I wait for Victoria Short outside the British Consulate General in Istanbul. It’s a humid evening in late July, and by the time she arrives the sun has begun to set. Nevertheless, we set out, passing through the security gates out of the consulate and heading up the gravel path toward the garden.

Almost thirteen years ago on the spot where we’re walking, a terrorist attack killed at least twenty-seven people, including Victoria’s husband, Roger, the British consul general to Istanbul. Victoria still lives in Istanbul and tends the consulate garden almost every day—“trying to put the heart back into it,” she says. Additions to the centuries-old plots are rare, but in the years following the strike, Victoria created a memorial in an area adjacent to the front of the building. The quiet trees and plantings stand in contrast to the bustle of the cars, street vendors, and crowded buildings just over the wall.

As we wander, we come to one of many spots in the garden where the letters V and R are etched into the stones. They stand for Victoria Regina, referring to Queen Victoria, who spent the majority of her reign mourning the death of her own husband. Today’s Victoria traces her fingers over them. “Sometimes,” she says, “I like to joke that it stands for Victoria and Roger.”

The British Consulate in Istanbul sits on a plot of land gifted by the Ottoman sultan Selim III, as a gesture of appreciation for Britain’s help defeating the French in Egypt in 1801. Perched at the edge of Pera, a diplomatic district for the Ottoman Turks, the site overlooks the Golden Horn, an inlet of water where the Bosporus joins the Sea of Marmara. The first British embassy on the property was completed in 1805 and destroyed in a fire twenty-six years later. The current consulate building, completed by British architect W.J. Smith around 1853, was fashioned in the Neo-Renaissance style of Sir Charles Barry, who designed London’s impressive Palace of Westminster.

When Victoria and Roger arrived in Istanbul in 2001, the consulate building they would have lived in was under renovation due to yet another fire, which had broken out there the year before. Victoria and I sit on a blue bench facing a small fountain, and she plucks at some hydrangeas as she recalls telling Roger, in that very spot, that she thought she could do something with the garden: the apartment they’d moved into had little outdoor space, and she wanted something to do that would keep her out of the house.

We get up again. Victoria’s slender frame weaves in and out of the bushes as she names their varieties and tells me about their origins. We come to a neglected greenhouse. “Do you like rosemary?” she asks as she hands me a pot to take home. We pass a little pond before reaching a side entrance that brings us to the main garden.

The day of the attack, Victoria and Roger drove to the consulate building together. A few minutes past eleven, Victoria put down her work in the garden and left to buy milk at a nearby market. It was then that a suicide bomber drove a truck filled with explosives into the main gate.

Victoria doesn’t remember hearing the explosion, only running back to the building and fearing that police officers would try to hold her back. “There was nothing there,” she says. “One or two minutes either way, I would also have been killed.” The bombing was one of a pair of coordinated attacks carried out that day in Istanbul, as British prime minister Tony Blair prepared to meet with US president George W. Bush in London to discuss a joint anti-terror resolution.

At the center of the main garden is a large lawn, with two large rectangles of budding sage in mauve and pink surrounded by neatly manicured hedges. Prior to the bombing, the plant beds were circular, and many commented on their resemblance to a pair of breasts. Afterward, Victoria planted hedges around them to change their shape. She points out the tree Prince Charles planted nearby to commemorate the reopening of the building after the bombing. Teak park benches from England line the terrace at the back of the main consulate building. Pink roses climb the terrace wall.

We didn’t think they would bomb so close to the street, where there would be so many civilians.

From afar, the clean lines give an impression of order. As we walk around the perimeter, however, a completely different botanical narrative begins to unfold. White daisies grow in every direction. Verbena and foxglove flowers fall into each other. Little pink buds peek out from beneath the tall grasses. The greenery is wild, thick, and free. The contrast of the outer space is an anecdote of the different ways nature is viewed, through the formality of the Turkish garden versus the romanticism of the English garden.

Victoria delights in the variety. She plucks a small strawberry and pops it in her mouth. “To me that’s what a garden is, where you can walk around and have a little something.”

In the days after the bombing, the consulate general was temporarily moved to a building a few blocks away that had once housed the American consulate, although some were forced to work out of rented rooms at the nearby Hilton hotel. In the months following the attack, Victoria moved apartments but remained in Istanbul. The decision seemed like a gradual one: in Istanbul people understood what happened, she explains, but people in England quickly forgot. It was “just another bomb on the ten o’clock news” she says. She tells me she has not read anything on the internet about that day.

Another constant in her life was the garden. She didn’t return immediately to the British consulate, though she did continue gardening, at the German and Swedish consulate buildings. In the growth and renewal of flowers, Victoria found a metaphor that allowed her to overcome the grief of loss. In this way it’s like painting, she says. “It takes you to a different place.”

A narrow path leads to a space tucked behind the main garden. The earth is stiff beneath our feet, parched from a particularly dry season. The clearing is rugged and encircled by foliage. “This,” Victoria tells me, “is the secret garden.” Her own little sanctuary. We sit on a dilapidated picnic table. More than ten years ago, a storm blew over a chestnut tree, clearing a patch of land where persimmon and honey suckle bushes now grow freely. We stare up at the huge bay trees. Victoria tugs at a leaf and crushes it in her fist; the fragrance erupts as her fingers uncurl. There’s no plaque here, but the little patch behind the main garden is filled with tokens of Roger and Victoria’s life together: a mulberry tree from a weekend trip to Bursa and a miniature pomegranate tree Roger brought from the south coast of Turkey.

Victoria met Roger in 1968, when she was eighteen years old. It was “by chance,” she says. “Something to do with a Johnny Cash concert and a demonstration outside the American embassy in London against the Vietnam War.” They saw each other often in the following months, but Roger had recently joined the diplomatic service and was soon sent to Turkey. On her way to meet him in Istanbul nearly a year later, she was held up unexpectedly in Germany and had no way to contact him once she arrived. “I was a young, distressed English girl, and I remember being looked after in the airport manager’s office,” Victoria recalls. Roger eventually returned to the airport to look for her, and a few hours later he asked her to marry him. Over the years, Roger’s work in the diplomatic service would take them to Brazil, Norway, Bulgaria, and Bosnia-Herzegovina. He would return to Turkey in the early 1980s, and then again with Victoria and their three children as the British consul general in 2001.

We walk back to the memorial, which feels more like a public park than a private place of remembrance. The dichotomy between physical and spiritual, living and dead, and ultimately public and private seems to be some what blurry in Turkish sentiment. For the Ottomans, cemeteries also served as public parks. They were everywhere: you couldn’t avoid walking through them. Much of the area surrounding Pera, including Taksim Square and Gezi Park, was once an Armenian cemetery.

“We didn’t think they would bomb so close to the street, where there would be so many civilians,” Victoria says. The area is dotted with new cypress and plane trees. Cypress are common in Turkish graveyards, she tells me, and she wanted plane trees because “they remind you of London.” We sit on one of the two half-oval wooden benches that face each other at the center of an open space, and she rests her hand on the spot next to her. “This is about where his office would have been,” she says.

Julia Pardoe, the British poet, novelist, and traveler, visited Istanbul in 1836; her 1837 book about her experience there is among the earliest writing on the city to have been published by a woman. The Turk didn’t seem to view death with disgust or horror, she noticed. Instead, “he spreads his burial places in the sunniest of spots—on the crests of the laughing hills, where they are bathed in the light of the blue sky; beside the crowded thoroughfares of the city, where the dead are, as it were, once more mingled with the living.”