THE LADY TREE

The Lady Tree, the first of the Lady Tree Trilogy, is a 17th century romantic financial thriller. It is also the first (and Private Eye says, the best) English novel about Tulipmania, a real but incredible 17th c. craze for speculating in tulip bulbs. The reader sees this madness, where men staked mansions and sailing ships on a single bulb, through the eyes of John Nightingale, a young English gentleman gardener who is black-mailed into going to the Netherlands to make money for an English trading company. Financial sharp-dealings and lethal corruption, at a time when The Netherlands were a major world power and England was still an emergent island, are intertwined with a love story blooming deliciously back at Hawkridge House in Hampshire - where the delightful, newly-arrived Zeal Beester has taken matters firmly into her small but very capable hands.



AUTHOR'S NOTES

Every book for me has a secret personal pleasure in addition to the story itself - my writer's 'perks'. In this book, I let my love for gardening and for English gardens have its head. John Nightingale’s delight in ‘his growing treasures’ is also mine. And so is his horrified disbelief that men could think of something so perfect in itself as a tulip as just another commercial commodity like modern day pork bellies or oil.

I also found that my four years with the RSC, hearing 17th blank verse being spoken every day, had imprinted the cadences and vocabulary in my mind and made it surprisingly easy to deal with period language.

For those who like to visit the real places behind fictional locations, Hawkridge House is based on The Vyne, near Basingstoke. Unlike Hawkridge House, however, The Vyne has acquired a neo-classical ‘duck’s beak’.

REVIEWS

'Guaranteed to induce instant gardening fever...To be read with bulb catalogue in one hand and the other poised for page turning.'

Mail on Sunday

'Christie Dickason has crafted an excellent historical novel with a perfect blend of romance and suspense.'

South Wales Echo

'It is well-researched, historically accurate and easy to read. A delightful way to learn more of the plant plotters of bygone days.'

Newsletter of the Herb Society

'A rich, lyrical, exciting story.'

The Citizen