My Darling Heriott: Henrietta Luxborough, Poetic Gardener and Irrepressible Exile - Tapa blanda

‘Henrietta is brought alive with enlightening understanding and narrative pace... Brown has unearthed a wonderful character who has until now only existed in the margins of garden history. With great verve she places Henrietta at the centre of the genesis of the picturesque garden movement.’ Guardian

‘The garden itself has long vanished, but Brown, with her rare gift for horticultural and personal passions, brings it to vivid, tender life, as she does the irrepressible Henrietta and all her turbulent times.’ Sunday Times

‘We should be grateful to Jane Brown, a distinguished and influential garden historian, for ensuring that, 250 years after her death, Henrietta’s actions smell sweet and blossom in her dust.’ Literary Review

The life and times of Henrietta Luxborough, eighteenth-century aristocrat, gardener and society exile.

Henrietta St John was born on St Swithun's Day in 1699 into a world of wealth, privilege and seeming security. Beloved sister of Jacobite rake and statesman, Henry Viscount Bolingbroke, she grew up in Hogarthian London and at Lydiard in Wiltshire, her ancestral home, into a headstrong woman of poetry and letters – Pope, Swift and Gay were amongst her acquaintance. With more wit and intelligence than was good for a high-ranking woman of her time and a wild mane of dark curly hair, Henrietta was not the easiest of wives. At twenty-seven she was accused of infidelity with a young poet by her pompous husband, and sent into the wilds of Warwickshire to moulder and die.

In refusing to fulfil these cruel expectations Henrietta created an eccentric and enchanting company of friends from the lower stratum of mid-eighteenth century society. It was Henrietta's gardens, however, that most sustained her sanity and that now shape Jane Brown's lively biography. By the time she became Lady Luxborough the irrepressible Henrietta could be credited with the invention of the shrubbery and possessed one of England's finest romantic understandings of her country's landscape. Through evocative descriptions of the gardens and houses her heroine inhabited, Jane Brown reconstructs Henrietta's remarkable and tumultuous life, and reveals an intricate portrait of early eighteenth-century English culture and society.