Parallel plant passions
Australian writer Kayte Nunn’s third novel (after Rose’s Vintage and Angel’s Share) weaves together two parallel stories, one beginning in Victorian times in Cornwall, the other in contemporary Sydney. The heroine of each is a young woman with a passion for flowers.
Feisty Elizabeth’s father is a leading botanist of the day who frequently leaves his grand Cornish home and his two young daughters, to travel the world in search of new and exotic plants to bring home and supply a burgeoning Victorian predilection for such rare imports.
Anna, in present day Sydney, is nursing a mysteriously broken heart but finds solace in spin classes at the local gym and in running her own landscaping and gardening business. As the novel begins, she has just inherited her grandmother’s long-loved little cottage. When builders arrive to carry out renovations, a mysterious box and a diary are discovered, hidden in a wall. And so the tale begins.
Decades earlier Elizabeth has set out on the perilous journey to Chile to carry out her dead father’s final request. Now Anna, too, journeys to the other side of the world, to Kew Gardens in London and beyond, to discover the meaning of her intriguing find.
The book’s subtitle promises “Discovery, Desire, Deception” and each of these themes is woven throughout with enough verve to keep the pages turning, if gently. The mood is mostly mild and well, floral. So a violent episode midway comes as a shock, more for its suddenness than its content, although that is bloody enough.
Nunn has obviously researched her botanical subject and 19th-century Cornwall and Chile. But its obviousness is a tad jarring. And although the twin stories are skilfully entwined, the most dramatic of their themes feel simply told, leaving the reader safely without. Even Nunn’s descriptions of the rich variety of flora through which her heroines pass, guaranteed to be 100 per cent accurate, fail to dazzle as they might if written with a more urgent and compelling pen.