The Disenchanted Garden

Middleton Hall was an eighteenth century landscape garden with lake, woodlands, statuary and buildings originally designed by Humphrey Repton, now swallowed up by urban sprawl. The Borough Council had purchased it from its last noble owner during the 1930s, when local authorities still had the funds for such extravagances, and turned it into a public park. Now, in 1983, it was an anachronism, an uneasy mixture of olde worlde gardens and up to date recreational facilities. The park, like most of the people attracted to work in it, or visit it, was a square peg in the round hole of a forward looking Leisure Services Department. Workers like Melody- a young girl with a secret she dare not share with anyone; Carol, who had found love late in life and didn't know how to deal with it; Gerald, whose wife had ambitions for him beyond his peace of mind. Visitors like Sammy, the dog who hated cyclists; Irene Tomlin, the cyclist who hated park keepers; Arnold, a young man who kept digging up the formal lawns in search of a golden cockerel he thought the author of a book he'd read had buried somewhere in the grounds. When local councillor Warren Hescott reluctantly agreed to a tree planting ceremony he didn't want, in order to celebrate his twenty five years of service to the community, he said he'd only take part in the event if the tree planted in his honour was the special cedar he knew his old enemy, Hereward Gordon, the former Director of Parks had, out of pure bloody mindedness after being forced to take early retirement, secreted away in his garden in one of the lodges in the grounds of the Hall before he went, rather than using the tree to complete the main avenue of the Hall as he should have done. Warren thought he'd escape the celebrations by doing that, but he was wrong, and people working in the park, or only visiting it, found themselves more and more involved when events surrounding the ceremony escalated out of control as plot and counter-plot to retrieve the tree for the ceremony failed. Add in the usual flashers and suicides who frequented the park, and the attempts by the local police force to apprehend a non-existent rapist invented by the local press in an attempt to sell more copies of their paper, and the way was open for an exciting summer for everyone as they attempted to plant Councillor Hescott's Tree.