The Walled Garden

Perfect for fans of Agatha Christie, The Crown, and Downton Abbey. American grad student Lucy Silver arrives in England hoping to solve a longstanding literary mystery, write her dissertation, and finish her graduate studies in a blaze of academic glory. But as Lucy starts to piece together the correspondence between her late grandmother and Elizabeth Blackspear, the famous poet and garden writer who’s the subject of Lucy’s dissertation, she discovers puzzling coded references in the letters—and when an elderly English aristocrat with a secret connection to Elizabeth offers Lucy access to a neglected walled garden on his estate, the mystery deepens. As spring turns to summer in Bolton Lacey, Lucy finds herself fighting the Blackspear Gardens’ director’s attempt to deny her access to vital documents in the archives . . . and trying not to fall in love with an attractive Scottish contractor. In the midst of this turmoil, she stumbles upon an illicit plot to turn the historic gardens into a theme park, and becomes determined to stop it. As she races against time to save the gardens, Lucy’s search for the truth about Elizabeth’s life leads her to a French convent where she uncovers explosive evidence that will change her life and the lives of everyone around her, ultimately revealing a home—and an inheritance—more incredible than anything she could ever have imagined.

BBC presenter Jules Hudson (Countryfile, Escape to the Country) is passionate about walled gardens. In this book, he looks at walled gardens throughout England and Wales and explores their history, innovative design and cultural heritage. The walled garden was once an essential component of every country house, its shelter providing ideal conditions for growing food, flowers and medicine. This book from the National Trust looks at walled gardens throughout England and Wales and explores their history, innovative design and cultural heritage. Walled gardens are a feature of British gardening history. In the late 18th century, gardens became status symbols, with aristocrats vying to grow ever more exotic fruits – ushering in innovations such as glasshouses and even heated walls. With the First and Second World Wars many of these gardens fell into disrepair, but renovated ones feature at many key National Trust properties and remain a source of pride and fascination today.

Set in the exotic, seductive world of pre-revolutionary Iran, In the Walled Garden tells the nostalgic and moving story of Mahastee and Reza, who loved each other as children but have not seen each other for 20 years. Mahastee, who has become trapped by the privileged society she has grown up in, is struggling to keep her identity in the face of the increasingly empty role she inhabits. Reza has grown up to become a Marxist revolutionary, leading underground meetings and living on the edge. When chance brings the two together again, their encounters are a portrait not only of an ill-fated love, but of two worlds at odds, moving ever closer to a doomed collision.

'A Walled Garden' reproduces the complete set of watercolours that Ian Gardner made in collaboration with Ian Hamilton Finlay for the unpublished book, 'A Walled Garden: A History of the Spandau Garden in the Time of the Architect Albert Speer'. Finlay conceived the project after corresponding with the former Third Reich architect in the late 1970s, shortly after the publication of Clara and Richard Winston's English translation of, 'Spandau: The Secret Diaries' (1976), Speer's clandestine record of his twenty-year imprisonment in west Berlin's Spandau prison from 1946 to 1966.

"Walled Gardens is a brilliant portrait of the Anglo-Irish ascendancy, struggling through the post-war depression aided by drink, horse-racing and religion, and their own idiosyncratic adaptations to modern life. Seen from the troubled perspective of the daughter of an aristocratic family in decline, we watch the disintegration of a marriage in elegant but emotionally chilled surroundings, and the struggle to keep up appearances, and a collapsing roof, in front of the neighbours. By turns sad, absurd and funny, the story is ultimately liberating as failure leads to freedom."--Global Books in Print.

Beth flew the coop as soon as she could, making a life for herself in London. James, her dutiful brother, stayed in Dublin, raising a family not far from their mother, Alice. Now Alice is dying and Beth has returned to the shabby grandeur of her childhood home to keep vigil by her mother’s bedside. Unable to speak, the only way Alice feels she can bridge the gap of understanding between her daughter and herself is to write letters to her seeking reconciliation. Set during the last days of Alice's life, this is also an extraordinary perceptive novel about childhood and growing old.

The kitchen garden was designed to provide a continual supply not only of fruit, flowers and vegetables, but also of plants that had medicinal and veterinary uses, plants for flavouring food and drink, and those providing dyes, perfumes, narcotics, disinfectants, poisons and pesticides. With the aid of heated glasshouses, there would be out-of-season delicies such as strawberries for Christmas, exotic tropical fruits, and even figs and grapes. Once found in the grounds of most large country houses in Britain and Ireland, many have sadly fallen into disuse and ruin. Their remains can still be seen, however: some have been converted to other uses, others simply abandoned, while a few have been restored to their former glory and productiveness. This highly illustrated book explores a horticultural history spanning hundreds of years, and provides an extensive gazetteer of kitchen gardens that can still be visited today.