The Last Garden

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The Last Garden in England has three timelines: the present day, the early 1900s, and the 1940s, and I loved them all, and these strong female characters. Set in Scotland at a historic garden at Highbury House over these three timelines, first it must be designed, and later on, it must be restored. It also served as a hospital.

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Let’s get specific about the numbers here. In the space of a few days, I bought over 500 box plants, north of 200 lavenders, probably a hundred or so assorted Mediterranean herbs, maybe 75 alliums, a few dozen Japanese anemones, fifty or so hellebores, twenty-odd foxgloves, because they’ll self-seed anyway, nineteen peonies (I have no idea why I went with nineteen, but it still feels right) and a respectable copse of trees. I would recommend this book to any who enjoy historical fiction, gardening and it's history and even women studies. I found it to be an enjoyable and even educational read. I learned much about gardens and the commandeering of estates during the wars in Britain. Well, I play one on the internet. I give people advice and post artfully cropped photographs. And it’s not as if I’m faking. I really do know how to overwinter dahlias, how to establish a fig tree or whatever. It’s just that I’m lapsed now, no longer practising. This book tells the story of 3 different generations of women who were the architects of the gardens on one large country estate. I like how it all folded together, and even with the three time periods, the stories blended well and I was able to keep it all together and know where I was at.I really enjoyed learning about historical concepts and events centered around a passion of mine - gardening! Kelly's decades-spanning story will appeal to gardeners and lovers of Downton Abbey and Upstairs Downstairs." - Library Journal

The Last Garden | Rachel Ip

Because it’s not a moment at all. Moments are ending in there. That’s how it works. Time and space have collapsed, are reconfiguring. There are new dimensions now, unfolding from this dark and pristine singularity. 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 well-to-do industrialists, solicitors, and bankers looking to show off their wealth with sumptuous country houses. She is determined to make Highbury House a triumph, but the gardens there—and the people she meets—will change her life forever. Knowing these things doesn’t help much, though. Because straight-up pissing the bed, when you’re twenty-nine years old? You can’t train for that. Then lying in it, to hide it from your wife. All casual, like there’s no rush. Yeah, that takes it out of you. The grass still needs cutting, but not for much longer. It’s probably just as well, in the circumstances. We also meet two other women who had something to do with the gardens and Highbury House. Each time we meet one of the women, we find a little more about the garden, their lives, and their connection to it all.These were the most complicated sections of the book but the most interesting and fleshed out in my opinion. Sorting the numerous characters and their stories was well worth the effort as there were many touching moments. I’m sorry, I said. Not actually crying, because for some reason I couldn’t any more. That mechanism was gone. I’m so very sorry. Strange balance - other than the garden designs I felt total surface views and hardly any soul. With all of that short attention span switching I felt like it was suffering from A.D.D throughout and hardly hung together as one story. It’s straight-up fanaticism, is what it is. No two ways about it. But there’s no reasoning with us on this point. Because like all fundamentalists, we believe ourselves to possess a sacred knowledge, to be admitted to a higher truth.