Even after his years in the wilderness he had not lost his sense of awe at the strangeness and beauty of this country. He longed to bring it home entire, but he forced himself to choose the best of the shrubs and trees that he found on his long, loping surveys. He found a type of daisy that he thought had never been seen before, a big-flowered daisy with curious petals. He dug up half a dozen roots and packed them into damp soil, hoping they would survive until he had a ship for home. He took cuttings of the vine which Suckahanna had planted at his doorstep all that long time ago. He recognised it now. It was a favourite of hers: a sweet woodbine which some people called honeysuckle, but growing here with long scarlet flowers like fingers. He had a new convolvulus which he would name for himself, ‘Tradescantia’. He found a foxglove which was like the English variety but stronger-coloured and bigger in shape. He potted up a Virginian yucca, a Virginian locust tree, a Virginian nettle tree. He found a Virginian mulberry which reminded him of the silkworms and the mulberry trees at Oatlands Palace. He found a wonderful pink spiderwort, the only flower his father had put his own name to, and kept the corms dry and safe, hoping that they would grow in memory of his father. He dug up the dry roots of Virginian roses, certain that they would grow differently alongside their English cousins if he could only get them safe home to Lambeth.

Specimen after specimen he brought back to the little farmhouse and heeled in the growing plants into his nursery beds and laid the seeds in sand or rice to keep them dry. Plant after plant he brought in to add to the Lambeth collection. And as he added a new tree, the Virginian maple, or a new flower, the yellow willow herb, or a new herb, Virginian parsley, he realised that he would bring back to England an explosion of strangeness. If the country had been at peace and ready to attend to its gardens he would have been hailed as a worker of miracles, a greater plantsman and botanist even than his father.

He believed that he thought of nothing but his plants on these long expeditions when he was gone from dawn to dusk and sometimes from dawn till dawn, when he slept in the woods despite the cold winds which warned of the change of season. But somewhere in his heart and in his mind he was saying farewell: to Suckahanna the girl, whose innocence he had prized so highly, to Suckahanna the young woman he had loved, and to Suckahanna the proud, beautiful woman who had taken him into her heart and into her bed and in the end sent him away.