The garden in fiction

If there’s one thing England does well it’s a country garden in high summer: the hum of bees, clean sweeps of clipped lawns, petals rioting silently under cloudless skies. Nature’s wild side tamed.

An upper-class garden with romantic glamour is the primary setting for the, which takes place in the pre-war Britain of the mid-1930s. There’s the ‘old diving pool with its mossy brick wall’ and ‘the iron kissing gate’. There are rhododendrons in the ha-ha, a rose garden and vistas of open parkland beyond. The sun has bleached the landscape, while the ‘faint leathery scent of cow dung’ pervades.