Holders Hope. Herefordshire.
In the long summer of the Edwardian age, the roots of a great garden are laid.
But it’s beauty and calm are deceptive – for this is a home with a secret.
For two generations the lives of two families are bound up with the garden.
The Allegri family, mine owners with the money to pay for it.
The Thomas family, mine workers from the Welsh valleys, whose care and skill help to shape it.
Three children – an unhappy rich girl, a musician and a boy dreaming of revolution – meet in the garden and share a secret that will affect the rest of their lives.
Over some of the most turbulent years of Britain’s history, through the First World War and the industrial strife and poverty of the 1920s, the garden grows, suffers and is almost destroyed by the forces that created it.
It waits, lost and overgrown, for a man from the twenty-first century with his own secret who will finally solve its mystery and bring a hope of its rebirth.