Per usual, I’ll start off by saying that I wasn’t keenly looking forward to diving into this novel. I’ve been so grateful, as well, to the welcome that the curators of this great American treasure have given me - to the grounds, to the rooms, to the history.Verdict: Stunning, Patience-Testing, and Vividly Written The Woodlands has now become so intrinsically entwined in my mind with White Acre that I can scarcely tell the two apart. (Alma Whittaker, my heroine, has her private botanical study there.) I also loved the basement of The Woodlands - particularly the caged-in butler’s bedroom (which shows up in my novel as the bedroom of the head housekeeper, Hanneke de Groot.) And the tiny little hidden room off the library became, in my book, “the binding closet” - where some of the most important scenes in the story occur. I was so impressed by the carriage house, for instance, that I gave it a central role in my narrative. So much of The Woodlands ended up in my novel - providing me with marvelous details which, I believe, help the book spring to life. To my delight, I stumbled upon The Woodlands, which became the wonderful model for my novel’s fictitious estate, White Acre. But I also wanted the novel to be plausible, so I went searching about to see if, in fact, there had ever been any vast palatial estates (graced with gardens and greenhouses) built on the Schuylkill River.
My novel, The Signature of All Things, is a big tale of 18th and 19th century botanical explorers, following the fortunes of the fictitious Whittaker family (who make their trade in the early pharmaceutical business.) While the book takes place all over the world, I knew from the start that I wanted to base the Whittakers in Philadelphia, and I dreamt of them living in a vast, palatial estate (graced with gardens and greenhouses) on the Schuylkill River.
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