Frost will pick out the shapes of the sea hollies, the wind will tatter them and in spring when I’m gardening I will find the lacy and beautiful skeletons of their bracts. I just hope this book changes that fact as she was a remarkable women with a fascinating story to tell and I'm very grateful to the author for bringing Miss Willmott to my attention! However, according to the plant’s entry in Maund’s Botanic Garden of 1849, the name Eryngium was adopted by the ancient Greeks, and the written description was sufficiently definite for Linnaeus to identify the plant and thus he kept the name. Miss Willmott's Ghosts is a sweeping biography of a gardening genius lost from most conscious memory but whose spirit lives in the dozens or more plant species named for her or associated with her.

It’s totally baffling to me that I can grow a plant, love a plant, then lose a plant, and find myself still without it nearly 20 years later.Stunning in the garden on a summer’s day, the plant is even more impressive on a moonlit night, when flowers give off what can only be described as a ghostly glow. It occurs to me that I keep referring to something a bit strange-sounding in these blogs and that it may be worth explaining what the bloomin’ heck I’m talking about. I listened to the audiobook and found the narrator a bit off putting, but enjoyed Ellen’s life story, and the puzzle of how it was put together. 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. Ellen’s father was a wealthy lawyer, and she seemed able to persuade him to finance her various projects, too.

Her many horticultural achievements and phenomenal plant knowledge have been overlooked in favour of scandalous tales of her unbecoming behaviour and financial profligacy.

But like the velvet shadows that hid away during the sunny months, ghosts are out there biding their time. We know the current whereabouts of very few objects that absolutely, without doubt, belonged to Ellen; even fewer objects that absolutely, without doubt, also belonged to her family. As a lover of gardening and gardens I was intrigued by this book as I knew nothing of Ellen Willmott, who gardened near me at Warley Place in Brentwood, Essex.