At an interior decorator’s shop in Burford (Ian Wright Interiors), I came across some exquisite flowers depicted on table mats and coasters which, I learned, had been originally produced by Mary Delaney (1700-1788) using a completely novel means of production — and had been recreated in modern times by the Irish Georgian Society.

A little further up the street, at a Sue Ryder charity shop, my wife and I came across, by coincidence, a book about Mrs Delaney (Mrs Delaney and her Flower Collages, by Ruth Hayden, published in 1980 by British Museum Press) which immediately became ours for £1. I read that Mrs Delaney in her seventies and even eighties made perfect flower representations out of paper, and that she received flowers from all over the world to copy.

Some came courtesy of Captain Cook who in 1770 arrived abord HMS Endeavour at Botany Bay in Australia, site of the present- day city of Sydney but originally named for the botanical specimens collected there — so I was interested to find when visiting Woodstock church (pictured) later that day, a memorial to a Captain James King.

The memorial on the south wall proclaims that Captain King was “the friend and colleague of Captain Cooke [sic] in his last voyage round the world. The history of which from the time of the death of that celebrated navigator, he wrote at Woodstock, during the short intervals of his retirement from the publik [sic] services of his country in which his laborious and almost uninterrupted exertions brought on a premature and deeply lamented death”. He died at 31 in 1784.

But back to Mrs Delaney. Her life turned out to provide an extraordinary insight into the 18th century, spanning as it did the reigns of five monarchs, and ending with a vignette of how George III and Queen Charlotte (along with their 15 children) lived — in the happy years before that nature-loving King went mad. For the king and queen virtually adopted Mrs Delaney as a sort of granny after her great friend, the Duchess of Portland (daughter of the Earl of Oxford) died. They provided her with a cottage near the Royal Lodge at Windsor and a pension of £300 a year, simply because they shared her interest in botany and so admired both her and her work.

Little wonder therefore that a Georgian Society has taken up her work. But why the Irish Georgian Society? Answer: because after the death of her first husband she married an Irish clergyman called Dr Patrick Delaney and spent more than 25 years in Ireland, much of them spent collecting wild flowers.

She was the niece of Viscount Weymouth and knew all the great and good of her time, carefully noting exactly what all the ladies wore at court etc. On the accession of the Hanoverian George 1 (who could not speak English) in 1714, she and her Jacobite father were forced to leave London for a house in the Cotswolds, just across the Gloucestershire border.

She found the roads in Oxfordshire on the way there deplorable and noted, later, that the Irish ones were much better.

But she knew all the great and the good of her time. She walked the Cotswolds with the founder of Methodism, John Wesley (who courted her); was a lifelong friend of Jonathan Swift, who wrote much of Gulliver’s Travels at what is now Cokethorpe School but was then the residence of Lord Harcourt; and she was also a friend of Alexander Pope, who translated much of the Illiad at Pope’s Tower in Stanton Harcourt.

Funny how things turn out. Would George III have backed Captain Cook’s voyage had it not been for his interest in botany? Perhaps I shall one day stumble across Captain King’s book and find out.