I have always loved books and one of my earliest memories is being pushed down the road in a bike basket by my oldest brother, Eddie, who was eight years older. We were on the weekly trek to get library books and it was a highlight. Thanks to my brother I could read before I went to school and I continued to devour books. But I owned few of them.

Among the precious relics are battered school prizes, always red leather copies of Dickens emblazoned with the school badge. I wish I could say I’d read them!

My prized relic is The Constance Spry Cookery Book, which she co-wrote with Rosemary Hume in 1956. This thick tome contains gems like Colonel Gore’s Orange Marmalade, and I can just about read the spattered page. It’s a good thing I know the recipe by heart. It also contains Coronation Chicken, the cold, sweet-curry dish served for the 300 guests at Queen Elizabeth II’s Coronation luncheon in June 1953.

Constance Spry is known more for her floral decorations than cooking, but she also had an extremely good grasp on gardening as a recent biography by Sue Shephard confirms. Entitled The Surprising Life of Constance Spry, this lively book was written to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Spry’s death in 1960. I’m not a lover of biographies, but this is a dizzy gallop that hurtles through Edwardian Britain, through the Roaring Twenties, the Jazz Age, the Great Depression, the war years and on towards the life most of us know today. Not many women were as dynamic or as successful as Constance Spry and she succeeded when women rarely escaped from obscure domesticity. Shephard’s elegant text follows her driven life and touches on her difficult personal life with great sensitivity.

When the famous rosarian Graham Stuart Thomas met Spry in the early 1950s, anxious to know the high-society flower arranger, he was surprised to find someone who knew more about old-fashioned roses than he did.

A visit to her Park Gate garden in Kent revealed a huge collection, many of which had been thought lost to cultivation. In short ‘Connie’ had the best collection of old-fashioned roses in the country. She allowed Thomas to propagate them and study them. Eventually, the collection was moved to Winkfield House, near Windsor, with his help, and Thomas and Spry (now near neighbours) became firm friends.

In his wonderful Rose Book, Thomas records that French names flowed from her until her enthusiasm was at bursting point. Spry loved roses and regularly used them in her arrangements to great effect, and that reinforced Thomas’s view that these neglected plants should be promoted and cherished. His influence as a National Trust consultant saw many old roses appear in famous gardens.

On January 3, 1960, aged 74, Constance slipped on the stairs at Winkfield Place while arranging flowers. She died an hour later. Her last words were “someone else can arrange this” — a fitting tribute to a woman worthy of a biographer like Sue Shephard.