Eleanor Vere Boyle (1825 1916), who re-created the gardens of Huntercombe Manor in Berkshire in the 1870s, was a talented artist as well as an author, illustrating both poetry and books for children. Coming from an aristocratic family, and in later life a friend of Queen Alexandra, she produced sketches and watercolours admired by Ruskin and Landseer, and Tennyson and Bulwer Lytton contributed to her anthologies of poetry. One of a number of late nineteenth-century female writers on gardens (many of whose works have been reissued in this series), she was interested in the natural history of...