In The Children of Green Knowe, it is the 7 year-old boy Toseland (Tolly for short) who comes to Green Knowe -- named after a sinister topiary Noah in the extensive gardens -- for Christmas holidays, while his parents are away in Burma. Through a painting and personal artefacts which he discovers in the ancient house, as well as his great-grandmother Oldknow's cryptic remarks, he discovers that the house is peopled by the spirits of children and horses long gone to their rest. In particular, he begins to detect and even interact through time (or his imagination?) with Toby, Linnet and Alexander, three young plague victims from the 17th century, of whom Mrs. Oldknow seems to have an extensive knowledge. In the second novel, The Treasure of Green Knowe (published in Britain as The Chimneys of Green Knowe) Tolly returns to Green Knowe for Easter, only to find the painting of Toby, Linnet and Alexander gone to an exhibit, and at risk of having to be sold-off to pay for roof repairs. However, he discovers a quilt made up of patches of material from the clothes of other long disappeared children, and it is this catalyst, along with Mrs. Oldknow which allow Tolly to discover his ancestor, the overly-coddled blind girl, Susan, and her family. Suffice it to say that Green Knowe is saved through inter-generational cooperation

At this point, L.M. Boston could have continued having Tolly show up for holidays and discover generation after generation of other ancestors, and writing as well as she does, might have even pulled it off, but in The River at Green Knowe neither Tolly, nor Mrs. Oldknow -- not even previous generations of Oldknows -- are present. The house is let for the summer by a flighty anthropologist who invites her grand-niece Ida, and two refugee children, the Polish Oskar, and the southeast-Asian Ping. Together they discover a canoe and explore the highways and byways of the river which flows by Green Knowe. Here, the story drifts very much into fantasy, with the children sighting flying horses, a giant wishing to join a circus, and a stone age religious ceremony, amongst other things. One wonderful sequence has Oskar building himself a nest like that of field mice, and shrinking progressively to that size as he completes the task. Again a triumph of the unfettered imagination of children

In A Stranger at Green Knowe, Ping visits the great gorilla Hanno at the zoo with a group of refugee children, where he is allowed to feed him and spends time gazing at him in wonder. Ping becomes once again the guest at Green Knowe, this time in the presence of Mrs. Oldknow. When Hanno escapes the zoo, Ping understand the great ape's motivation, and when he turns up in the forested area across the river from Green Knowe, Ping befriends the supposedly dangerous Hanno -- but the search is on and closing in. While the Ping-Hanno relationship is a powerfully poignant one, it is the first couple of chapters detailing Hanno's life in the wilds of Africa and the events leading up to his capture which would make Jane Goodall proud. The highly accurate and heartfelt account of life in a gorilla family group and how it is irrevocably marred by human intervention is amongst the best Nature writing out there, bar none. It is no big surprise that this novel won the Carnegie Medal.

In An Enemy at Green Knowe, things get very much darker, with a real-life black-magician, Dr. Melanie T. Powers, threatening Mrs. Oldknow and Green Knowe in her quest to obtain a magical book of an erstwhile occupant, the 16th century tutor and alchemist, Dr. Vogel. There is ultimately a fight to the death between Mrs Oldknow, Ping and Tolly and the Satanic powers of Ms. Powers. It is clear that L.M. Boston knows her witchcraft, and this title, where it is presented in a largely "realistic" and non-fantastical context, would certainly be highly objectionable to those parents who found the Harry Potter Series to be a stepping stone into the Dark Arts. However, for those of us who don't see budding Satanists in every 10-year old reader, this remains an intensely creepy and nasty little novel, which might not be the best fare for the nightmare-prone amongst your children.

There also exists one other book in the Green Knowe Series which was not initially reprinted with the first five Harcourt volumes. It was originally published some 10 years after the others, in 1976, by a different publisher (Atheneum Press in the US), but is now available in an edition uniform with the other Harcourt volumes. The Stones of Green Knowe shifts from modern times to the very origin of Green Knowe. The story centers around Roger, son of the Norman lord who first built Green Knowe. As he watches Green Knowe being built, he also wanders nearby, eventually discovering a pair of already terribly ancient chair-shaped standing-stones, and learning of their lore from his wise Mrs Oldknow-like grand-mother. These chairs allow him, and many of Green Knowe's other children, to travel through time and meet one another. It also allows Roger to see the transformations which his home and its environs will undergo. His travels into his future, if awkwardly depicted, bring him into contact with Tolly and Susan in particular, and serve to cap the series with an underlying sense of centuries-long continuity. The grandmother figure present in most of the stories also contributes to this feeling of deep history and some timeless protective presence. The final sentence — when the old standing-stones have been hauled away to a museum in the present, and Roger stands before them in his time — is beautifully sad and haunting: "He was alone, and the Stones were standing in their place, throwing long shadows before them."

Besides great stories, L.M. Boston, who was trained as an artist, had a wonderful ability to depict her beloved home and its environs, as well as to create an almost unworldly atmosphere. The first novel begins with Tolly's arrival by train. A car takes him through the flooded landscape to near the manor, where he is picked up, in the dark, by a rowboat manned by the ancient gardener Boggis, who rows him to the steps of the completely surrounded manor, elsewhere described as an Ark... tying into its name "Green Noah". Maybe it was the near floodwaters around my home when I read this portion, but the exquisitely portrayed impression of rowing through the dark, up the driveway to the house, immediately predisposed me to suspend disbelief and enjoy both the rest of the book and the rest of the series. Certainly, the wild gorilla family-life segment, mentioned above, ranks among the best Nature segments in childrens literature I've ever read. Equally, L.M. Boston's Green Knowe Series has excellent creepy moments, and at least some unhappy events and unpleasant characters to save the books from simply being saccharine kiddy-drivel. All of this is anchored by a sense of the continuity of place and family over numerous generations, certainly values that are too frequently lost in today's world.