This is the story of one man and a garden. It is also the portrait of a marriage expressed through the vision and mystery of creating a garden.
Neither the author, Roy Strong, nor his wife, the designer Julia Trevelyan Oman, had foreseen this when they eloped and married in 1971. Over 30 years later they find themselves surrounded by the largest formal garden made in this country since 1945, a garden that has increasingly become recognised as one of the most important laid out in the second half of the 20th century.
And yet it was created not only with little money and less labour, but quite unconsciously. But it is not so much the horticultural triumph that will grip the reader as what this garden on the Welsh Borders in Herefordshire has come to mean in the lives of its creators.
'The Laskett' is the tale of a garden as the domain of ghosts and as the habitat of memory.
