The Restoration Garden pulled me in from the start. A damp, wild, overgrown, once magnificent garden on an English country estate? An enigmatic old lady haunted by memories of her past? Yes please; it’s so deliciously gothic.

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I’m so excited to write this review, because I absolutely loved The Restoration Garden when I read the ARC a few months ago and couldn’t wait until publication date came closer so I could post my review!

After a personal tragedy, landscape architect and garden restorer Julia Esdaile takes a job restoring the decrepit gardens of Havenworth Manor, an English country estate, to their 1940s magnificence. The elderly lady of the manor, Margaret Clarke, mysteriously demands that the restored gardens must look exactly as they did when she was a child at Havenworth in the early days of World War II. With Margaret reluctant to revisit her memories of the gardens and no historical garden plans or photos to work from, Julia must do her own sleuthing to unearth the garden’s history, inadvertently encountering a painful family mystery haunting Margaret. 

This book is told in a dual timeline, with Julia’s present day story and Margaret’s sister Irene’s story set in 1940. Irene is an artistic soul and her chapters are filled with vivid depictions of the gardens and stories of courage during World War II. 

The garden in the heyday of Havenworth Manor is lush, colorful, and inviting. I love a beautiful English garden but was unable to picture many of the flowers mentioned in the book – so I had fun looking them up on Pinterest and making a board that imagines what the garden might have looked like at its prime.

The Restoration Garden is the kind of book that made me ignore most of my personal responsibilities while reading it because I didn’t want to put it down. I loved exploring the gardens and uncovering the family’s history through Irene’s chapters and alongside Julia and her little nephew Sam. Julia’s personal struggles serve as a bit of a secondary plot; the power of this book is really in Irene’s sections and Julia’s discoveries. The book has themes of family, romance, loyalty, courage, and forgiveness – and left me wanting to plant my own English garden.

Thank you to NetGalley and Lake Union Publishing for the ARC. All opinions are my own.