Miss Willmott's Ghosts: the extraordinary life and gardens of a forgotten genius

Product Information

She tried to set up various businesses, a garden centre, a plant rental scheme, a seed catalogue - they were all loss making in the end, but they were pre-cursors of the types of businesses which would take off decades after her death. The beginnings of this prickly myth can be traced back to her conspicuous absence at what should have been the pinnacle of her career: the Royal Horticultural Society's inaugural Victoria Medal of Honour Award ceremony, at which she was due to be one of only two female recipients. One of the things that home gardeners can do to help is to cultivate native plants that provide nectar and food for pollinators, such as those you will find in the pollination collection. Trick-or-treating is an organised affair with parents shepherding offspring around to collect plastic-wrapped sweets in plastic pumpkin buckets from friendly neighbours.

In 1897, to celebrate Queen Victoria’s diamond jubilee, the Royal Horticultural Society awarded 60 inaugural Victoria Medals of Honour to the great and good of gardening. Widely branching heads of metallic silvery-green cones of flower are surrounded by spiny silver bracts. When seedlings are large enough to handle, transplant and grow them on in cooler conditions until large enough to move outdoors after all risk of frost has passed. Thus, it becomes almost a perennial … but a perennial that pops up here and there, never exactly where you expected it. My editor very sensibly cut this section out of the book and I admit… it’s not absolutely necessary to know the following to make sense of Chapter Eight.Grow Eryngium giganteum in gravel gardens or dotted among swaying grasses for a dramatic textural contrast.

Miss Willmott was a plantswoman extraordinaire who at one time employed 104 gardeners at her own home.I was celebrating – the paperback of Miss Willmott’s Ghosts, published exactly a year after the hardback came out. The mother has long thin legs with dark knee joints, her rotund body a symmetry of brown white and black markings.