‘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 favourites 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.’