John managed a weary smile, leaning back against his pillows. “Maybe,” he said. “But I’m a good age now.”

Alexander Norman glanced over the will and set his name to it. He reached toward John and shook his hand. “God keep you, John Tradescant,” he said quietly.

The Duke of Buckingham’s old steward, William Ward, stepped forward, and signed the will which the clerk showed him. He took John’s hand. “I shall pray for you,” he said quietly. “You shall be in my prayers every day, along with our lord.”

John turned his head at that. “D’you pray for him still?”

The steward nodded. “Of course,” he said gently. “They can say what they like about him but we who were in his service remember a master to worship, don’t we, John? He wasn’t a tyrant to us. He paid us freely, he gave us gifts, he laughed at mistakes and he would flare into a rage and then it was all forgotten. They spoke ill of him then and they speak worse of him now; but those of us who knew him have never served a better master.”

John nodded. “I loved him,” he whispered.

The steward nodded. “When you get to heaven you will see him there,” he said with simple faith. “Outshining the angels.”


The will was signed and sealed and posted with the clerk, the executors in agreement, but Hester thought that John would not go until he could see his tulips one last time. There is no gardener in the world who does not worship spring like a pagan. Every day John would take a seat at the window of his bedroom and peer outward and down to try to see the tiny spears of green springtime bulbs piercing the cold earth.

Every day Frances came to his room with her hands filled with new buds. “Look, Grandfather, the lenten lilies are out, and the little white daffodils.”

She would spread them on the coverlet wrapped around his knees, both of them careless of the sticky juice from the cut stems. “A feast,” John said, his eyes on them. “And they smell?”

“Like heaven,” Frances replied ecstatically. “Yellow, they smell like sunshine and lemons and honey.”

John chuckled. “Tulips coming?”

“You’ll have to wait,” she said. “They’re still in bud.”

The old man smiled at her. “I should have learned patience by now, my Frances,” he said gently, his breath coming short. “But don’t forget to look tomorrow.”

Hester thought that John’s stubborn will would not let him die in early spring. He wanted to see his tulips before he died; he wanted to see the blossom on his cherry trees. She thought his soul could not leave his weary body until he had some warm summer flowers in his arms once more. As the cold winds died down and the light at the window of his bedroom grew brighter and warmer, his breath slowly slipped away, but still he hung on – waiting for the summer, waiting for the return of his son.

At the end of March he turned his head to her as she sat at his bedside. “Tell the gardener to send me in some flowers,” he said softly. He was breathless. “Everything we have. I may not be able to wait for them to bloom. Tell him to pot me up some tulips. I want to see them. They must be nearly showing by now.”

Hester nodded and went out to find the gardener. He was weeding in the seed beds, preparing them for the great rush of planting out which would come when the danger of night frosts was over.

“He wants his tulips,” she told him. “You’re to pot them up and take them in. And cut some daffodils, armfuls of them. But I want us to do more for him. What are the best plants he has made? The rarest, most special plants? Can we not put them all in a pot and take them in so that he can see them from his bed?”

The gardener smiled at her ignorance. “It’d be a big pot.”

“Several pots then,” Hester persisted. “What are his other plants?”

The gardener’s gesture took in the whole garden, and the orchards beyond. “This is not a man who gardens in pots,” he said grandly. “There’s his orchard: d’you know how many cherry trees alone? Forty! And some of his fruit trees were never grown before, like the diapered plum he got from Malta.

“And he found wonderful trees for the park or garden. See those beauties so fresh and green with those pale needles? He grew them from seed. They are Archangel larches, from Russia itself. He brought the pine cones back and managed to make them grow.”

“They’re dead,” Hester objected, looking at the spiky yellowing needles clinging to the brown twigs.

The gardener smiled at her and took one of the swooping bare branches. There was a tiny rosette of green needles at the tip of the rusty brown branches.

“In the autumn they turn as golden as a beech tree and shed their needles like yellow rain. Come the spring they burst out, all fresh and green like grass. He reared them from seed and now look at the height of them!

“In the orchards he grows the service tree, and his favorites are the great horse chestnuts. Look at that avenue down the garden! And every one of them flowers like a rose and makes leaves like a fan. It’s the greatest tree that has ever been seen, and he grew the first from a nut. On the lawn before the house? That’s an Asian plane. And nobody can say how big it will grow because nobody has ever seen one before.”

Hester looked down the avenue at the arching swooping branches. “I didn’t know,” she said. “He showed me all around the garden and the orchard but he never told me they were all his own, discovered by him and grown here in Lambeth for the very first time. He only told me they were rare and beautiful.”

“And there’s the herbs and vegetables,” the gardener reminded her. “He’s got seven sorts of garlic alone, a red lettuce which can make seventeen ounces of good leaves, allspick lavender, Jamaican pepper. His flowers come from all over the world, and we send them all over the country. Spiderwort – he gave his name to it. Tradescant’s spiderwort, a three-petaled flower the color of the sky. On a wet day it closes up so you think it’s dead; on a sunny day it is as blue as your gown. A flower to lift your heart, grow for you anywhere. Mountain valerian, lady’s smock, large-flowered gentians, silver knapweed, dozens of geraniums, ranunculus – a flower like a springtime rose, anemones from Paris, five different types of rock rose, dozens of different clematis, the moon trefoil, the shrubby germander, erigeron – as pretty as daisies but as light and airy as snowdrops, his great rose daffodil with hundreds of petals. In the tulip beds alone we have a fortune. D’you know how many varieties? Fifty! And a Semper Augustus among them. The finest tulip ever grown!”

“I didn’t know,” Hester said. “I just thought he was a gardener…”

The gardener smiled at her. “He is a gardener, and an adventurer, and a man who was always there when history was being made,” he said simply. “He’s the greatest man of this age for all that he’s always been someone’s servant. Fifty tulip varieties alone!”

Hester was gazing along the avenue of the horse chestnut saplings. Their buds were green, breaking out of the bud casings which were fat and shiny, wet and brown like molasses.

“When will they bloom?”

The gardener followed her glance. “Not for another few weeks.”

She thought for a moment. “If we cut some branches and took them indoors and kept them warm?”

He nodded. “They might dry up and die. But they might open early.”

“Pot up the tulips then,” she decided, “all of them, every one of his fifty varieties. And anything that is ready to bloom in the rarities room or the orangery. Let’s make his bedroom a little forest; let’s make it a flowery mead, with branches and flowers and plants, everything he loves.”

“To help him get better?” the gardener asked.

Hester turned away. “So that he can say good-bye.”


Tradescant lay propped high on thick pillows to help him to breathe, his nightcap on his head, his hair combed. The fire was burning in the grate and the window was slightly opened. The room was filled with the perfume of a thousand flowers. Over his bed arched boughs of chestnuts, the leaves broken out of the sticky buds. Higher again were beech branches, the buds like dried icicles on the thin twigs, but every plumper bud was splitting and showing the startling sweetmeat-pink and white lining, where the leaves were pushing to come through. In great banks around the side of the room were the tulips, fat and round, showing every color that had ever come out of the Low Countries: the blaze of scarlet, the magnificent stripes and broken colors in red and white and yellow, the shining purity of the Lack tulip, the wonderful spiky profile of the bizarre tulip and the flower that was still John’s joy, the white and scarlet Semper Augustus. There were boughs of roses, their tight buds promising the beauty of their flower if John could stay just another month, or another month after that. There were clumps of bluebells like spilled ink on the carpet, and white and navy violets in pots. There were late daffodils, their little heads nodding, and everywhere threaded through the riot of color and shape was Tradescant’s own lavender, springing fresh green shoots from the pale spines and putting out violet blue spikes.

He lay back on his pillows and looked from one perfect shape to another. The colors were so bright and joyous that he closed his eyes to rest them, and still saw, on the inside of his eyelids, the blazing red of his tulips, the shining yellow of his daffodils, the sky-blue of his lavender.

Hester had left a little pathway from his bed to the door so that she could come and go to him, but the rest of the room was banked with his flowers. He lay like a miser in a gold vault, half-drowned in treasure.

“I have left a letter for you to give to John when he returns,” he said quietly.

She nodded. “You need not worry for me. If he will have me then I will stay, but whatever happens I will be a friend to the children. You can trust me to stand their friend.”