Lost Garden [Paperback]

Helen Humphreys (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 15, 2004

It's Spring 1941 and London is being destroyed by the Blitz. Gwen Davis, a young horticulturist, leaves the city for the Devon countryside. In charge of a troop of Land Girls, her job is to rebuild the grounds of a neglected estate. The manor is far removed from the fighting but Gwen has her own battles - as she struggles with her shyness and fear of intimacy to create a community among her girls. Gwen meets two people who will change her life. Raley, an officer awaiting posting to the front and Jane, a frail, free spirit whose fiance is missing in action. Through them, and the beautiful garden that she stumbles upon, she finds a flowering of a different sort - her own profound capacity for love, even in the face of pain.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Evocative, if occasionally clunky, Humphreys's third novel (following Afterimage) is the story of an Englishwoman's search for her place in a world permeated by war. The narrator, 35-year-old Gwen Davis, is a horticulturist who flees bombed-out WWII London to manage a team of "land girls"-women who grow vegetables as part of the war effort-at a country estate. She struggles to manage her wayward charges, who are more interested in the Canadian soldiers billeted in the main house than in cultivating potatoes, and writes letters in her head to her idol Virginia Woolf, whose recent death has left her feeling bereft. She also tries to seduce the world-weary, hard-drinking Captain Raley, who has a secret of his own that dooms their relationship. Though her conflicts pale next to those of the soldiers waiting to be posted to battle and even those of her new friend, Jane, whose cousin is a casualty of war and whose fiance is missing in action, it is Gwen's quiet self-discovery that is at the center of the novel. Humphreys renders convincingly her first, fleeting experience of deep friendship and love. Unfortunately, the story is sometimes marred by overwrought or cloying prose, though Humphreys's language also has its moments of elegance (during the blitz, "houses become holes. Solids become spaces. Anything can disappear overnight"). Humphreys doesn't quite have the narrative energy of Pat Barker and Jane Gardam, but fans of those authors may enjoy this exploration of the impact of WWII on English life.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From The New Yorker

"Afterimage," the author's previous novel, described the life of a maidservant employed in the hectic household of the photographer Julia Margaret Cameron. In this measured, lyrical book, the locus is once again a large house deep in the English countryside—but now it's 1941, and Gwen Davis, a desperately lonely botanist employed by the Royal Horticultural Society to investigate canker in parsnips, has signed up to direct young women agricultural volunteers on an estate requisitioned for the war effort. Humphreys is a metaphysical novelist; for her, intricate emotional content finds specific analogues in the made world—an astonishing photograph or, as here, an overgrown garden that, once cleared, reveals its consoling secrets.
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 192 pages
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing (Pod) (March 15, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0747568138
• ISBN-13: 978-0747568131
• Product Dimensions: 7.6 x 5 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.1 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,356,721 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Fragrant prose, October 13, 2003

By 

Christopher P. Dunn (The Aloha State) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Lost Garden: A Novel (Hardcover)

This is much better book than the Amazon reviewer gives it credit for. Perhaps, because this is such a personal novel (with respect to the experiences of the main character) and one that those who survived the Battle of Britain might connect with deeply, there are aspects of it that are lost on some readers and reviewers.

My parents were such Battle of Britain survivors, having lived in London during the bombing. And my father was an avid gardener. And, my mother had a fling with an American GI (as opposed to Canadian in this book). That's the personal aspect that resonates with me, and I am deeply thankful to Helen Humphreys for capturing all the pain, love, longing, and faith that these real people experienced.

But enough of that... this book is a small prose miracle. Others here have stated and summarized the main plot, so I won't repeat it. The idea of gardening, of nurturing both the earth and one's soul is not a particularly novel (pardon the pun) idea. What IS different here is the magnificent way in which Humphreys tells this story in the first person (not as easy at is seems) with such passion, poetry, and compassion.

Humphreys' way with words, with describing the gardens, the pain of loss, the longing of love unrequited, the miracle of growth, is stunning. "Grief moves us like love. Grief is love, I suppose. Love as a backward glance." These words by our heroine, Gwen, are as bittersweet as the novel, as bittersweet as her love affair with roses, as bittersweet as her unspoken attraction to Capt. Raley, one of the Canadian soldiers billeted nearby.

As she says early in the book, in one of these backward glances, "I sit in this rocking train carriage, years later, words floating around me, wisping down in thin, grey threads. Nothing I can hold in my hands. Smoke, these words are smoke."

Gwen recalls overhearing Jane, another of the young woman employed to grow food for the war, read aloud from Wolff's "To the Lighthouse" to one of the Canadian soldiers. As Gwen puts it, "and when I hear that voice [Jane's] polishing those words so that they shine inside me..." Well, all I can say is that Helen Humphreys' words also truly shine.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Discovering love, April 17, 2003

By 

Anna Klein - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Lost Garden: A Novel (Hardcover)

It's 1941 and London is burning. Gwen Davis (35 and a horticulturist formerly seeking a cure for parsnip canker) must now flee the city she loves, so she's volunteered to lead a team of girls from the Women's Land Army in growing vegetables for the war effort at an old country estate. The estate is beautiful, but it soon becomes apparent the girls have better things to do than plant potatoes -- they have a company of Canadian soldiers billeted in the old estate house right in their backyard. The soldiers are commanded by the bitter, secretly terrified Captain Raley, who immediately snares Gwen's long lost fancy. While the girls dance with the soldiers, she tracks Raley down, seeking to cement a relationship destined to haunt her. Neither can she forget the novelist Virginia Woolf, who's tragic death has left her with fantasized fan letters she can never send. But it's her discovery of a secret love garden hidden behind the orchard, long overgrown and lost to whomever planted it, that truly leads Gwen to explore her dormant longings. While her best friend, Jane, is fiercely trying to keep her missing fiance alive by remembering him and while the land army girls are depicting their former lives in chalk on blackout curtains, Gwen is tracing the meanings of the flowers in her lost garden in search of what she knows of love.

THE LOST GARDEN is truly a beautiful book -- straightforward and yet told with such sensitivity and understanding it's impossible not to get caught up in it. Gwen's idea of a drunken orgy is to get "very sincere" and start rhapsodizing on plants, and her incredibly straight view of love and life makes the poignancy all the stronger. Captain Raley's repressed fear, knowing he is just waiting to be sent out to die, had me crying by the end of the book. In fact, I cried all the way through the last chapter. Though Gwen never gets to know the land girls well (she secretly names them after potatoes), Jane and Raley and Gwen herself are excellently developed. I'm the sort of reader who thrives on constant action, yet this touching little book had me from the first word and never let go.

A brilliant portrayal of love in a time of war, THE LOST GARDEN is a literary arrangement I could not recommend more highly.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars You will start smelling the roses, August 21, 2003

By 

saabataj - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Lost Garden: A Novel (Hardcover)

I loved her Afterimage which is in my top ten favorite books. I like her prose in both the books, it's sort of poetic and lyrical but uncomplicated. (Although, I liked it better in Afterimage. In this book, at times it sounds a bit pretentious like she is trying too hard to sound deep and flowery but that's just a few places in the beginning.) She has a way with words that evoke an incredible imagery when you read it. I get caught up in her expression of the language that I don't even care if the plot seemed a bit contrived at certain places.

This book is a quick read...it's rather short.

Like a previous reviewer mentioned, Gwen beings to piece together the story the garden has to tell, which is also her own story...of Love, Longing and Loss.

She runs a few metaphors and threads describing past events throughout the book, alongside the main setting, and by the time the book ends, the connection is thrown in and you realize their purpose. They throw a little insight into the main character's thought process and complete the theme - it is much better done subtly this way. Like with the Virginia Woolf thread in this book. It goes with the overall theme of lost chances. The thread with Gwen's mother is also about Loss, though a bit over-dramatic. The thread with the white roses and Raley are tied symbolically by Love. The threads with David's longing for his wife and the Genus and Jane's topiary Angel...the symbolism of longing.

If somebody recommended a book to me about gardens, I would have found it drab and boring. And I especially don't read many stories with a war backdrop. I'm not wired to relate to or pick up a book like that. But I'm so glad I read this one. Another reviewer has said, "Anyone who enjoys a creative expression will like the book." I will add that, anyone who normally doesn't care for it should definitely read it. You will start smelling the roses.