Alvilde Lees-Milne (née Bridges; 13 August 1909 – 1994) was a British gardening and landscape expert. Early life Alvilde was born on 13 August 1909 in London. She was the only child of the Lt.-Gen. Sir (George) Tom Molesworth Bridges, the Governor of South Australia from 1922 to 1927, by his wife Janet Florence Menzies, and was the great-niece of Robert Bridges, the one-time Poet Laureate. Personal life On 9 January 1933, Alvilde married Hon. Anthony Freskin Charles Hamby Chaplin, who would in 1949 become the 3rd Viscount Chaplin. They had one daughter, Oenone Clarissa Chaplin (b. 1934), who married Michael Charles Deane Luke (b. 1925), son of Sir Harry Charles Luke KCMG, of Hollingbourne Manor, in 1958. While married to Lord Chaplin, she met James Lees-Milne, who became her second husband, during World War II while she was engaged in an affair with the arts patron Princess Winnaretta de Polignac. By 1949 they were in love, but from the outset the relationship was not without complications. At one point the Chaplins, Lees-Milne, and Anthony Chaplin's girlfriend Hon. Rosemary Lyttelton all lived in the same house. Lord and Lady Chaplin divorced in 1950, whereupon the viscount married Rosemary Lyttleton (by whom he later had two daughters). She and Lees-Milne were candid with each other about their true sexual nature, and they did not generally hide their affairs from one another. During the 1930s James Lees-Milne had been the lover of Harold Nicolson, husband of the writer Vita Sackville-West who was herself noted for her high-profile lesbian affairs. Both Harold and Vita acted as witnesses at the Lees-Milnes' wedding (also present was James' former lover the composer Lennox Berkeley and Berkeley's wife Freda). Vita Sackville-West's former lover Violet Trefusis had been the long-term lover of Princess de Polignac, and in turn in the 1950s Sackville-West became involved in a love affair with Alvilde Lees-Milne (who tried to conceal the fact from her husband). In later written accounts James Lees-Milne said that he and his wife enjoyed an active sexual relationship prior to their marriage, but less so afterwards. In 1955, Alvilde embarked on the affair with Sackville-West; they were semi-discreet but the affair was well known within their social circle. When in the late 1950s Lees-Milne began a - mostly platonic - affair with a younger man the marriage became stormy, predominantly as a result of Alvilde's jealousy (she was prone