Agatha Christie's Murder Garden

Gardens play a significant role in many Agatha Christie stories. Consider a few examples. In her first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, the day on which the gardener works near the house proves a vital clue for Hercule Poirot, as does the woman who sits reading in the garden, where she can hear an argument taking place inside the house. In her third Hercule Poirot novel, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Poirot has tired of conducting his sleuthing from his flat in London. He retires to a village where he buys a house, and grows marrows (squash). Although he applies his little gray cells to this task successfully, raises exceptionally healthy and large vegetables sure to compete favorably in the village show, he grows so dissatisfied with his life there that he picks up and hurls a marrow over the fence, narrowly missing the doctor who lives next door. And in Nemesis, Miss Marple accepts the challenge of a dead man (through his lawyer), and agrees to carry out an investigation, even if at the outset she doesn't know precisely what she is supposed to investigate. As events unfold, she soon learns she has been invited to join an all-expenses-paid garden tour. As the bus travels between towns and great English Manor houses, and she tours these carefully manicured gardens, she meets many interesting people. Gradually, she begins to understand the mystery her deceased benefactor wished her to investigate.

As we toured the English county of Devon on this year's trip, we found flowers blooming in boxes, containers, and hanging baskets on nearly every street of every town we visited. Torquay, Agatha Christie's hometown, showed off many impressive gardens. There we discovered one dedicated to the writer. It holds a number of flowers and plants mentioned in her stories. From these plants, the poisons used in her novels can be produced. This garden resides within the walls of Torre Abbey. We enjoyed seeing all these plants, and racking our brains for the answers to the trivia questions on the placards. 

Today we're so used to getting medicines and poisons in specially marked containers that we tend to think of them as only things that can be produced in the most sophisticated laboratories. Agatha Christie's stories remind me of a time when people lived closer to nature, and knew how to utilize and appreciate what sprang naturally from the soil. True, sometimes they used these fruits-of-the-earth for terrible purposes, but I'm sure that the majority of the time that closeness to nature enhanced their lives in innumerable ways.

If you live in England, and are attending the International Agatha Christie Festival, you can get a guided tour today of the writer's murder garden at Torre Abbey. If you'd like to visit Torquay someday, consider adding the gardens of Torre Abbey to your prospective itinerary. Either way, when you get there, take a moment to appreciate the beauty of all those plants. Bend close to inhale the sweet fragrance of the flowers. But whatever you do, don't contemplate taking a nibble of the leaves or petals. The consequences could be...deadly.