Miss Willmott's Ghosts: the extraordinary life and gardens of a forgotten genius

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The Kew Pollinators range of seeds from Thompson and Morgan has been specially created alongside the experts at Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew to attract and support a wide range of pollinators, including bees, butterflies and beetles, as well as a number of other important pollinating insects. She accessorised old, mended, unfashionable clothes with buttonholes made with from rare plants only she had been able to get into flower knowing that, in the right circles, they screamed money and talent. Trick-or-treating is an organised affair with parents shepherding offspring around to collect plastic-wrapped sweets in plastic pumpkin buckets from friendly neighbours.

Over the years Ellen acquired a reputation as a bitter, cantakerous and miserly old woman, carrying a revolver in her bag and laying mines amongst her expensive daffodil bulbs.

Taller than most other cultivated garden thistles, the plant bears large silvery-blue cones in summer, each flower head resting atop a spiky ruff of brutally sharp silver bracts that let you know if you venture too close as you’re tending the garden. Miss Willmott was a plantswoman extraordinaire who at one time employed 104 gardeners at her own home. Both the species and its cultivar 'Silver Ghost' have gained the Royal Horticultural Society's Award of Garden Merit. In her lifetime, however, Ellen was known equally – and in some circles more – for her musical abilities. Apparently, the candied sweet was much sought after for coughs and colds - and as an aphrodisiac (what wasn't?

My editor very sensibly cut this section out of the book and I admit… it’s not absolutely necessary to know the following to make sense of Chapter Eight. She was, after all, one of the most famous amateur horticulturists of her day - or perhaps it wasn't until after her death?

In all she grew 100,000 different plant species and cultivars, employing 104 gardeners to care for them. But she didn't stop others shaping her future and she travelled extensively putting together an astonishing plant collection, most of which is now lost amidst the ruins of Warley Place, now run as a successful nature reserve, and somewhere I definitely need to visit soon! She claimed to have grown over 100,000 different varieties on her various estates, notably Warley Place in Essex, England. It’s quite a statuesque plant, forming an innocuous evergreen rosette of broad, heart-shaped plain green, lower leaves the first year, but then sending up in the second a stiff, thick, blue-green stalk of smaller sessile (without a petiole) stem leaves that are narrower, distinctly bluish with ivory veins and surrounded in nasty-looking prickles. Eryngium 'Miss Willmott's Ghost' is stunning in the garden, and it's a terrific dried or cut flower .

But she still leaves the reader exasperated and confused – full of admiration for her energy and gifts, infuriated by much of her behaviour. The marbled, heart-shaped foliage is attractive too, and shown off to best effect planted in gravel. With its luminous spiny collar of silvery-white bracts surrounding an egg-shaped flower head and tightly packed with flowers, initially pale green, then changing to steel-blue, Miss Willmott’s Ghost (Eryngium giganteum) is quite a catch and an asset to any garden! BY THIS TIME of the year, all but the hardiest annuals have succumbed, and most perennials have gone dormant. Cultivated as an ornamental for the garden, this prolific self-sower is also popular with flower arrangers due to its fabulously architectural form.

When you hear the lists of her purchases read out - historic instruments, decorative silver, paintings, antique carpets, tapestries, sculpture - you can see the links to their collections.

willmottiae, discovered by planthunter Ernest Henry ‘Chinese’ Wilson on his first trip to Szechuan in 1899 – a trip she helped finance. Liberating” Seeds in Other People’s Gardens Miss Willmott’s ghost, with its appropriately ghostly silver coloration, pops up here and there in some of the world’s best gardens. In fact, this book includes so many events and scenes that I have a new reading list of over 30 new plants, places and people featured in the book to last me a year at least. Author, Sandra Lawrence, has been granted unparalleled access to her archives, and with it has uncovered the secrets behind this thorniness. The entry, published in 1849, reports that although something of a lost art it was still prepared by some confectioners.Rising atop a basal rosette of heart-shaped green leaves, this short-lived perennial or biennial self-sows generously and remains in the garden year after year for our utmost pleasure. With the best range of heirloom seeds, rare plants and bulbs available, join us to learn how to create your own beautiful and productive garden for a sustainable future.