The Real Secret Garden

The Telegraph explores it.

From the article...

Today, with the gentle acres keeping out all traffic noise, I feel I’m experiencing the same scent and hum that seduced her. The hall’s present estate manager, Roger Watts, beckons me beneath the glossy green foliage, pointing out the changes made by Edwin Lutyens in 1909 when the hall was rebuilt. The design is relatively formal now. “But when Frances first came here,” he says, “it was all one big orchard, overgrown with brambles. She created a rose garden. Over there is an old pink variety she loved, called ‘Madame Moussigny’.”

It was 1897 when Hodgson Burnett first stood within these lichened walls. By her late forties, she was exhausted from decades as a “pen-driving machine”.