(probably in the late 1920s) for Wallace & Co of Tunbridge Wells, nursery-men and landscape architects. He wrote his final book The Garden Year at Tunbridge Wells in 1936. Military service and family casualties WW1 Herbert Cowley's army records reveal that he enlisted early in the war on 7 September 1914 as No. 2477 in the 12th County of London Regiment, known as the "London Rangers" or "Polytechnic Corps". He had quickly embarked for Belgium by 25 December 1914. In one of Herbert Cowley's postwar letters in his National Archives British Army Service records, he complains to the Army authorities in 1920 from his residence at Curley Croft, Lightwater, near Bagshot: "I have received so far no medals whatsover for services rendered at the Front in 1914/15. I was in the 12th London Regiment and went to Belgium with the 1st Battalion on Christmas Eve." Cowley would eventually be awarded the Pip, Squeak and Wilfred trio of medals for soldiers who served early in the First World War. He was also awarded the Silver War Badge by 1916, a useful public symbol that showed others he had been injured and demobilised. Cowley had got what was known as a "Blighty" wound, serious enough to get him invalided out of the army but one that allowed him to live an active life. "Our Sub-Editor at the Front", Cowley is recorded in the 1916 Kew Guild Journal as being "wounded twice" in the spring battles of Ypres in 1915. He was slightly wounded in late April 1915, reported in The Garden of 8 May 1915: "For the past eight days we have been in severe battle. I am slightly wounded by shell - only a bruised rib and am in hospital. Dreadful warfare is still raging ... we must win!" He was more seriously wounded on 4 May 1915, receiving a GSW Right Knee (either gunshot wound or shrapnel wound). The circumstances are reported in The Garden on 15 May 1915: "Rifleman H. Cowley 2477,... has again been wounded in action and is now in hospital ... Surgical 7, 3rd Southern General Hospital , Oxford ... wounded in the knee whilst bandaging another soldier in the trenches ..." Cowley was lucky to be alive, if injured, after this action at Ypres. The fighting by his 1st Battalion, 12th London Regiment on the Frezenberg Ridge in the Second Battle Of Ypres "brought about