In 1941, he was assigned to the Allies' Psychological Warfare Branch (PWB) in Italy, with which he served as an intelligence officer throughout the Italian campaign.
[citation needed] The couple continued the restoration of the Caetani family's garden at their estate of Ninfa, Lazio, which Lelia had inherited on the death of her brother,[8] who died on the Albanian front in 1940.
The garden is laid out among the romantic ruins of a small castle and village which had been abandoned in 1381, set on the edge of the Pontine Marshes south of Rome.
Today over 10,000 shrubs, plants and flowering trees grow among the medieval ruins and a lake formed by damming the river Ninfa.
The garden owes little to the formal Italian style, but is developed in an English tradition of plantsmanship and painterly sensitivity.