The last resting place of author Flora Thompson is being given a facelift thanks to green-fingered volunteer Adrian booker – and the Dartmouth Chronicle.

The author's grave in Dartmouth's Longcross Cemetery had become so neglected that it had driven one of her fans to tears, it was claimed last year.

Now veteran member of the Dartmouth and Kingswear Horticultural Society Mr Booker has stepped forward to clean up the grave.

He has cut back vegetation that was obscuring the grave, taken out weeds and placed gravel on the memorial where Flora Thompson was buried in 1947.

This week he was planning to clean up the headstone which includes Flora Thompson's name and that of her son Peter who was killed serving with the merchant navy in 1941.

Mr Booker said he had stepped up to volunteer to help clean up the author's grave as soon as he had seen the story in the Chronicle.

'I am retired with plenty of time,' he said. 'As a keen gardener and allotment holder and having been a member of Dartmouth and Kingswear Horticultural since 1975, I realised I had the necessary experience for the job.

'I contacted Dartmouth Town Council who gave the go ahead and agreed to pay for the granite chippings to replace the mud and weeds in the grave itself.

'I have also cut away the scrubby growth from the hedge and removed the overhanging tree branch.'

Mr Booker has even cleaned up the path which leads to the grave. He said that by the spring 'I believe Dartmouth will have a grave worthy of visits from people outside the town'.

Flora Thompson's works include the Lark Rise to Candleford trilogy which she sent as essays to the Oxford University Press in 1938 and which were published as books soon after.

The books are a fictionalised, if autobiographical, social history of rural English life in the late 19th century. They were adapted by the BBC for a TV series in 2008.

She moved to Dartmouth with her family in 1928 to live in Above Town before moving to Brixham in 1940.

She wrote her last book – Still Glides the Stream – at Brixham just before her death in May 1947 and it was published posthumously.

There is a plaque on the house where she lived in Above Town.

Just before Christmas, Dartmouth bookshop volunteer Oriole Newgass said fans of the author had been complaining about the state of the grave. She said one fan had come in 'in floods of tears' after visiting the grave.