regional canada

This book sets out to tell the story of a garden and the larger-than-life personality who helped in its creation. The garden is the Milner Garden and Woodland, near Qualicum Beach on Vancouver Island off Canada's south west coast. It has an international reputation as a beautiful "natural" woodland garden. Sadly, the book does not do the garden justice.

The Veronica of the title is Veronica Milner, born to an aristocratic English family and related to both Winston Churchill and Princess Diana. She first married Desmond FitzGerald, Knight of Glin and lived a life of privilege in an Irish castle. Her second husband, Ray Milner, was a prominent and wealthy Canadian businessman who seems to have been an exceptionally nice man. Ray had previously been married to Catherine and the two of them had bought the land and developed what became the Milner Garden. Both loved the garden and the trees that gave it its lovely natural setting beside the ocean. After Catherine's death Ray met and married Veronica and somehow managed to live amicably with this selfish, snobbish, difficult woman and to finance her extravagances, which included improvements to the garden.

The writer seems to be fascinated with Veronica's wealthy and titled background, and with visits from the Queen, Prince Philip, Prince Charles and Princess Diana to the garden. The reader has to struggle through page after page of name dropping. I had been hoping for a book about the garden, not "Lives of the Rich and Famous". There is very little information about the design of the garden, and how it evolved, and it seems that Veronica took much of the credit due to Ray and Catherine Milner. The illustrations are adequate (except for the maps, which are quite crude) but not professional quality and don't really reflect the beauty of the garden.

This is a regional book with little to recommend it to readers outside British Columbia. Actually, there's not much to recommend it to local readers either.