s, and Emma’s transformations from winter to spring to summer to autumn. How do each of their character developments mirror what each season represents?
11. At the outset of the novel, Venetia, Beth, and Emma are all single, and by the end, each of them has fallen for a man in the gardens of Highbury House. They are all quite stubborn and, like the flowers in the garden, take time to “bloom.” How are these romances similar? How are they different?