Miss Willmott's Ghosts
The Extraordinary Life and Gardens of a Forgotten Genius
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Miss Willmott's Ghosts
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Narrated by:
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Heather Tracy
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By:
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Sandra Lawrence
About this listen
Ellen Ann Willmott was a remarkable woman whose achievements in horticulture, botany, landscape architecture, photography and more should have made her one of the most well-known trailblazers of her age. Yet, both posthumously and within her lifetime, she instead became known as a bitter, cantankerous and eccentric miser, and her reputation has been forever stained by the image of her maliciously seeding other people's gardens with thorns.
The beginnings of this prickly myth can be traced back to her conspicuous absence at what should have been the pinnacle of her career: the Royal Horticultural Society's inaugural Victoria Medal of Honour Award ceremony, at which she was due to be one of only two female recipients. Universally interpreted as the rudest of snubs, nobody has ever stopped to question why Ellen wasn't there or if she was really as difficult and mean as she has been portrayed ever since.
Author Sandra Lawrence has been granted unparalleled access to her archives and with it has uncovered the secrets behind this thorniness. This is a book with it all: gossip, sisters, rivalry, squandered inheritance, forbidden love, bad marriages and, at the heart of it all, trailblazing talent.
©2022 Sandra Lawrence (P)2022 Bonnier Books UKListeners also enjoyed...
Critic reviews
"An amazing read! I galloped through it." (Lady Antonia Fraser)
"Lawrence has done an excellent job of recreating this eccentric gardening guru's life." (The Times)
"My pick for gardening book of the year is this page-turning life story of Ellen Willmott." (The Sunday Times)
"Sandra Lawrence tells her story with brio and affection." (Daily Mail)
What listeners say about Miss Willmott's Ghosts
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Tired Mummy
- 26-07-24
fascinating!
absolutely loved listening to this book - provided so much insight into a much maligned and under-rated, hardly spoken of Edwardian plant genius
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Overall3 out of 5 stars
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Performance3 out of 5 stars
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Story4 out of 5 stars
- Miss J E Watters
- 19-11-22
Interesting story
Very glad to have listened to this interesting story, but distracted by too much authorial intrusion/opinion/speculation. I found the rather informal language a bit distracting too. Clearly read, but too much drama in the performance and the reader is clearly not familiar with generally-accepted pronunciation of botanical terms, which jarred a bit with respect to the subject of the book.
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Overall4 out of 5 stars
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Performance4 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Rosa_B
- 20-10-24
Interesting portrayal of a female horticulturist
I enjoyed this audiobook. I’m very keen on gardening but had never heard of Miss Wilmott, in spite of owning several books written by her colleague, Gertrude Jekyll. Ellen was an interesting character but certainly not perfect. There were times I groaned aloud at her reckless attitude towards her inheritance but she was an expert plantswoman.
She was closely allied to the British Royal family and I also appreciated the sections that featured Ellen’s chateau and garden in France.
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Overall4 out of 5 stars
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Performance3 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Hilary
- 23-07-22
Excellent story - annoying narration
I nearly stopped listening to this after the first two chapters. The narrator, in my opinion, ruins an intriguing and interesting biography by her indignant tone throughout. I am glad I listened until the end as the story covers an interesting period of history from the 1880s to the 1930s. I do wish it had been read in a neutral tone.
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2 people found this helpful
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Overall3 out of 5 stars
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Performance3 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Catty C
- 11-10-22
Miss Willmott would never have gushed like this
First of all, if you want to find out about Ellen Willmott, this is well worth a read. I learned a huge amount. But, someone needs to get the editor back in and take out all the gushing. The book is littered with superlatives and the narrator somehow seems to put even more in, or maybe everything really was in figurative quote marks that elicited her strange and unnecessary pauses like everything was a 'drama'. Such a shame. it was like listening to an adventure written for teenage girls in the 1940s mixed with an issue of Hello magazine. Very odd indeed.
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