BARBARA CARTLAND’S LOVE OF FLOWERS

My mother, Barbara Cartland, loved the grace and beauty of all flowers whether they were pink or not.
Particularly daffodils, primroses and bougainvillea.
She enormously enjoyed her garden at Camfield Place and from her desk in the drawing room she could see a long swathe of the garden leading up to large clumps of rhododendrons, which in May would be a riot of colour fading away later to a peaceful light green.
I can never forget Barbara telling her friends “don’t send me flowers when I die, send them to me when I am alive so I can delight in them!”
The heroines in her wonderful romances love flowers too and they always go into the garden of the hero’s stately home to seek peace and tranquillity and to search their souls and, because the garden is so beautiful and fragrant, they suddenly realise that they are in love. And then we have to guess what happens at the end of the story!
And she fervently believed that flowers are an earthly symbol of true love. They look at you with love in their petals and smile because they know the real truth about love if only they could speak to us mortals.

Ian McCorquodale
March 2019