There are few things I enjoy more than a visit to a garden, and few books I love more than those by the writer Dora Saint who wrote as Miss Read. So the opportunity to marry these two passions was just too hard to resist.

Published in 1993, Farewell to Fairacre was the penultimate book in the beloved Fairacre series. Miss Read is invited to an evening concert at Rousham House by John Jenkins. Alas, it is dusk when they arrive and the garden is in darkness, but the two of them...