Miss Wilmott's Ghosts is the biography of the extraordinary and wilful Ellen Wilmott, a Victorian gardener, botanical photographer and an award-winning and influential breeder of hundreds of plants.
Her sister Aida was only seven when she died, but when Ellen reached her seventh birthday, she received a cheque for £1000 and the same amount every birthday from Countess Helen Tasker, her godmother.
On her 21st birthday, Ellen’s father gave her the money to design and create a large alpine garden. This early success led to Warley being recognised as one of the most important gardens in the country and at one time there were 104 gardeners working there.
Meanwhile, when Ellen’s fairy godmother Helen died, she and her sister Rose each inherited £143,000. This really was life-changing as it was equivalent to more than £19 million today.
It’s all very well having a fortune to throw at establishing a number of gardens ( at Warley, at Tresserve in the French Alps and in Italy, a third garden, Boccanegra.
However, Ellen was gifted, clever and had the vision to create gardens which were greatly admired by her peers. She also became an expert in cultivating new species of plants which were sought after by other prominent garden collectors.
Over 200 plants are named after her. Ellen was a member of the Linnean Society and the Royal Horticultural Society and was well known in gardening and natural history circles.
As Sandra Lawrence writes “ the more I found out, the more I wanted to know”
And this is exactly how I felt as I read further about the social mores of Ellen’s time and those perceived Victorian conventions which she managed to navigate as a woman.
Mind you, I was intrigued right from the introduction of this book where Sandra involves you in her journey to find the real Ellen Wilmott as she searched through rotting trunks found in the cellar at Spetchley Park in Worcestershire, the former home of her beloved sister Rose.
The excitement of finding letters, artefacts and photographs led Sandra to uncover the mystery of why Ellen made the greatest faux pas and biggest error of her career.
In 1897, Ellen Wilmott was awarded the prestigious and inaugural Victoria medal of honour by the RHS. She and Gertrude Jekyll were the only two women to be honoured in such a way, but why did Ellen not attend the actual ceremony?
Sandra reveals she found years worth of passionate love letters between Ellen and Miss Gian Tufnell, a lady in waiting for the Duchess of Teck. There’s transcripts of such ardent letters and yet Gian suddenly announces she is getting married to a much older man. Not only that, the wedding is the day after Ellen was due to get her medal.
Too distraught to go to the RHS ceremony, it wasn’t as if Ellen could explain why there would have been a huge scandal. Even so, her non attendance though was seen as a very public snub to the society and the whole horticultural community.
Sandra feels that Ellen’s reputation never recovered and afterwards there was a real sea change in her life.
As she got older, there’s no doubt she was an eccentric… one who carried a revolver in her pocket and even owned some knuckle dusters. She became known as difficult, a battle axe, a spendthrift and a miser.
Largely sympathetically written but with welcome dashes of humour and asperity, this is an engaging, fascinating, oh so lively biography of a remarkable woman whose wonderful world crashed around her. Highly recommended.
...........................................................
Miss Wilmott’s Ghosts by Sandra Lawrence was published earlier this month by Blink Publishing and costs £25. I received a press copy to review.
Warley Place, her family home, is now a nature reserve run by the Essex Wildlife Trust and is open every day during daylight hours. The house was demolished in 1939.
