In 1773 the gardens of Lady Mary Coke (1727–1811) and Lady Caroline Holland (1723–74) were parted by a lane no more than twenty feet wide. Their experiences of the garden and their sense of retirement were parted by far more.

Both women came from powerful aristocratic families, both had difficult relationships with those families, both gardened and wrote of their gardens with an unusual intensity. The daughter of John Campbell, 2nd Duke of Argyll, Lady Mary (Figure 4.1) was pushed into an unhappy dynastic marriage in 1747, separated from her husband in 1750, and, after his death in 1753, remained single for the rest of her life. The daughter of Charles Lennox, 2nd Duke of Richmond, Lady Caroline (Figure 4.2) was the eldest of the famous Lennox sisters (Sarah Lennox was more than twenty years her junior); when she eloped with the politician Henry Fox in 1744 (and thus became Lady Caroline Fox) she created a rift with her parents which was not to be resolved until 1748; when she became a peer in her own right in 1762 she signalled the attachment she felt to her home at Holland House by taking the title Baroness Holland.