The research fell into 5 sections.

Plants and Garden History.
The contribution of John Tradescant to English gardens is extraordinary. It seems that almost every American plant that we grow was sent to England by him on his great plant-collecting trips. The garden history for this book was drawn from books -they are listed in the book list - and from brief study courses designed for gardeners wanting to create historic gardens. I visited gardens to get a sense of how and why a gardener would care about plants and their position, and I became absolutely inspired to garden myself. My garden is now a great joy to me, and pottering about in it, planting weeding, dead-heading, and bringing plants on is one of my great pleasures.

Recreated historic gardens in England are enjoying attention at the moment and you can visit so-called Stuart gardens. There is a very fine Tradescant garden at Hatfield House, and the Museum of Garden History has a faithful planting of Tradescant plants around the family tomb in what once was their parish church at Lambeth.

Tradescant in Virginia.
I travelled to Virginia for two main reasons: to see for myself the sort of landscape that John Tradescant experienced when he arrived.

The vastness of America is what strikes many Europeans on arrival and I could imagine that this would have been even more powerful in the pre-industrial era when the untouched landscape must have seemed to go on for ever. The light, the trees, the wildlife and more than anything else, the river made a powerful impression on me which I tried to convey in the novel.

I was wonderfully helped by the inspiring recreation of the historic site of Jamestown. Few authors can hope to have their imaginary landscapes made real for them, and then peopled as well! I was guided around Jamestown by a costumed actor who gave a tremendous performance as a new English immigrant to Jamestown. It was an experience as powerful as a haunting and yes - I could not resist asking her if she had met John Tradescant. She hadn't, but there was a moment when I was not sure which century we were in.

I met with curators at the Jamestown museum and talked to them about our mutual interest in John Tradescant. It was their initial suggestion that John Tradescant would probably have hired a native guide, and that his disappearance from the records of the early community could be explained by the fact that he was simply absent on plant-hunting expeditions and did not meet many new immigrants or play much of a part in the community.

Of course, records from the time did not survive in great numbers, this was not a bureaucractic time and the native people's uprisings and the Civil War destroyed a lot of material. But I was able to find a record of John Tradescant's plots of lands that were allocated to anyone making the crossing from England, and the outline of my account of his stay in Virginia started to form in my mind.

As a novelist I was helped in the writing of this section by reading Pincher Martin by William Golding. This very great novel takes place entirely inside the mind of a drowning man, and apart from uplifting and inspiring me, it gave me enormous confidence in staying inside John Tradescant's mind when he was all alone in the wilderness.

The Powhatan.
I read all I could about the history of the Powhatan and visited museums in Virginia. The history is often written from the point of view of the settlers, and the records of the native villages and way of life are, of course, all written by European explorers and settlers. They need to be read therefore with an awareness that this is, indeed, a history written by the victors. However, a number of explorers had a genuine interest in the native peoples and the racism which has been such a blot on the white imagination for so long, was not fully developed in these early years. Some of the accounts of the native peoples are sympathetic, some are even respectful.

Many explorers became acutely aware - as John Tradescant does in the novel - that the Powhatan had skills to survive in the landscape which they signally lacked. Also, the culture and life style for the working country people in England was not so different than the Powhatan.

I visited a Powhatan reservation in Virginia and had the privilege of talking to several senior members of the village, and I thank them for their time.

English Politics.
The changing prospects of royalist and commonwealth forces in the English civil war in my novel follow the recorded history of the time. John Tradescant missed much of the war, and I imagine that this was a deliberate choice on his part. It was bad luck for him that he avoided a civil war in England to find himself in the middle of a bloody and cruel war in Virginia.

I made John Tradescant Snr a royalist, drawing on the record of his service for members of the court and for the King. But I made John Tradescant Jnr a republican. Partly this was a novelist decision: I could create tension between father and son, and explain the different views of the civil war if I had the two of them on different sides. But also, a number of contemporary historians report that the generation after the civil war were more detached from the political struggle, and more doubtful about the value of the whole debate. John Tradescant Jnr's whole character and life, as I describe it, is one of doubt. He has two political systems, two wives, and two countries. This made him very interesting to write, especially because indecisiveness and worry are not typical 'heroic' qualities.

The scenes of the royal family flying from their palace in London with no-where to go are reminiscent of the French royal family fleeing the mob in their revolution. This scene follows history, amazingly enough the English royal family were wandering around the country, unsure where they could go for safety. We do not know if John Tradescant was with them or not.
John Tradescant III - or Johnnie, as I call him in the novel was a real character and did die early, but we do not know the cause of his death, nor do we know anything about his politics. His character in the novel and his brief life is my own invention.

John Lambert however, is a real full value English hero of the Cromwell forces. A most extraordinary man, water-colourist, gardener, loving husband, passionate egalitarian, brilliant general, if I get a chance I shall write a novel about him. He is a most wonderful character in extraordinary times.

Elias Ashmole and the Ashmolean Museum.
Please forgive some prejudice and irritation here but I profoundly dislike Elias Ashmole. The historical record supports the account I give in the novel. Elias Ashmole was a friend and regular visitor of the Tradescant household. He had a great interest in their collection of artefacts and plants but he collected nothing himself.

He and John Tradescant went out one evening and when Tradescant was the worse for wear from drink he signed the museum and the plant collection over to Elias Ashmole on the understanding that Ashmole would transfer them on to either Oxford or Cambridge university.

When Tradescant sobered up he cut the seals off the bottom of the document, hoping to destroy their legal validity, but at his death, Ashmole produced his copy and claimed his inheritance. Tradescant's widow Hester fought Ashmole in the courts (which is how we know this shameful story). She lost, Ashmole built a house next door to the Tradescant home so that he could enjoy the plant collection in the garden, and transferred the artefacts to his own house.

Hester and Ashmole made disagreeable neighbours with several small disputes but this was ended by Hester's death when she drowned in the lake in the Tradescant garden. She was generally thought to have taken her own life.