Sea Garden - Hardcover

Gardeners listen up! Victoria and Guy Jones inherit the Cornish island of Trelise and begin work to restore its famous gardens. Five generations of quirky, opinionated gardeners have lived and planted here. As Guy digs up the flower beds, his American wife probes into the family history in documents found in the priory and around the island. Botanically speaking, this is a work of love. Historically, it is a work of lusts, secrets, murders, and exotic plants. Gareth Armstrong is a masterful reader of this English household. His American Victoria, however, is a bit over the top. The character could easily be portrayed with a mid-Atlantic accent as she hails from New Hampshire, but Armstrong interprets her with an inappropriate drawl. This hardly detracts, however, from the enormous sweep of the novel and the intensity of the history, both human and plant. B.H.B. © AudioFile 2002, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine

Victoria, a young American, and Guy, a young Englishman, meet, fall in love and get married in the first few pages of this stylish tale of crime and passion. Soon thereafter, Guy inherits his family's estates and properties, on the condition that he and his bride change their surname from Farrer to Blakeney-Jones. They move to a mansion on Trelise, his family's island off Cornwall, which the author, a native of the Isles of Scilly, lovingly evokes. After purchasing Trelise in the 1840s, Joshua Jones, the famous medicinal herbalist, immediately began to turn the island into one large garden. When Victoria discovers some buried bones, Guy thinks they must be those of some long-ago monk. Victoria disagrees, so she begins to research the history of Trelise, consulting letters, invoices, diaries and other documents stored in the mansion. She learns that Joshua Jones was followed by James Blakeney-Jones; James's daughter, Harriet; and Harriet's son, Harry, as family leader over the years. From this point on, the book presents a clever interweaving of past and present, with the different stories told as if they were occurring contemporaneously. The mystery turns out to be thoroughly modern, however, involving many of the present-day staff at Trelise. Victoria's insights and her personal failings play a strong part in her deductions and conclusions in this intricate tale of sex and death over the generations. (Sept.)
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