Garden of chessmen. Many grand gardens established in the heyday of Victorian and Edwardian England disappeared during and after World War II.

Walking barefoot across the warm bricks, I set two gardenia plants (both blooming) and a potted blue hydrangea (its four flower heads bobbing) out on the patio. I love gardenias' scent and love garden blues. Because nature doesn't issue that many flowering blues — bachelors' buttons, asters, forget-me-nots, lupines, Canterbury bells, delphinium, anchusa, lobelia, and the Heavenly Blue morning glory (whose slatternly vines grip at and choke whatever the vine's growing tip touches) — perhaps I love botanic blues even more.

I myself was in the grip of a garden passion. I had a lovely new book, Eminent Gardeners, by the English garden historian Jane Brown.

Brown first won my allegiance with her Gardens of a Golden Almanac, an account of the collaboration of gardener Gertrude Jekyll and architect Edwin Luytens and with her lush and gossipy Vita's Other World — A Gardening Biography of Vita Sackville-West. The most famous of the Edwardian era's English gardeners — Gertrude Jekyll (1843-1932) — designed and "kept" a 15-acre garden at Munstead wood. The never-married Miss Jekyll (so myopic that her celebrated blurry colored borders are suspect as consequence of poor vision rather than refined aesthetic) managed a full-scale nursery and thriving garden design ventured, produced 16 books and 1032 articles for Country Life and English gardening magazines. From 1881 until her death, she was the premier influence on English gardeners, coaxing them to eschew the elaborately formal Italian and French garden models in favor of "cottage gardens on a country house scale." A few days after her 89th birthday, Miss Jekyll died. Her family and many friends collected to watch Miss Jekyll's four gardeners lower her casket into a moss-lined grave. the moss had been raked from Munstead Wood's lawn that morning.

Victoria Mary Sackville-West (1892-1962) — "Vita," friends called her — led a far more kick-up-your-heels life than did Miss Jekyll in 1903. Vita married British diplomat Harold Nicolson and went on to extramaritally entertain (in England an on the continent) what at the time were described as "Sapphic" romantic liaisons. One of those "romances" found its focus on Virginia Woolf, who in turn wrote the very peculiar gender-change fantasy Orlando, a novel in which a fictional Vita is her and heroine. Vita, herself a poet and novelist, won literary prizes but never quite rose above prosiness, and what Vita's ended being famous for (after her flirtations) is growing a great garden. Sissinghurst, and writing for the London Observer, a weekly gardening column (from 1947 to 1961) that was read by the English, a nation of gardeners, with an avidity similar to what Americans show for Ann Landers and Abby. Brown claims in Eminent Gardeners that Vita's gardens were the "anchors" that held her to England, children, and marriage, "when all else pulled her to Violet [Violet Trefusis, one of Vita's first grand passions], and a romantic, bohemian life elsewhere." By 1930, Brown concludes, when Vita moved to Sissinghurst, "The making of her garden became the constant factor and enduring means of creative expression, it did not fail her, even when she could no longer write poetry and her lovers lost their enchantment."

Eminent Gardeners takes its title from Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians, one of the earliest examples of biography that Joyce Carol Oates describes as "pathography." Strachey's book, published in 1918, bent the halos of Victorian worthies (Florence Nightingale, Major General Charles "Chinese" Gordon, Matthew Arnold, and Cardinal Manning) and in its day was received with all the brouhaha attendant upon Kitty Kelley's Nancy Reagan biography.

Brown doesn't come close to Strachey's malicious idol-trashing. Her notion of dirty linen, that one of her heroines — Nancy Lindsay — lollygagged in a "silken" tent while on a plant-hunting trip in Persia ("How," Brown asks, "could she cope with life in unforgiving English society after that?) seems deliciously quaint (as does Brown's charge that Nancy was a "scurrilous" plant hoarder). Similarly trifling is Brown's accusatory disclosure about Sackville-West ("Vita," Brown writes, "has a lot to answer for"), that in praising the acclaimed garden at Hidcote Manor, Vita made sure that Nancy's mother, Norah Lindsay, a lady of whom Vita did not entirely approve, received no credit for her work in this garden.

Many grand gardens established in the heyday of Victorian and Edwardian England disappeared during and after World War II, what buzz bombs and privation didn't destroy, postwar developers dug under (after World War II, the National Trust began a campaign, which has proved somewhat successful, to save the nation's great gardens). Garden historian Brown has tried to reconstruct these garden's vanished perennial borders, their lily clumps set down in stretches of ferns and yew and box hedges pruned to resemble fantastical nesting chickens or a board of chessmen.

Reconstructing gardens, Brown reconstructs gardeners' lives, and Eminent Gardeners' seven chapters offer a variety of gardeners of small fame and large. There is plumpish, affable Frances Wolseley, who in 1902 started the Glynde School for Lady Gardeners, offering a two-year course where "applicants of spirit and intelligence" were equipped to "earn a good living wage as professional gardeners or growers." No "half-hearted hobby for young ladies who liked flowers," notes Brown, the school's students, "dressed in sensible gardening jackets, flap skirts and farters, with ties and hatbands in the school colors of red, white, and blue," sifted soil, stirred manure, moved rocks, and generally worked long hours. Before the school closed soon after World War I, several hundred young women had been trained there, establishing gardening as a socially acceptable career for English women.

Chapter Four, "Academic Gardeners," spotlights Anne Jemima Clough (what a wonderful English name!), who made the garden at Newnham college, Cambridge. In 1871, when Clough came to Cambridge to found its first women's college, she declared women's need that schoolrooms and residences be surrounded by "a bower, secure from the scowls and other unpleasant attentions of a Cambridge that by no means welcomed their presence — at least, not for the right reasons." Clough supervised a garden built "with serpentine paths among shrubs, a croquet lawn, blossoming trees, and a young medlar." After Clough's death, her niece Blanche Athena Clough took Newnham's garden in hand. By 1895, Brown reports, "the buildings were all trimmed with beds of briar roses, jasmines, and pinks."

The chapter whose material propels Brown to her highest, dizziest pitch is that she titles "The Henry James Americans." Brown writes, "[I]t was Mary Sargent [American-born mother of painter John Singer Sargent] who perfected the art of not going home.... At no time ... was she trying to deny she was an American, her only purpose was not to live in America."

Mary Sargent "was a pioneer" in the cult which sprinkled Europe with like-minded romantics — Gertrude Stein, Edith Wharton, Bernard Berenson, William Waldorf Astor." With that digression put aside, Brown goes on to Mary Sargent's son. She tells an amazing tale of Sargent's painting Carnation Lily, Lily Rose, "his impressionist vision of Polly and Dolly Barnard in a garden at dusk with their paper lanterns, standing among lilies taller than themselves and surrounded by roses and red carnations growing in the long grass." Brown claims that notion for this painting came to Sargent after he received a hard blow to the head while boating on the Thames; still light-headed, a vision came to him of massive white lilies growing under riverside trees lit by lanterns set out for a party. His friends, the Millets, took him home to the Cotswolds to recuperate, and there he began to set this vision down in the midst of the real-world Millet garden. In late summer and early autumn 1885, Sargent made endless studies of the two young Barnard girls. He ordered paper lanterns sent him from London, and he ransacked village gardens for roses and carnations. But lilies were lacking; the painting remained unfinished. Sargent returned to London, sending the Millets lily bulbs so that they could force them in pots to have ready for summer 1886. Come summer, Sargent returned to the Cotswolds and the Millets. At a nearby village, he discovered a half-acre of roses blooming in a nursery and ordered every last bulb dug up and sent to the Millets.

"But most difficult of all to catch," Brown writes, "was the particular light, which held only for fleeting moments in the lading summer afternoons. The Millets and their friends had to make up endless tennis matches to keep the artist amused; then, at the right moment, the game would be halted and Sargent would repair to his waiting easel, paint till the light declined, and then return to finish the game." The painting was finished before frost, and in 1887, Carnation Lily, Lily Rose was shown at the Royal Academy, where it "went straight to the hearts of the British public."

With her Sargent tale as overture, Brown continues "The Henry James Americans" with descriptions of James's Sussex garden ("written into eternity as Mr. Longden's garden in The Awkward Age") and ends with American Lawrence Johnston's Hidcote Manor garden in the Cotswolds, that same garden for which Vita Sackville-West neglected to give credit to Norah Lindsay.

Brown's restorations of gardens and reconstruction of gardeners' lives have left her believing that "making a garden can be as important an expression of personal creativity as writing a book or painting." But unlike Sargent's Carnation Lily, Lily Rose or James's Awkward Age), the garden will not long outlast the gardener. Reading Brown, I came to wish, as she so eloquently does, that at least some of those alleys of climbing rows, those carpets of blue forget-me-nots, and "planted pavements of thyme, sages, tiny iris, clumps of candytuft and rosemary, and larger clumps of laurustinus" (from Norah Lindsay's kitchen garden) might somehow be brought back to life.