Garden — Gillian Linscott

‘My dear, you are smothering me with cherries, ambushing me with andromedas, and impaling me on ilex. No wonder the purple beech is weeping. I'm sure it is from sheer bewilderment. Oh my girl of little patience, this is not the way one makes a garden, any more than one makes a painting by squeezing every tube to hand onto canvas. I shall explain when I come.'

Holders Hope, Herefordshire. The roots of a great garden are laid in the long summer of the Edwardian age. Grown from a woman's desperate need to hold on to beauty, created by a man who plants his love for her, hated by a husband it humiliates and imprisons - the garden grows around a secret it will take almost a century to solve.

For two generations the lives of two families are bound up with the garden. The Allegri family, mine owners with the money to pay for it. The Thomas family, mine workers from the Welsh valleys with whose care and skill help to shape it. Three children - an unhappy rich girl, a musician and a boy dreaming of revolution - meet in the garden and share a secret that will affect the rest of their lives.