After she married the surgeon William Lawrence in 1828 when she was 25 and he was 45, her social ambitions were gratified by horticulture, first in a villa with less than two acres at Drayton Green.

There were Italian pollarded walks, rock work including a rustic arch (with Cupid), a French parterre, a span-roofed greenhouse, a stove and an orchid house.

She dedicated it to Mrs Lawrence of Ealing Park, Middlesex, “as a zealous patron of floriculture, an excellent botanist, and, above all, as one of the first lady-gardeners of the present day”.

LXVIII of Curtis’s Botanical Magazine, the work of Sir William Jackson Hooker, the director of the Royal Botanic Garden was dedicated "with sentiments of great regard and esteem" to Mrs Lawrence, “the beauty of whose gardens and pleasure grounds and whose most successfully cultivated vegetable treasures are only equalled by the liberality with which they are shown to all who are in botany and horticulture.

For eighty years or so botanists had been bringing back to Europe previously unknown plants from all over the world, and they were eagerly cultivated.

[10] Grander still was the visit of Queen Victoria, the Prince Consort, the King of the Belgians, and the Grand Duke of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, who planted the first trees in a planned avenue of deodars, the Himalayan cedar which had been introduced to England not long before, in 1831.

The elder son died in childhood; the younger, Trevor, became as celebrated a gardener as his mother, and was a president of the Royal Horticultural Society.