The Lost Garden: A Novel

by Helen Humphreys

Book Overview

This word-perfect, heartbreaking novel is set in early 1941 in Britain when the war seems endless and, perhaps, hopeless. London is on fire from the Blitz, and a young woman gardener named Gwen Davis... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0393051838
• Release Date: October 2002
• Publisher: W W Norton & Co Inc
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 0.83 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.5" x 1.0" x 5.8"

Customer Reviews

Beautiful

Helen Humphreys' The Lost Garden is a beautiful little gem of a novel, a quick and wonderful read about one woman's perfect moment and time and how it quickly eluded her. Gwen Davis is a lonely woman in the early days of World War II in London when she volunteers to lead a group of women in a war-effort farming experiment on an abadoned estate in the British countryside. She is devastated to leave London, devastated by the war and yet her experiences away from London turn out to be the most rewarding of her life. She finally forms a meaningful friendship and begins to fall in love with one of the Canadian soldiers briefly stationed at the estate. Gwen reflects on the nature of love and happiness, both in her life and in the lives of those around her. This is an excellent, if short, rewarding novel. Enjoy.

Longing and Love

I rarely cry when I read anymore. But I cried almost through the whole last chapter. This is a beautiful book of love lost, memory captured and the beauty of gardens. I recommend it.

An excellent piece of art

Helen Humphreys is nothing less than a superb story-teller. The tone of this W.W.II drama is lyrical, wistful and bold, and her characters bend and sway in the nostalgia she so openly releases. It is narrated by Gwen Davis a single 30-something horticulturist who joins the war effort by volunteering to lead a group of girls in growing potatoes on a deserted estate in the English countryside. Used to working in a solitary lab environment, Gwen has to face her shyness and lack of self-confidence as she forms her relationships with the girls in her crew. Her amateur gardeners are young and energetic and would rather be flirting with the soldiers who are also stationed at the estate while awaiting deployment. One of the girls, however, is different... Jane. Since Jane's fiancé has been declared missing in action she's been slowing fading away, just barely holding onto that fragile thread of hope. Jane and Gwen befriend one another, as well as two of the soldiers staying in the estate house. Then Gwen finds the best companion of all... a secret garden hidden within the grounds. With her knowledge of horticulture and some research into the inhabitants of the estate, Gwen beings to piece together the story the garden has to tell... and finds that it is telling her story as well. If someone would've told me that I'd learn quite a lot about gardening techniques while reading this book, I might have passed it up, because I wouldn't have realized that there is a beautiful and sensitive language gardens can speak. I think any reader who enjoys creative expression will find they can relate to this story. Humphreys delivers her tale with perfect timing, swiftly wrapping-up after the climax, yet leaving just enough loose threads to keep you thinking about the characters long after the last page has been turned.

Discovering love

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.

A Most Unusual Love Story

The setting for this book is wartime Britain - not the blitz on London but a country estate in the Devon countryside, where a group of Canadian soldiers happen to be posted temporarily near a group of English girls who are learning to grow crops for the war effort. Everything about this book is unusual - its context, characters and incredibly sensitive development of the story. There are turns of phrase that will catch you completely off guard. It is funny, sad and delightful. It's as well that it's not a lengthy book, because, once you start it, you won't be able to put it down.