She tried to set up various businesses, a garden centre, a plant rental scheme, a seed catalogue - they were all loss making in the end, but they were pre-cursors of the types of businesses which would take off decades after her death.

Place in a propagator or warm place and maintain a temperature of 15-18C for 3 weeks, then move to the refrigerator (3-5C) for 5 weeks.The photo is of the most famous plant that is associated with Ellen Willmott - a sea holly, Eryngium gigantium, known as Miss Willmott's ghost as she scattered its seed around gardens when she visited. At her peak, Ellen Willmott, supported plant-hunting trips to China and the middle east, and created two notable gardens in France and Italy.

Or perhaps for her book, ‘The Genus Rosa’, published at great personal expense in four volumes between 1910 and 1914. Today, this architectural plant is often planted en-masse with other plants - and looks particularly good in prairie-style plantings with grasses and echinacea. Eryngium giganteum 'Miss Willmott's Ghost' is well worth growing for its architectural flower-cones, each encircled by a spikey, ornate bract. The ruff around the elongated cone, which is common to all Eryngium, is very dramatic and it gets better with age as it dries. Enter your tracking number and postcode there and you will be able to track the progess of your parcel(s).

Needless to say, garden owners were surprised to find drifts of this the giant sea holly appearing a couple of years after her visits, and this is how the plant earned its popular name of Miss Willmott’s Ghost. My editor very sensibly cut this section out of the book and I admit… it’s not absolutely necessary to know the following to make sense of Chapter Eight. Helping these pollinators to thrive is hugely important for our eco-system as a whole and these seeds, in their striking packaging inspired by artwork from the Kew archives, will help to create the environment which they need to thrive, with varieties chosen to help a wide range of pollinating insects, including some night flowering plants to help moths which also play an important part in our gardens. Bleached by the end of summer, the dramatic dried stalks persist until wind and rain turn them to stubble.

These binoculars are not in the first flush of youth – or at least their once-sturdy, red velvet-lined case isn’t. Plants with tall flowering stems and lots of foliage may lose a great deal of water in transit and cutting back helps reduce this stress.

In year two (or three: in my short-season climate, it tends to act as a triennial), the flowers will go to seed, drop to the ground and take care of planting themselves. A wealthy heiress by the time she turned 30, Willmott devoted her life to learning about (and acquiring) plants, travel and creating gardens at properties she purchased in France and Italy, in addition to maintaining the grounds at Warley Place.

The beginnings of this prickly myth can be traced back to her conspicuous absence at what should have been the pinnacle of her career: the Royal Horticultural Society's inaugural Victoria Medal of Honour Award ceremony, at which she was due to be one of only two female recipients. If you're showing any of the symptoms of coronavirus, or if you've been in contact with anyone that has the virus in the last 10 days, please don't visit.Whether this book rehabilitates her reputation and helps us understand her much better is difficult to say. However, the taller varieties with their huge globe flower heads are now one of the stars of the architectural plant world. Place in a propagator at a temperature of 65-70F (18-20C), or seal inside a polythene bag for 14 days. To many people Ellen Willmott is best known as a wealthy but cantankerous miser who used to maliciously sow thistle seeds into people’s flower beds from a secret stash in her handbag.