For centuries, English garden-makers have had a fascination with the Renaissance gardens of Italy and have attempted to transport their magical qualities home. They have done so with varying success and the best have been where the Italian inspiration and mastery of scale and architecture are embedded in an intrinsically English setting. Nowhere has this been better done than at Renishaw Hall, where, from the late 1880s to the inter-war period, Sir George Sitwell created a memorable garden around his historic family home.

Renishaw lies in the far north-east corner of Derbyshire, close to Sheffield, and surrounded by countryside that was for cen- turies dominated by coal and iron — the foundations of the Sitwell family’s wealth. The house was originally built of ashlar stone in the 1620s and extended with wings at the end of the 18th century, giving it the unforgettable broad, castellated south-facing façade. This would become the backcloth for Sir George’s garden, the foundations of which were terracing dating from the 17th century, the topography of the landscape dropping away from the terraces southward allowing for the creation of views, and woodlands flanking the terraces (in the style of the ‘bosco’ so integral to Italian gardens).

George was born in 1860. Two years later, he inherited the family baronetcy and when aged four is reputed to have announced to his fellow passengers on a train: ‘I am Sir George Sitwell, the youngest baronet in England.’ In his youth, the family estates were managed expertly by his mother, Lady Louisa. As a result, Sir George inherited with the resources to carry out the restoration of his house and the development of its garden, on which he embarked shortly after coming of age in 1881.

Oxford University introduced the young Sitwell to the Arts-and-Crafts Movement and this, together with the late-19th-century fashion for formal gardens championed by the architect-designer Sir Reginald Blomfield, guided his work at Renishaw. Blomfield’s book The Formal Garden in England, published in 1892, was illustrated by another architect designer, Francis Inigo Thomas, who was Sir George’s cousin. Correspondence in the family archives (expertly researched by Renishaw’s archivist, Christine Beever, recently) between Thomas, Sir George and his estate manager William Hollingworth confirms Thomas’s involvement at Renishaw.

Sir George was meticulous in the planning and execution of his garden. His son, Osbert — who, with his siblings Edith and Sacheverell, were largely responsible in their writings for their father’s not always flattering reputation — wrote that Sir George would stand at an upstairs window with a megaphone and shout instructions to his butler Henry Moat, who would move wooden marking posts and towers into position to ensure the precise levels and vistas he required. Supervision of the landscaping work was carried out by Henry Milner, one of the most successful landscape architects of the period.

The importance of his garden being not only an entity in its own right, but inextricably uniting the house and surrounding landscape was confirmed in the early 1890s when two lakes were dug, incorporating ancient fishponds at the foot of the slope beyond the terraces. Later, Sir George was to write: ‘The garden must be considered not as a thing in itself, but as a gallery of foregrounds designed to set off the soft hues of the distance, it is Nature which should call the tune and the melody is to be found in the distant prospect of blue hill or shimmering lake.’

It is a measure of the reputation that Sir George’s garden gained within fashionable architecture and gardening circles that, only three years after the foundation of Country Life in 1897, Renishaw was one of the first gardens to be featured. The author’s admiration was evident: ‘What is the character that we find here? That of spaciousness and yet enclosure in the first place, of broad terrace levels with fine descents, excellent in architectural fitness, of floral wealth, of a great outlook, and, above all, of splendid trees.’

Ironically, it was ill health that first took Sir George to Italy, which would become the passion of the second half of his life and which inspired him to give the finishing touches to his garden. His annual visits to Italy between 1903 and 1921 are meticulously documented in a series of notebooks. Most significantly, his trips produced a selection of outstanding statues and other architectural features that were shipped home and positioned strategically in the garden at Renishaw. Perhaps more than anything, it is the two pairs of stone statues, Diana and Neptune towards the centre and the Two Giants on the central axis on the lowest level, all gazing out to the landscape beyond, that give Renishaw its stamp of real quality as an Anglo-Italian garden.

Sir George’s visits to Italy also produced one of the small classics of garden literature, his book, On The Making of Gardens, published in 1909. In his work, which mainly describes the gardens in Italy that so inspired him, one passage hints at what he had aspired to evoke at Renishaw: ‘Much there is of mystery in the garden, of subtle magic, of strange, elusive charm which must be felt but cannot wholly be understood.’

In 1921, Sir George left England to live at Montegufoni, the castle in Tuscany that he had bought as a ruin a decade earlier. He died in 1943 (by which time he had moved to Switzerland) and was succeeded by the eldest of his three children, Sir Osbert, who wrote about life at Renishaw in his celebrated five-volume autobiography Left Hand, Right Hand!. Failing health led Sir Osbert to hand over to his nephew Sir Reresby in 1965 and, in recent decades, the gardens have enjoyed periods of energising and adventurous renaissance under both Sir Reresby and his wife, Penelope, and their daughter, Alexandra, who took over in 2011.

The extent to which Sir George incorporated flower borders was confirmed in a series of delightful watercolours of his garden by George Elgood. Also, it is documented that no lesser figure than Gertrude Jekyll (probably introduced by Edwin Lutyens, who worked on the house) supplied planting plans. It is this heritage that has inspired the new planting schemes carried out in recent decades, mostly devised by members of the family with their head gardener of 30 years, David Kesteven.

In 2015, renowned designer and plantsman Arne Maynard was invited to replant the middle borders that flank the garden’s main central lawn. He had never been to Renishaw before and when I spoke to him he recalled the overriding impression from his first visit: ‘More than anything, it was an amazing sense of place that I had not witnessed before, created by the way the terraces, and the statues looking out, lead you out into the landscape.’

Mr Kesteven has overseen all of the recent work in the Renisham garden. When we spoke, he told me of the thing that satisfied him most: ‘If Sir George was to come back and visit the garden today, about 100 years after he left, I know that he would immediately recognise it and find his way around.’

Today, the garden is enlivened with exemplary planting throughout the seasons, all appreciated by the thousands of visitors who come every year, but it remains, at heart, the garden created by Sir George and probably the most distinguished Italianate garden in England.

Visit Renishaw Hall's website for opening times.

This feature originally appeared in the July 15, 2026, print edition of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

The deep, wooded valley of Lamorna runs down to the bluest of rocky coves, secreted between Mousehole and Porthcurno, towards the furthest westerly reaches of the Cornish peninsula. A ribbon of granite cottages, ferny gardens watered by a bubbling stream and The Wink, an endearingly named former smugglers’ pub, complete the picture of this sequestered — and formidably artistic — community.

The casual visitor, intent on reaching the pebbly beach at the end of the little road, would never guess that one of Cornwall’s most exciting and colourful gardens clings to the cliffs overhead, high above the treetops and chimneypots in the valley below.

‘When we first came here, you couldn’t see the sea,’ says Robert Moule, who, with his wife, Carol, moved to the house and its three largely precipitous acres in 1997.

‘The house had been empty and the garden abandoned for 20 years — the view was blocked by fallen trees, Monterey pines and a big yew, and the banks were a solid mass of hydrangeas, bracken and brambles.’

The challenge the couple faced proved even greater than they had at first imagined, as the land faced north-east and lay exposed to the worst and coldest of winds. Local cliffside gardens occupying the same stretch of coast — on St Michael’s Mount and at the Minack Theatre, for example — indicate that even sub-tropical planting is perfectly possible, but those gardens face south and enjoy the warmth and protection of their wooded or rocky surroundings.

The Moules were leaving Cheshire — where they had opened their garden, largely dedicated to camellias and rhododendrons, through the National Garden Scheme — and planned to make a new garden where they could continue growing and propagating these acid-loving plants. They followed the ‘soil map’ south to Devon, looking at potential properties, and were almost ready to put down roots, until they fell under the spell of the house on the cliff. They were intrigued, too, by its history: built in 1908 for a pair of Suffragettes, it had been a refuge for fellow hunger-strikers recovering from their ordeals.

With help from family and local contractors, the garden was cleared and the view at last revealed, framed by a magnificent Monterey pine. A long, level walk, bisected by a steep granite path with steps emerged from the undergrowth, to which the Moules added a network of narrow, sinuous paths that zig-zag down the slope, skirting giant outcrops of granite and trickling spring water. The design evolved organically, not on paper, as the Moules quickly learned to accept what could and couldn’t be done, given the physical constraints of the site.

However, it soon became clear that there was nowhere the couple could comfortably sit out of the wind, to admire both the view and the fruits of their labours at the end of the day. A conservatory and decking terrace were both deemed essential, even if in strong winds the view was alarming: large and treasured shrubs could be seen flying out of their planting holes before they could properly take root. The soil was (and remains) thin and stony. Taking out all the garden rubbish ‘Himalayan style’ in builders’ bags to the top of the cliff was hard enough; the very thought of trying to return it as compost or the luxury of a garden tractor and trailer is out of the question. (No wonder they look so fit.)

Inevitably then, the pair’s early years at Chygurno were a learning curve as steep as the slopes they were attempting to cultivate. Many of the more tender or exotic plants the Moules had cherished were seriously damaged or killed — or simply blown away. Saddened but undeterred, they replaced proteas and leucadendrons, Metrosideros (a native of seaside locations in New Zealand) and Geranium maderense with phormiums, grasses, grevilleas, tough fan palms and tree ferns, underplanted with hemerocallis, iris, kniphofias, crocosmias, schizostylis, osteospermums and agapanthus — all of which, planted when still small, stayed snug in their holes and proved to be tolerant of strong, cold winds.

Wherever possible, the couple take out the tops of trees and shrubs, ‘otherwise the wind will’, and, where plants have been blown over, staking and regular hard pruning have become essential. The wonderful display of pot-grown succulents and dinner-plate-sized aeoniums that greets the visitor on arrival are wrapped in fleece and overwintered in an unheated greenhouse.

Nevertheless, their important collection of rhododendrons and camellias, lovingly transported in pots from Cheshire, has for the most part flourished. As we wander through the garden, the Moules appraise them with affection, pointing out an unusually scented pink azalea ‘Soir de Paris’, the furry-leafed Rhododendron ‘Teddy Bear’ and peachy-flowered R. ‘Unique’. Camellia ‘Lamorna’, raised from a self-sown seedling found in the garden, deserves a special mention. It’s a ‘self-grooming’, pink williamsii type that flowers from December to Easter — a much-appreciated contribution to the camellia world.

The steeply sloping site invites consideration both from above and below. There are ‘classic’ Cornish plants in abundance, but all demand a second glance. The fuchsia, for example, is no ordinary fuchsia, but F. boliviana, with extraordinary long flowers and compact and colourful. Hypericum cultivars in the Magical Series, such as ‘Red Flame’, make a splash. Crocosmia, practically a weed in Cornwall, is represented by the best of them all, ‘Lucifer’.

Squeezing past a shoulder of granite, a sheltered dip in the slope reveals a nest of tree ferns. The Moules exchange glances. ‘It was a skiing holiday or the tree ferns!’ they laugh, although they now have dozens more self-sown tree ferns to dispose of in a garden already brimful of plants.

The past year has seen an increase in pollinators in the garden, especially solitary, ground-nesting bees and wasps. Dr Moule attributes this to a deliberate policy of leaving the ground as undisturbed as possible by weeding as little as possible. In such a physically demanding garden, it is good to see a little less labour rewarded.

The gardens of Chygurno, Lamorna, Penzance, Cornwall, open on Wednesdays and Thursdays, 2pm–5pm, April–September, and on selected days for the National Garden Scheme.

This feature originally appeared in the July 8, 2026, print edition of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

Placing a little building of some sort, perhaps a folly, a faux ruin or other structure as a focal point in the distance was a favourite trick of the 18th-century landscape garden creators. Such ‘eye-catchers’ were favoured by the likes of William Kent and Capability Brown, for they created visual drama, sometimes also suggesting the estate in question extended far beyond its actual boundaries.

Are any of those eye-catchers as remarkable as the incidental one seen from Underhill House in the pretty Sussex village of East Dean? From the house terrace, you look southwards to view the garden, which rolls down a gentle slope, terminating at a dense hedgerow of mixed shrubs and trees. Beyond it, your gaze follows a steep upward trajectory of sheep-grazed pastures, up to the edge of the famous Beachy Head cliff and the most fascinating of ‘follies’: the Belle Tout lighthouse. Built in 1832–34, for some 70 years it saved numerous sea-going vessels from a hazardous stretch of coast littered with sharp reefs, where thousands of ships have been wrecked over the centuries.

This undulating chalk landscape, grazed by local Southdown sheep and crossed by old droveways and smugglers’ paths, has its own specialised flora, attuned to the fast drainage and alkalinity. Flowers such as bird’s-foot trefoil and salad burnets thrive in its ‘rendzina’ — a geologically interesting loamy and limey soil that enriches the gardens in the valleys, yet is stony to work. As you dig, pieces of chalk and flint emerge all the time, among what is also quite fertile ground.

From 2021 onwards, owner Joanne Dove focused first on substantial internal refurbish- ments to the attractive flint-and-brick house, before turning to the garden. For the latter, three years ago she engaged landscape designer Andy Sturgeon, who is based nearby in Brighton, to modernise the terrace and pool area and refresh the planting everywhere. His plan has been to bring more harmony and ease of circulation into the east-facing front courtyard and especially to the main gardens, which extend for some distance to the east and south.

The main terrace was remodelled to improve space for entertaining and dining, bordered by a substantial raised bed, walled with traditional bricks and flints that match the house elevations. Paving slabs in a near-white limestone harmonise with numerous chalky- coloured stones embedded in the house walls. It also gives the pool surround a fresh and modern look, replacing tired and slippery Yorkstone laid many decades ago and not really in keeping with the local vernacular.

No changes needed to be made to the shape of the existing swimming pool, which already had a sympathetically curved southern edge, attractively mirroring the contours of the land- scape. It was, however, relined with shimmering mosaic tiles in many shades of blue, grey and green, suggesting the colours of the sea, just over the cliff edge on the horizon.

In such an open situation, planting a garden in an interesting and sustainable way can be demanding. It may bake in long hours of sunshine, absorbing the humid, salty air of the nearby coast; it can also be plunged into hours of foggy mystery when a sea mist rolls in.

The long bed separating the limestone terrace from the pool area has an inviting, Mediterranean feel with low, mounding shrubs and eruptions of small, seasonal flowers, reminiscent of a flowery garrigue hillside in spring. Its occupants include cistuses, such as C. creticus, a native of the Levant with crumpled pink petals, and its showier cousin, C. x purpureus.

The rock-loving Euphorbia seguieriana brings shots of lemon and lime in its bright foliage and flowers and the tough little daisy bush Olearia x haastii puts out masses of nectar-rich flowers enjoyed by various pollinators. The tumbling herb Rosmarinus officinalis ‘Prostratus’ always requires careful positioning to show off its propensity to imitate a waterfall; in the terrace bed, it overhangs the retaining wall very prettily.

Herbaceous flowers include fluttering, white Gaura lindheimeri, sword-leaved Libertia grandiflora, salvias in variety and the invaluable little daisy Erigeron kar-vinskianus. Given a chance, it sows itself into every nook and cranny. Here, it makes a pretty edging to the brickwork, picking up the wall’s multitude of pink and dark-rose tones.

Below the pool lies the Rose Walk, with its various roses in pastel pinks and peach, joined by ‘Munstead’ lavenders, foxgloves and felty-leaved Jerusalem sage, Phlomis fruticosa. A lawn beside it encourages eastward exploration, towards an exceptionally appro- priate garden building for this location — a corrugated metal shepherd’s hut, of exactly the type used in the area for centuries, where shepherds watched their flocks and moved the wheeled huts over the Downs as required. No shepherd would recognise its interior, however, which is both a dry sauna and a con-venient hide for watching local wildlife.

‘This is where the foxes and badgers come through,’ says Dove. ‘The sauna is for red-light therapy and infrared; if you’re sitting in it from about 5pm, it’s like rush hour, with all sorts of wildlife coming by. They don’t know you’re there behind the glass.’

The easternmost area slopes considerably, among thinned-out trees, and is devoted to wildflowers. Lawns and a curvaceous bed of shrubs lead to a wildlife pond and, at the lowest point, a slender, productive kitchen garden and small greenhouse, which is used for raising melons and tomatoes. ‘The view from the lower garden is really nice, looking out to all the curves in the hills,’ says Dove.

Sight of the hilltop Belle Tout disappears — and as suddenly reappears — depending upon where you are in the garden. Having been decommissioned in 1902 in favour of a brighter, new lighthouse at Beachy Head, it now serves as a high-end B&B and a curiosity for walkers on the Seven Sisters footpath.

‘We are really blessed to have that view,’ Dove observes. ‘The lighthouse has already been moved once; it was brought further inland from the old cliff edge, but the cliffs continue to erode. I would be sad if it ever goes because it’s such an interesting focal point.’

Indeed it is, but perhaps the lighthouse, with its 360-degree view, is also fortunate to see pretty Underhill House in the distant valley, snugly settled into its charming garden.

This feature originally appeared in the July 1, 2026, print edition of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

There can be few garden designers who have a longer relationship with a particular garden than Tania Compton has with Fonthill House in Wiltshire, for it goes back half a century before she was born: her grandparents first set eyes on each other there. ‘They were the lucky recipients of a blind date set up by [the then owners] Hugh and Lady Mary Morrison,’ she explains, ‘and met over tea on the south lawn.’ We are talking on that same south lawn today, with its tremendous views to distant Win Green and the Dorset downs. The outlook may be the same, over the titanic stone bastions that support the garden on its steep hillside, but if her grandparents were to turn around, they would be astonished to see the change behind them.

The Fonthill they knew was an enormous, many-gabled mansion with, at its centre, a Jacobean manor house, which, before the First World War, had been painstakingly dismantled and rebuilt on this new site by the architect Detmar Blow. Its owner, Hugh Morrison, was one of the richest men in Britain, thanks to his grandfather, James. Known as ‘the Napoleon of shopkeepers’, James Morrison made one of the great Victorian fortunes, starting out in haberdashery before moving into banking and railways. He bought the Fonthill estate in the early 1830s, but eventually found it too far from London and gave it, in about 1845, to his second son, Alfred, who lived there for the rest of his life. Alfred’s son, Hugh, inherited in 1897, but, as his mother showed no signs of moving out of the main house, he engaged Blow to build him a home of his own on the eastern edge of the estate.

They chose a wonderful site, on a sunny hillside sheltered from the north and east by the steep escarpment of Little Ridge Wood. In those pre-war days of cheap, abundant labour, the hillside was sculpted into great stone terraces on an almost Mycenaean scale, planted with an Edwardian abundance of roses and bedding. For the first few years, the Morrisons lived in an exquisitely reconstructed Jacobean manor, at that time called simply Little Ridge, but, after children and further inheritances, the original building was repeatedly extended and renamed Fonthill House. Photographs from the Country Life archive reveal it to have been a beautifully picturesque exercise in the 17th-century style — the kind of house of which Sir Edwin Lutyens would have been proud.

Unlike many other country-house owners, the Morrisons survived both wars with their fortune remarkably intact, but, after Hugh’s death in 1931, changing social lives and staffing shortages made huge private houses such as Fonthill almost impossible to live in and, by the early 1970s, his son, John — made Lord Margadale a few years before — had decided to demolish the whole thing.

A late campaign to get Blow’s masterpiece spot-listed, led by Sir Nikolaus Pevsner and the Victorian Society, failed largely because officials at the Department of the Environment had got it muddled with one of the other houses on the estate, which they were under the impression had been demolished years before. By the time they realised their mistake, Blow’s house lay in ruins, to be replaced in 1972 by the current neo-Regency villa, which stands at the middle of the original terraces, although not, maddeningly, quite on the central axis.

Tania Compton’s involvement began about 20 years ago, in her bathing costume. ‘I was over for a swim one afternoon,’ she recalls, ‘soon after Lord Margadale [Alastair Morrison, who inherited the title in 2003] moved in, and I made some disparaging comments about the dwarf-dahlia bedding. It was something of a throwing-down-the-gauntlet put-down, but they knew changes were needed and I was the lucky person to be asked to come up with a masterplan.’ The previous two generations, as she puts it, ‘had been horse rather than horticulture aficionados’ — the first Lord Margadale established the Fonthill Stud, which bred Classic winners under his son — and the once-fine Arts-and-Crafts gardens had suffered decades of neglect, with lank leylandii hedges half hiding tumbledown fruit cages.

Her plan divided the garden into sections, enabling the work to be done in stages, keeping the best surviving trees and shrubs. The house is approached by a sinuous, mile-long drive, which crosses a bridge over Fonthill Lake, then winds gently uphill through woods and pastureland. Finally, it enters what feels like a dark, narrow cutting before emerging, in a brilliant coup de théâtre, into a huge amphitheatral space carved out of the hillside, with flights of steps sweeping up from either end above an arched central loggia. The last stretch of the drive is framed by handsome Persian ironwood trees, Parrotia persica, alternating with clipped box and standard holm oaks, Quercus ilex, underplanted with massed white narcissi, the alliums A. ‘Mont Blanc’ and A. stipitatum ‘Mount Everest’ and Japanese anemones.

To the west of the house, the unlamented leylandii have given way to three distinct spaces, their grassed centres divided by yew hedges, with the original wall along one side and a long retaining wall below, which boasts a fine collection of fan-trained figs. Closest to the new house, the Drawing Room Garden occupies the space where the 1920s drawing room once stood. Designed to feel like an extension of the house, this is one of the most intensely gardened areas, all red, purple and pink, with masses of Rosa ‘De Resht’, ’Bleu Magenta’, ‘Penelope’ and ‘Ispahan’, plus the annual poppy Papaver somniferum ‘Lauren’s Grape’. Beyond is the Cornus Garden, initially intended as a cricket pitch, but now dominated by a group of eight Cornus kousa var. chinensis, some standards and others multi-stemmed.

The sequence culminates in the Fountain Garden, centred on a serene William Pye fountain. In spring, its deep borders are yellow and white with Magnolia stellata and the flat white dinner-plate flowers of Viburnum plicatum, underplanted with chrome-yellow Paeonia daurica subsp. mlokosewitschii. In autumn, the colour scheme switches to pinky-purple, with Hydrangea paniculata and a 164ft ring of Sedum ‘Herbstfreude’ (now Hylotelephium × mottramianum ‘Herbstfreude’).

The south side of the house opens onto a formal lawn, supported by stone walls more than 20ft high, flanked at lower levels on either side by two further gardens — one framing the swimming pool and another, slightly wilder one centred on a small lily pond. The swimming pool sits in the middle of what had been the Edwardian rose garden, complete with Blow’s pretty corner pavilion, now wreathed in wisteria. A hedge of headily fragrant mock orange, Philadelphus ‘Belle Étoile’, runs along one side and the awkward slope towards the house is disguised by four standard Elaeagnus ‘Quicksilver’, which at first glance look like olive trees.

Of the south lawn, the designer says: ‘Given how many walls and steps and other areas of stone there are, we wanted it to offer a visual rest and be all green, yet remain structural.’ The outer three sides are enclosed by her trademark triple hedges, with clipped box sandwiched between two layers of white Rosa rugosa, their stems hidden in a bed of nepetas.

‘I use rugosa everywhere,’ she adds. ‘It looks great, it’s tough and it’s cheap as chips. If you’re creating a long rose hedge, why spend hundreds of pounds on named varieties when you can buy rugosas for 99p a pot?’

It’s a sentiment of which James Morrison would surely approve.

Tania Compton’s cornus champions

Cornus kousa var. chinensis
The most elegant of all the Chinese cornuses, with horizontally inclined, arching branches studded with beautifully spaced starry bracts, which have the profusion of blossom. It has the natural elegance of a selection over the clunkier hybrids, an abundance of dangling strawberry-red fruits and fabulous autumn colour. Its close relation, ‘China Girl’, bred in Holland in the 1970s, has slightly larger bracts, but similar refinement.

Cornus kousa ‘Miss Satomi’
This Chinese dogwood has all the attributes of C. kousa var. chinensis, but with pink rather than creamy white bracts. It’s one of the most gorgeous shrubs for any garden that has rich, neutral to acid soil that doesn’t get too dry. In full flower, it has a similar effect to Viburnum plicatum f. tomentosum ‘Pink Beauty’, which makes a beautiful partner where their spreading canopies have space to make gracefully layered sheets of inflorescence.

Cornus x elwinortonii Venus
This one is the opposite of everything elegant and refined. Its bracts are the starched white handkerchiefs of the Cornus tribe, but it proved irresistible to try it at Fonthill in its Chelsea debut year, and it is thriving in the deep, humus-rich greensand on the edge of North Wood.

Cornus ‘Eddie’s White Wonder’
Where a more rounded silhouette is wanted, this American hybrid has large, rounded, overlapping bracts. It thrives in spring after a long, hot summer, so is getting more reliably dazzling for British gardens. Other than C. kousa var. chinensis, all these cornuses come with an Award of Garden Merit from the RHS.

The gardens at Fonthill are open to visitors on select days — see their website for details.

This feature originally appeared in the June 17, 2026, print edition of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

As you enter through the gatehouse arch at Broadwoodside, the centre of the first of two courtyards is dominated by an imposing iroko aviary, modelled on the fruit cages designed by Arabella Lennox-Boyd for the Rothschilds at Ascott House in Buckinghamshire. This is the summer home to William, an African grey parrot, who has been in residence since the Dalrymple family — Robert, Anna and their four children — moved here in 2000. The archway and an ogee-roofed pavilion in the corner of the second, which were among their additions, gently meld with the buildings of a once-dilapidated former steading dating back to the 17th century.

Mr Dalrymple is a book designer of some renown who has worked with many of the world’s leading publishers and galleries. If one were comparing him to a bird, it would be a gimlet-eyed magpie, picking up ideas, both artistic and horticultural, and shamelessly transporting them back to his nest just outside Gifford in East Lothian. Possessed of an enquiring mind and a penchant for a play on words, as well as fingers turned deep green from more than 25 years of planning and planting the garden (indeed, it first featured in Country Life on February 22, 2007). It is also clear that he is not a man who takes himself too seriously.

Near William’s quarters, he points out a large gnarled and desiccated branch of native juniper. ‘It succeeds entirely as a Louise Bourgeois spider,’ he says, in the fruity cadences he shares with his historian brother William (after whom the chatty parrot was named), punctuated with barks of cheery laughter.

‘From whatever angle you look at it, it has a satisfactory composition. I thought I had taken pretentiousness to a new level, but actually it has gone down well with the general audience.’

We move on to a column of wood cubes alternating with short rods of glass supporting a glass sphere, which has burnt the wood below it through the sun’s refractions. ‘My daughter did a course at the furniture school down the road [Chippendale International School of Furniture] and I found these glass bars. She drilled the wood and we assembled it together; it does a Roger Ackling.’

Other gleaned examples around the garden include A Load of Balls (literally, a pile of plastic, stone and glass spheres, inspired by fashion designer Dries Van Noten’s father’s garden in Belgium) and the Three Sisters, made from leftover roofing slates and inspired by an installation at the Hannah Peschar Gallery in Surrey by Herta Keller. ‘The writing is on the wall’ (indeed it is) is inscribed in the loggia, used for feasting à la Balthazar on warm summer days, and, placed along a grassy path, a stone tablet displays ‘Ore stabit fortis arare placeto restat’, a donnish joke best read in English.

The garden cannot escape an intellectual nod to the late Ian Hamilton Finlay’s creation at Little Sparta, a mere 40 miles away. Yet this is no pastiche, as, together with the buildings new and old, each area makes sense in its context and has a harmony and lightness of touch that comes together as something traditional, yet deeply personal and original.

Mr Dalrymple’s design background is the presiding genius here and the layout is strongly linear, with repetition, rhythm and symmetry being key and each sightline considered, whether along a path to a focal point within the garden or out into the arable land and woods beyond. He uses the layout of these buildings or existing farm walls as the frames. ‘It is somehow less fanciful than simply dividing up a big garden into rooms.’

The first courtyard, with Palazzo William at its centre, was created so there is always some-thing pleasing to look out at from the house, even during long, dreich Scottish winters. It was inspired by John Stefanidis’s garden in Dorset and is laid with a chequerboard of 25 squares of cobbles, grass and neatly clipped evergreens, such as box, rosemary and teucrium, coloured seasonally by alliums and grasses, and self-seeders, including foxgloves and Verbena bonariensis, out of which rise hard clipped standard Norway maples. Mr Dalrymple admits mistakes were made in the early days. ‘We moved to a building site and I thought: “that will be depressing”, so I spent quite a lot of money on mature prunus trees that I had read about in a Penelope Hobhouse book. They had been in about six months and got canker and died. These are the replacements.’

The next hortus conclusus, beyond a low wall and reached down a step to further emphasise the change of scene, has a more child-conducive central lawn (there are now nine grandchildren), traversed by a cruciform flagstoned path. To the north is the ‘thug bed’, filled with the likes of eupatorium, macleaya and Japanese anemones. Against the sunny west-facing wall is another opportunity for a joke, ‘blackberry and apple’: Rubus fruticosus ‘Oregon Thornless’ and Estivale apples, purchased from Crocus in a sale for their formal, goblet-trained bush, but, in fact, ‘the best-tasting apple we have’.

Although Mr Dalrymple’s disciplined hand is to be seen in the repeated plantings, the symmetrical vistas, the avenue of fastigiate hornbeams that were a present from his grandmother and the pollarded circle of willows near the drive, Mrs Dalrymple does get a look in. ‘She always wants more flowers. It is a creative tension,’ he admits, with another bark of laughter. ‘It is the Vita and Harold cliché. I do the straight lines; she does the abundance.’

There are, indeed, flowers aplenty, especially in the kitchen garden, at the centre of which is a long formal pond, and areas such as the Hall Garden, on either side of a path leading from the drive to a large room used for parties and tour groups, which has something more of the sweet disorder favoured by Mrs Dalrymple. Limes that started off with the intention of being pleached, then turned into pompoms are now parasol-trained to shade the path. As to the planting, ‘it is really a free for all,’ says Mrs Dalrymple. ‘It starts off quite orderly in March, with a complete covering of scillas. Then you get Euphorbia epithymoides and yellow tulips and then brunnera and then it starts to become the law of the jungle.’

Order may yet prevail, as the Hall Garden has just been refreshed and replanted by Nanette Wraith, who replaced Guy Donaldson last year after he’d spent 25 years as the gardener. Do the two have plans for any new areas? ‘No bigger, thank you,’ says Mrs Dalrymple firmly.

Broadwoodside welcomes visitors by appointment, and on selected days for the National Garden Scheme — see more details at the website.

This feature originally appeared in the print edition of Country Life on June 24, 2026. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

'It is definitely the only garden I have ever designed where old-fashioned roses have been the big thing,’ is how Tom Stuart-Smith summarised his garden at Lasborough Park in Gloucestershire, designed for Julia and Sir Hans Rausing. For the man whose creations with perennials have passed into horticultural folklore, the project was definitely a one-off, yet one that he will always recall with great affection.

Whatever style of garden a designer might be asked to produce, few could fail to be entranced by the setting at Lasborough. Here, in the south-western reaches of the Cotswolds, where the limestone uplands fold gently down towards the Severn estuary, is some of the most undisturbed and beautiful countryside in south-west England.

It includes a series of secluded valleys, wrapped around by wooded hillsides so as to appear little worlds of their own. This is certainly the case as you approach Lasborough and take the narrow lane that drops down from the A46 west of Tetbury and eventually brings you to the cluster of houses close to the church before crossing the River Wells and rising gently on the far side to Lasborough Park.

Lasborough’s long history stretching back over centuries has witnessed a succession of owners. It has also benefited from some garden and landscape highlights, evidence of which survives today. The present house was originally built in the late 18th century, designed by James Wyatt, and William Emes planned the surrounding landscape.

The impressive walled garden with its long, curving south-facing wall originally dated from the early 19th century and, in the mid 19th century, Lasborough was acquired by the famous Victorian tree planter Robert Stayner Holford of nearby Westonbirt.

Characteristically, one of his additions was Lodge Avenue, a double avenue stretching the five miles from Westonbirt to Lasborough, much of which remains today. Holford lived at Lasborough for a period and he also made extensive alterations to the outbuildings and added the original freestanding glasshouse to the walled garden. During the 1920s, the little known, but distinguished garden designer George Dillistone was commissioned by the then owners, Galbraith and Eleanor Cole, to plan an ambitious reworking of the garden, but Galbraith died in 1929 and Lasborough was sold before Dillistone’s work could begin.

There were to be five more sales of the house before, in 2014, it was purchased by the Rausings, who almost immediately commissioned Mr Stuart-Smith to carry out extensive work in the gardens, the major element of which was to be the re-creation of the early-19th-century walled garden. Perhaps the most significant factor for Mr Stuart-Smith was the degree to which the work on the garden would be a partnership with Julia. She had already been diagnosed with cancer and the creation of the Lasborough garden was an absorbing project that gave her great pleasure in the final years before her death in 2024.

When Mr Stuart-Smith started work, the walled garden had effectively ceased to exist. Holford’s impressive glasshouse had disappeared by the 1920s and the designer recalls that ‘all there was in the walled garden was an oil tank, an Astroturf putting green and some Christmas trees’. Repairing — in many areas completely rebuilding — the walls took a year, after which a new glasshouse was built on the footprint of the original. The new garden that emerged is something of a celebration of the great British tradition of walled kitchen gardens — on a spectacular scale, as it extends to more than an acre.

A symmetrical pattern of beds is arranged around a grid of paths, with those extending across the garden from one side to the other giving views that demonstrate the overall scale. The central area is set out with beds in front of the new glasshouse, to one side there is a concentration of vegetables, to the other the flower garden. The beds now overflow with a combination of plants that, if there is an unfamiliar emphasis on roses in many areas, bears all the hallmarks of Mr Stuart-Smith’s skill with a complex plant palette. In some places, there are mixtures; elsewhere, a single plant is massed for effect, for instance, a block of pinky/mauve-flowered echinacea.

There is the rich mixture of flowers, fruit and vegetables essential to a traditional walled garden, growing in such quantities that there is a constantly changing kaleidoscope from month to month. In the depth of winter, tall drums of clipped beech retain their golden leaves and provide structure, as do the arches and other metalwork over which a range of apple and pear trees is immaculately trained.

More fruit is trained against the walls, especially on the long curve of the south-facing one where a medley of gages, figs, apricots, plums and pears alternates with a similarly mouthwatering range of wall shrubs and climbers, such as different Clematis viticella, white and mauve solanum and abutilons. Mingling with them all are, of course, roses, including The Generous Gardener, ‘François Juranville’ and ‘Albertine’ to name only three reliable pink-flowered old favourites. Around the garden, some choice larger wall shrubs include Magnolia delavayi, Maytenus boaria, Hoheria sexstylosa ‘Stardust’, Viburnum cinnamomifolium and Clerodendrum trichotomum var. fargesii.

Through the weeks of summer, as the beds devoted to vegetables fill out with their burgeoning crops and beans and sweet peas smother hazel wigwams, the range of plants and plant combinations creates an atmosphere of richness that on a sunny day is sheer intoxication. In May and early June, a wonderful collection of Benton irises come into flower in beds in front of the glasshouse beneath espalier pears. In some beds, shrub roses predominate, underplanted with geraniums, erigeron and other appropriate low perennials.

The David Austin-bred Scepter’d Isle and Susan Williams-Ellis; old-fashioned shrubs ‘Tuscany Superb’, ‘Charles de Mills’ and ‘Fantin-Latour’; and hybrid musk ‘Penelope’ and ‘Felicia’, form a selection of roses picked out by Mr Stuart-Smith. Elsewhere, there is a variety of shrub and perennial combinations that would keep you absorbed for hours and, in the glasshouse, in traditional kitchen-garden style, there’s a collection of pelargoniums in clay pots, including a delicious pale-pink-flowered climbing variety trained against one wall.

The walled garden is definitely the centrepiece of the new garden at Lasborough and is best viewed from the Gothic folly built by Ptolemy Dean perched on the slope above. Yet Mr Stuart-Smith’s work attended to all the areas that make up the 12 acres — as well as extending out into the park to the south and west, which gives both garden and house such an idyllic setting. When he began work, the area immediately to the west of the house had been made into an enclosed courtyard with no proper links to the pool garden nearby and the areas beyond, such as the walled garden. Since then, the pool garden has been replanted and the courtyard opened up, so it now leads to the walk that extends parallel to the walled garden. Here, long borders either side of the path are at their best in May, with repeat cornus and other shrubs mixing with a palette of spring perennials.

A little over 10 years has witnessed a transformation in the garden at Lasborough, taking it to heights not achieved at any time in its past when, all too often, a change in ownership brought a period of stability to an end. In the creation and development through its formative years, the garden gave enormous and recuperative pleasure to Julia Rausing. Today, it gives the house a setting of horticultural excellence that is a fitting complement to the centuries-old landscape that surrounds it.

George Plumptre is the former chief executive of the National Garden Scheme, for which the garden of Lasborough Park, Gloucestershire, opens.

This feature originally appeared in the June 10, 2026, print edition of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

It was a small sepia advert in a Sunday magazine that first caught Delia Broke’s eye 27 years ago. ‘It mentioned a designer called Arne Maynard and I wrote him a letter,’ Mrs Broke remembers. ‘He arrived with three bunches of flowers and told me to shut my eyes. When I opened them, I had to point immediately to the bunch I liked best.’ Almost three decades later, the garden at Holme Hale Hall continues to be a spectacularly successful collaboration, where the colours and tones of the planting scheme are shifting and dynamic, yet remain coherent across every space, and where the relationship between client and designer has been a consistent delight.

‘Our only instruction was that it must stay relaxed, with children, dogs and football,’ says Mrs Broke. An artist and florist, she wanted more flowers to bring into the house, too, and for the foraged wreaths she fashions each month, ‘a way of seeing what’s in the garden: I want to remember it, like painting a picture’. Mr Maynard recalls: ‘Delia initially brought me in to advise on an area where a tree had come down, but I was immediately taken with the walled garden. I’ve always had a passion for them: they offer enclosure, security and, as the edges soften, become incredibly romantic.’

The hall owes its Continental warmth to a visionary previous owner, Robert Farrand. In the early 1800s, rich from grain and fresh from his Grand Tour, he moulded the original Elizabethan building into an Italianate villa and swapped the straight driveway for a sinuous curve through parkland. Farrand added a sprinkle of everything fashionable at the time: brick and slate stables, a laundry, kennels, a pond with wrought-iron bridges and a cylindrical dovecote with his coat of arms.

To complete the scene, he built a walled kitchen garden, but, unusually, decided to attach it to the house. ‘What makes it so special are the low railings chosen so the garden was immediately visible as you approach,’ points out Mr Maynard. ‘It isn’t a garden to be hidden away to grow vegetables, it is one to be celebrated as a major part of the garden as a whole.’ The place had fallen into disrepair by the time the Brokes inherited it in the mid 1980s, but there was a magnificent and enormous wisteria — already well established in an 1873 photograph — clambering over the shuttered windows and the soft yellow render of the walls.

Mr Maynard’s masterstroke was to divide the walled garden into three compartments, unfolding as an enfilade through clipped hornbeam and crab apple hedges, each with distinct colour palettes and identities. The first is the most classic: a cruciform axis of brick-edged gravel paths, with trained apple trees over an ironwork tunnel down the centre, creates four productive quarters for vegetables, soft fruit and companion annuals, such as nicotiana and cornflowers. Around the perimeter are deep curving beds for shrubs and perennials, where ‘we chose pastels — soft pinks, mauves and lemons — that picked out the colours of the house,’ Mr Maynard explains.

Soft spires of Verbascum (Cotswold Group) ‘Gainsborough’, apricot Alcalthaea suffru-tescens ‘Parkallee’, Sanguisorba tenuifolia ‘Purpurea’ and creamy batons of Actaea cordifolia ‘Blickfang’ are threaded through repeated mounds of Astrantia ‘Roma’ and Geranium pratense ‘Mrs Kendall Clark’. Dotted amid the bronzes and buttermilks are silver drifts of Artemisia ludoviciana ‘Valerie Finnis’, A. absinthium ‘Lambrook Silver’ and Stachys byzantina. Succisa pratensis ‘Peddar’s Pink’ (a native scabious that grows along a local footpath) scatters itself along the front. Plants are loosely grouped, with outliers drifting away from the main clump, and a few thrown over to the far side of a path so the effect doesn’t abruptly end. The placement is so skilful that it all looks good in every combination around the entire circumference.

The second compartment holds a parterre of L-shaped, box-edged beds designed to reach a crescendo in late summer and autumn, with a hotter slant towards orange, burnt-toffee and plum shades. Digitalis ferruginea and the coppery foliage of Crocosmia x crocosmiiflora ‘Coleton Fishacre’ (also called ‘Gerbe d’Or’) pick up on the orange-eyed blooms of Buddleja x weyeriana ‘Moonlight’. Dahlias, including D. ‘Café au Lait’, ‘Sylvia’, ‘David Howard’ and ‘Henriette’, are added to a vibrant mix of heleniums, eupatoriums, Rudbeckia triloba ‘Prairie Glow’ and many Michaelmas daisies. Symphyotrichum laeve ‘Le Moutiers’ is delicate with dark stems, useful as it runs in sandy soil rather than clumping, threading through its neighbours, and Symphyotrichum ‘Coombe Fishacre’ is another variety that is light on its feet.

Entering the third compartment, Mrs Broke declares, ‘is going on holiday to Provence’. The existing swimming pool was re-tiled in a soft green and encircled by giant terracotta pots full of scabious and pelargoniums, frothed around by lavenders, Mexican daisy and Alchemilla mollis planted directly into the gravel. Espaliered whitebeams create a cool, pared-back corridor, neat box cubes around their feet. A hidden tennis court lies at the very end, the south wall housing both an ancient pear and a perfectly preserved apple store.

Mr Maynard planted the garden in 2000, the same year he won his first Chelsea Gold medal. Two years later, he returned to reorganise the front lawn and ‘enhance the sense of place’, adding yew beehives beside the door, copper beech hedging and cloud-pruned, box edged beds filled with a mix of ginger biscuity Miscanthus sinensis ‘Kleine Fontäne’, Veronicastrum virginicum ‘Fascination’ and scattered wild chicory. In 2016, he tweaked the perennial borders, reducing some of the more thuggish astrantias and persicaria, and adding more topiary for winter structure.

‘I still consider this design to be one of my favourites,’ Mr Maynard acknowledges, ‘but the most important element in any garden is the gardener who cares for and continues to develop it.’

For the past eight years, head gardener Chris Marchand has skilfully main- tained that fine balance. ‘The perennial borders are a lot of work,’ he admits, ‘because the crucial part of the job is editing, the constant micro-decisions of what to encourage or take out.’ Every bed is mulched heavily each winter, which ‘doesn’t add much richness,’ says Mr Marchand, ‘but it does add structure’. Although the planting was designed to cope with Norfolk’s dry sandy conditions, he adds, ‘our soil needs to hold water. The trick is to never let it dry out’.

Self-seeding is encouraged; recently, it has been Digitalis lutea that has merrily thrown itself about. ‘Everything is dynamic and you get accidents,’ explains Mr Marchand. ‘You can’t panic and stick things in or grab something colourful to plug a gap, otherwise you lose the overall character’. Mrs Broke agrees: ‘If something isn’t working, we call Arne and ask about a replacement. We develop it, but try to stay true to what he first envisaged.’

Holme Hale Hall, Norfolk, holds occasional openings through the National Garden Scheme — see more details.

This feature originally appeared in the May 27, 2026, print edition of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

From the south terrace of Ferne Park, the double avenue of 400 lime trees lead out towards the hazy distance where, on the rise of Cranborne Chase, a stand of beeches marks the site of the Bronze Age Win Green bowl barrow. This is the highest point in the Cranborne Chase National Landscape, where the ancient ox drove runs east/west, linking the chase to Salisbury in Wiltshire and Shaftesbury in Dorset over the county border. Equally breathtaking is the view from the front steps of the house, which faces north to the rolling greensand hills in the Vale of Wardour. Little wonder that there has been a settlement here since 1225.

The surprise is that the house that commands this view and the gardens and parkland that surround it have only been here for 25 years. When Lord and Lady Rothermere bought the estate, it covered 200 acres and was derelict: there was no house and everything that could be sold had been. Today, the estate encompasses 2,000 acres, of which the garden covers about 28 acres, providing cut flowers, houseplants, vegetables, fruit and eggs. The 100-acre park surrounding the garden has been substantially replanted and is now home to a herd of White Park heritage cattle.

‘When I went with my husband to look at Ferne,’ recalls Lady Rothermere of her first sight of the estate in March 1999, ‘I had no desire to build a house. To create a garden certainly wasn’t in my future plans.’ Yet, as they rolled down the A30 and the landscape opened up before them, they could not help but be smitten. ‘Our decision to move was very impulsive, but we were young.’

It was a bold move, as the estate had been in decline for 80 years. The Douglas-Hamiltons, the last family to live at Ferne Park, had left in the 1920s and bequeathed all to the Scottish Society for the Prevention of Vivisection, a charity set up in 1912 by the wife of the 13th Duke of Hamilton. The approach would have deterred all but the stout-hearted: a dead sheep lay beside the drive and the broken entrance gate was held up by orange twine. Many of the trees in the park had been blown up when the army had used it as a training ground during the Second World War. Those hardwoods that survived the bombardment had been cut down and sold to raise money, leaving only self-seeded sycamores.

As for the garden, it was piled with rubble, brick, broken glass and had been overrun by laurels and Japanese knotweed. ‘You really couldn’t see 10ft in front of you,’ recalls Lady Rothermere. What had been a grass court on the south lawn had been dug out, leaving a huge bank of spoil and in one of what transpired to be two walled gardens they found an old sign telling people they could dump their rubbish for £50 a load. They hadn’t identified the walled gardens at first because the walls had fallen down as water got in after the coping stones had been removed and sold. ‘There was this troubling silence,’ remembers Lady Rothermere. ‘It really made me think — no, there’s nothing wrong — there’s just nowhere for the birds.’

Quinlan Terry was commissioned to build a new house (Country Life, May 5 and 12, 2010), with the two wings one can see today added at a later date by his son, Francis Terry. Meanwhile, the vast clearance work, which involved digging up concrete yards and removing asbestos from barns, meant that it was a good couple of years before the garden could even be considered. To whom should the Rothermeres turn for advice?

In 1997, Lady Rothermere had met Rupert Golby at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show, which she was visiting as her father-in-law, the then Lord Rothermere, had sponsored a show garden for the Evening Standard magazine. The adjacent garden had been designed by Mr Golby for Country Life to celebrate the magazine’s centenary. ‘I went in and asked Rupert a few questions. I really didn’t know anything about gardens or gardening at all and had no background in horticulture. I made a mental note that if ever I’d like to have help I would ask him.’

When Mr Golby first visited Ferne Park, there was still no house and the garden looked like a building site. ‘He was shocked,’ remembers Lady Rothermere. Shocked, but not undaunted, as he had honed his skills at RHS Wisley in Surrey, the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew and with renowned garden designer Rosemary Verey, not to mention in many previous garden-creation schemes.

Unusually for a project of this size, there was no masterplan and areas have been developed bit by bit. The site is mostly flat, but with so much rubble and overgrowth — and bear in mind that this was before Google Earth had been invented — it took a long time to see it in its entirety and to gain that crucial understanding of the topography. ‘The design of the garden,’ Mr Golby explains today, ‘was strongly led by the landform itself. Rather than fighting the unusual and diverse variety of levels, we have embraced and enhanced the variety of conditions we found. This enabled a logical formality around the house, which rapidly dissolves into the broader, beautiful, wild Dorset landscape, where thousands of new trees have added to the romantic wooded scene.’

Since acquiring Ferne Park, Lady Rothermere had taken a course at the English Gardening School, where she had been taught by experts who included the rosarian and Country Life contributor Charles Quest-Ritson. She had also begun to visit gardens and to build up a picture of what she liked and did not like. ‘I don’t like going into a garden and turning around. I think that a garden should lead you through it like a narrative, it should tell a story and tell it to you subliminally, so you’re not really aware of it, you’re feeling it and sensing it.’ There was also a need for symmetry to work with the house.

Inspiration came from many sources, from Rousham in Oxfordshire and the rare brilliance of that master of design William Kent and the romantic ruins at Ninfa in Italy, where Mr Golby had worked one summer in 1985. Other influences included the gardens made by Nancy Lancaster at Haseley Court, Oxfordshire, as well as Kelmarsh Hall and Cottesbrooke Hall in Northamptonshire. The late Lady Salisbury, who restored the gardens at Hatfield House in Hertfordshire, was a great friend and inspiration.

With so much to do, areas were tackled one at a time; the orchard first: ‘I came in a van with all the fruit trees — quinces, apples, plums,’ recalls Mr Golby. Today, the fruit trees are comfortable veterans, there is a large pollarded mulberry, a circle of cobnuts and, in spring, Dactylorhiza orchids appear amid the long grass, as do clouds of camassias, a plant that reappears throughout the garden, providing that reassuring repetition.

A tour of German and Belgian tree nurseries — English nurseries were not then set up to supply the quantity and size needed — with Mark Fane of Crocus, which had managed the original landscaping, was the first step in the mass planting of trees. These would provide an essential buffer against the prevailing southwesterlies. ‘It’s very easy to sit out in the garden and enjoy it now,’ says Lady Rothermere. ‘Back then, it was like sitting out next to the North Atlantic, it was so windy.’

The double avenue of Tilia x europaea ‘Pallida’ was planted in three stages, as the land for the South Park was not bought until 10 years later, but all has now knitted together. Remarkably, not a single tree has been lost, although Ferne is on fast-draining greensand. Regular watering was vital: Lady Rothermere was known to disappear in the middle of a dinner party to move the hoses from one tree to another.

There were plant expeditions: ‘I remember a visit to the Isle of Wight to look at nerines with Rupert,’ says Lady Rothermere, who relished her introduction to the world of horticultural expertise: ‘Everybody was so welcoming and kind and helpful.’ The nerine collection is now housed along the wall of the greenhouse in the kitchen garden. The pair scoured reclamation yards, too, bringing finds that lend a sense of history and of permanence to the new garden. For many years, Mr Golby drove down from his home in Oxfordshire to Ferne Park every fortnight — sometimes every week — to keep a watchful eye on the garden’s gradual development. The tradition became known as a Ferne Friday.

The new Palladian house, despite being built with local Chilmark stone, stood out rather starkly from its surroundings in the early days. Mr Golby resolved this by reducing the area of gravel left by the architects and bringing the grass closer to the south front, with mown turf paths between rectangles of long grass. This meadow merged with that under the double lime avenues — ‘I had planned beech trees,’ admits Lady Rothermere, ‘but Jonathan chose limes, being tougher and just as beautiful. He was right.’

All was planted with wild Narcissus lobularis and orchids and seeded with wildflowers. Mat Reese, who had previously worked at Great Dixter in East Sussex and was at that point head gardener at Ferne Park, drove over with a horsebox full of hay gathered from the wildflower meadow in the Dixter orchard. Gardens of clipped beech and yew to east and west of the house further helped to anchor the building and, below the balustrade, on either side of the central steps that lead up to the South Terrace (perfect for eating outdoors in summer) ran two herbaceous borders. The final touch was the dramatic central box parterre, inspired by those at Hatfield House and is a scaled-up version of one that Lady Rothermere had seen at Villa Farnese, Caprarola, Italy.

The new wings have made a huge difference: the house now fully feels as if it belongs in the landscape. At the same time as the wings went up, the herbaceous borders were taken out. This coincided with the departure of Mr Reese, who had given them so much of his attention. In their place is a very successful architectural evergreen scheme of Magnolia grandiflora and Wisteria sinensis trained against the balustrades, with, in front of them, box domes and a low edging of Lonicera pileata in-filled with soft mounds of Bupleurum fruticosum. Urns of white tulips sit on the stone piers and, from the top of the steps, one looks back to the yew cubes on the lawn that announce the parterre, which had to be replanted 10 years ago as the box was suffering blight.

There is a formal underpinning throughout the garden, providing year-round interest with hedges, parterres and topiary. The beech beehives look particularly good in the area that remains of the former east garden (reduced when the east wing was built), where they grow with standard white wisteria, tree peonies and roses.

Mr Golby has helped to curate an excellent selection of ornamental trees and shrubs. ‘A higher than average rainfall and the greensand overlying chalk soil are ideal conditions for magnolia, flowering dogwoods, most shrubs and trees and wildflower meadows,’ he explains, ‘albeit dangerously free-draining for young trees.’

Notable among these are the avenues of Pyrus nivalis — ‘a great tree that people don’t use enough,’ says Mr Golby — running along the top bank in the walled garden. Another moment of interest here is provided by the stand of white-flowering ornamental cherries underplanted with white crocus. These were bought as ‘Shirotae’ (which would have formed a ceiling of white), but turned out to be ‘Taihaku’ and might one day be replaced. Magnolias, viburnum, Staphylea pinnata and Cornus kousa are massed around the restored old pond — one of the few features that remain of the original garden. Recalling Ninfa, several mature trees here are run up with big roses such as R. ‘Princesse Marie’, a lovely light-pink double-flowered Hybrid Sempervirens introduced in France in 1829. (The roses at Ferne Park are some of the luckiest in the world, blanketed in a good 3in–4in of rich mulch, courtesy of the stables.)

In keeping with so many Italian gardens, there is theatre, a deliberate creation of individual scenes and special moments. I particularly like the decision to leave the boughs of the catalpas beside the changing rooms in the walled garden — inspired by Kent’s Praeneste at Rousham — to swoop to the ground in a great curtsey. The same gesture is echoed by the cherries and camassias.

Waiting in the wings to entertain the visitor are many of those reclamation-yard finds — a pair of stone obelisks announce the double lime avenues. In the potager in the kitchen garden, created from scratch by Mr Golby in what had been a wood yard, the bothy in the corner has octagonal glazed windows copied from Rousham. Outside stands a fine 1692 William and Mary lead tank embossed with the Tudor rose and Prince of Wales feathers.

Much care has gone into individual commissions. The intricate ironwork of the southgarden gate was made by Hughie Powell of Cotswold Decorative Ironworkers in Oxfordshire; the white gates at the entrance to the potager were by Nick Hodges from Wroxton, Oxfordshire, using antique tools. Every small detail is considered — and it is this attention that has created not only an intelligent and sophisticated arrangement of the areas around the house, but a garden that is used and lived in (including paths along which horses can be led from the stables to the park).

The north front of the house is a case in point. This is the formal entrance, so must deliver the grand gesture, yet it does this with much grace. Originally, there had been shrubs and climbing plants on the walls, but in a recent reworking these have been removed, leaving only two wisteria to clothe the railings of the entrance steps. The house is now bare, with architectural blocks of clipped yew formally arranged.

The yews are essential to setting up the scene from those steps, as the visitor looks back over the wide gravel area to the distant Vale of Wardour. They hold everything together: framing the view and, in the near foreground, below the terrace, is a formal pool from which rises the fountain of Triton. This is a copy of the statue that stood outside the Radcliffe Infirmary in Oxford, one that Lady Rothermere and Mr Golby had long admired and itself a copy by Stephen Pettifer of the Bernini Fontana del Tritone in Rome. The genius finishing touch — which brings all back to Nature — was to sprinkle seeds of pale-yellow mulleins and sea holly in the gravel, the former from a packet sent by Debo Devonshire from Chatsworth; the latter, Eryngium ‘Miss Willmott’s Ghost’, a nod to the great British horticulturist.

The garden at Ferne Park is now well established, the result of a creative combination of workmanship by many people over 25 years, orchestrated by Lady Rothermere and Mr Golby and now gardened by Brendon Long and Ritchie Lever who, with their team, maintain everything to a refined standard.

‘After more than 25 years, a degree of maturity is settling across the estate,’ says Mr Golby. ‘Limes, beech, hornbeam, sweet chestnut and planes are reaching lofty specimens. The orchard produces a great abundance of fruit and climbing and rambling roses cascade from the canopy of semi-mature trees.

‘It is exciting,’ says Lady Rothermere, ‘to let a garden slightly run away and find its own uniqueness and its own soul, which I think it is busy doing. It’s like being on a horse that’s ever so slightly out of control.’ As for the birds, they are singing their pleasure throughout the garden and the park. ‘It’s a miracle how many swallows there are now.’

This feature originally appeared in the May 13, 2026, print edition of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

At the furthest end of the 320 acres of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew — beyond the glasshouses and even the arboretum — is a bluebell wood. This traditionally managed, historic woodland has a genuinely rural atmosphere that becomes quite magical during the great sensory crescendo that is a bluebell wood in full bloom.

The wood is part of a not particularly well-known 37-acre natural area that also includes meadows and wetland. Its unassuming nature is due to an unlikely conservationist — Queen Victoria. Like her forebears, she was a great supporter of the gardens and, as her grandparents, George III and Queen Charlotte, were, she was particularly charmed by the informal ‘wilderness’ along the River Thames from Kew Palace.

Rarely used by the Royal Family after Queen Charlotte’s death, the area was left in a somewhat natural state, with ivy and bramble allowed to romp, and fallen trees abandoned in the undergrowth. For her Diamond Jubilee, Victoria decided to give the royal wilderness to the nation with one proviso, ‘that this unique spot may be preserved in its present beautiful and natural condition’.

Attached to Kew’s natural area is the garden around Queen Charlotte’s Cottage, a rustic building that she had made with half-timbered exterior walls and antique leaded windows.

Inside, there was no kitchen or bedroom, but enough space to prepare tea, with a tiny privy behind a baize door. The ‘picnic room’ was painted by her daughter Princess Elizabeth to resemble the inside of a bower, its parabolic ceiling criss-crossed with a trompe-l’oeil bamboo trellis, adorned with nasturtium and morning glory. Outside, a menagerie of exotic animals kept the Royal Family amused until the kangaroos became too numerous. The garden was then planted with Rhododendron ponticum, introduced into England in 1763.

There are many interpretations of how to manage a landscape in a natural condition and one of them is to do nothing. By 2024, the cottage’s garden featured mainly 20ft rhododendrons, with a supporting chorus of bramble. Although the cottage was restored by Historic Royal Palaces in 2021, it remained mainly hidden from view when Kew’s arboretum team, led by Valerie Boujard, began its own restoration a couple of years ago.

Ms Boujard has the challenging remit of drawing in visitors without putting in obvious new attractions, unless one counts native shrubs, such as elder, serviceberry and spindle, in this category. One of the first jobs was to tackle the Rhododendron ponticum. Much has gone, but an island of the plant, cut to waist height, has been left for old times’ sake, and a few full-height remnants are allowed to express themselves further back.

Nothing has gone to waste: their twisted stems are useful in a sculptural woodpile in the ‘habitat bed’. Another survivor is a rangy, unpruned Buxus sempervirens, contemporary to the 1772 cottage, which is a magnet for bees when in flower.

In choosing new plants for the cottage’s garden, the plan has been to select natives, ‘because we are neighbours with the natural area,’ explains Ms Boujard. An easy win was to add more Betula pendula to make a birch grove with a few old survivors. Seen through their pale stems, the cottage beckons, like the setting for a northern European folk tale. In April, the woodland-edge garden is awash with bluebells and more Hyacinthoides non-scripta, gathered from other areas, have been planted to form a bluebell ‘river’ in the cleared space. It’s an unrushed process, with foxgloves, campions and daffodils added by seed and the garden monitored for insect activity.

Kew’s scientific expertise is an advantage when it comes to interpreting a ‘natural’ land-scape for our times and the future. Adding more native trees involves some consideration; it is no good looking to old reliables such as English oak or beech because they are now struggling when spring is increasingly dry and summer is unusually hot. Kevin Martin, the head of tree collections, has been monitoring Quercus robur grown from acorns collected from as far east as Kazakhstan and south to the Caucasus where they grow in conditions that might be similar to ours in the future.

Ru Brookes is Kew’s natural habitats supervisor, not a job title that would have existed in Victoria’s time or even a decade ago. Of the natural area she says: ‘It’s a managed landscape, but we try to make it look as if there’s no human intervention.’ Preventing disease and keeping invasive plants in check is one goal; boosting native populations is another. A community of ageing black poplars has been given a future thanks to the efforts of Kew and other conservationists in Richmond upon Thames. Using cuttings from the genetically diverse wild population, the team is gradually replacing the old poplars on the riverbank.

Non-native trees, such as Turkey oak (Quercus cerris), are considered less useful to the ecosystems that have evolved in the British Isles with trees such as English and Welsh oak (Q. robur and Q. petraea). Instead of being removed, they are killed slowly, following the adage that a dead tree has more life in it than a living one. Bats, fungi and many rare inverte-brates thrive in wood that is decaying or dead. ‘Beetles need a lot of wood, buried timber, old root systems,’ says Ms Brookes, whose parti-cular focus is on stag beetles, which thrive in this area when generally they are endangered. The effect of senescence provides its own kind of theatre: ‘Seeing wildlife using the dead wood definitely helps people get on board.’

Non-native hardwoods are veteranised, in which members of the ‘tree gang’ rip off branches to mimic storm damage. Further options are ring barking to speed things up, and monolithing (particularly for beech) to create a branchless stem. Standing in the landscape like a lightning-struck specimen in a Caspar David Friedrich painting, the tortured trees attract owls and green woodpeckers are a common sight in the wood-fringed grasslands. The natural area’s bird population is ‘high density’ and 40 bird boxes have had their entrances reinforced to keep out parakeets. The grassy planting of a woodland-edge landscape is visually forgiving.

Although bluebells in gardens can be considered thuggish by gardeners, they are part of a succession of spring flowers that includes wild garlic, wild daffodils and snowdrops.

The latter are not native, but they are not invasive either and pro-vide early nectar. ‘A lot of insects are emerging earlier because temperatures are warmer, so we’re keen to have plants in flower anytime,’ notes Ms Brookes. After the spring pageant, unshowy wildflowers such as Stellaria media are valued in the emerging carpet of groundcover, which is essential for caterpillars.

Even brambles have their place and are cut back cyclically. ‘We encourage it because the flowers are good for pollinators and the fruit is good for pretty much everything.’

When the natural area was ceded by Queen Victoria for public enjoyment, it was described by the director of Kew as ‘a great sylvan beauty’. What would Victoria make of it now? Ms Brookes says: ‘I like to think she’d enjoy the way we’re keeping an equilibrium and trying to foster diversity in the natural environment.’ Choosing different words perhaps, it seems likely that she would concur.

Find out more about the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.

This feature originally appeared in the April 22, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

Canonteign Falls is a successful tourist attraction on the edge of Dartmoor. It also has two National Collections of ferns. You can take your children for an adventurous scramble up the escarpment of one of the highest waterfalls in England and dabble along the way in the Victorian passion for Dryopteris and Polystichum cultivars. In short, it has something for everyone.

The climb up the valley is immensely rewarding, but not for the faint hearted. The steps are irregular, often displaced by exposed tree roots and interrupted by outcrops of stone. Perhaps the best time to make the ascent is now, when sunlight shines through the young leaves of beech and oak and bluebells and wood anemones cover the woodland floor.

At one point, you cross over the stream and see the majestic arc of Lady Exmouth’s Falls glittering in the sunlight.

Further up is the series of gorges made by the original stream over tens of thousands of years. Higher still is the Victorian Fern Garden, richly planted with a great variety of ferns, although the whole valley is thick with wild species. When you reach the top, you step over the leat that feeds Lady Exmouth’s Falls until the path bursts open to a viewpoint known as Buzzards’ View, where the rich and rolling south Devon landscape stretches into the distance. It is an exhilarating experience.

The Canonteign estate — originally well over 2,000 acres — has an interesting history. In 1812, it was bought by Admiral Sir Edward Pellew Bt, who had enjoyed a successful naval career during the American War of Independence, the French Revolutionary Wars and the Napoleonic Wars.

In 1814, he was raised to the peerage and took the title Baron Exmouth of Canonteign in the County of Devon. Two years later, he commanded the Anglo-Dutch fleet during the Battle of Algiers, one of many naval campaigns to put an end to the activities of the Barbary corsairs who had for centuries pillaged the shores of the western Mediterranean, seizing the inhabitants and consigning them to slavery in north Africa. Lord Exmouth’s substantial naval force completely destroyed the Algerian fleet and compelled the Dey of Algiers to release some 1,200 enslaved Christians, although the Barbary pirates were not finally eliminated until the French captured Algiers in 1830.

The Admiral was upgraded from Baron to Viscount and retired back to Devon, but he never actually settled at Canonteign, preferring instead to live in a large house called West Cliff in Teignmouth itself.

Throughout his career, the Admiral was able to amass significant wealth from the proceeds of prize money, most notably when he commanded the East Indies station in 1805–09. This good fortune facilitated the acquisition of Canonteign. It was, however, his eldest son Pownoll — also a naval officer enriched by prize money — who took up residence at Canonteign Manor itself, the Elizabethan house at the centre of the estate.

It was Pownoll, later 2nd Viscount Exmouth, who commissioned London architect Charles Robert Ayers in 1828 to design and build a new house halfway up the hillside above the Falls. Canonteign House is a white mansion in the Greek Revival style, with Ionic columns, pilasters, floating pediments and a supreme neo-Classical elegance that places it among the greatest of Devon’s country houses.

One of the unexpected assets of the Canonteign estate turned out to be the presence of lead and silver lodes deep beneath the surface of the soil. A large number of hopeful speculators were granted leases or licences by the Exmouths to work these mines. The first was John Williams, a member of the west Cornwall mining family whose descen-dants own the great magnolia gardens at Caerhays Castle. He began to develop what was known as the Canonteign Mine in 1828.

However, the most successful enterprise, known as Frank Mills, was granted a lease by the Canonteign estate in 1853. The stream running down the valley from Dartmoor was the source of its success. Some of its water was diverted into a new reservoir, from which a heavy iron pipe carried it to the mill and the mine 250ft below. The strength of the flow was enough to pump water from the mine and enable the miners to drill ever deeper in search of mineral deposits, nearly 1,000ft below the surface. The turbines were later turned by coal-fuelled machinery that served to crush the ore.

Flooding was a recurrent problem: on one occasion, some careless working near the surface punctured the lake (where the ore was washed) and emptied its contents into the workings. The damage was quickly repaired and the lake, now known as Swan Lake and populated by black swans, is especially beautiful when the purple rhodo-dendrons that surround it are in flower. Nevertheless, flooding, as well as diminishing financial returns, caused the mine to close in 1880. It was the last mine in the Teign valley and almost its only monument today are heaps of spoil along the river bank.

The history of the Canonteign Falls after 1880 is obscured by legend. At some point, however, the piping below the reservoir was adjusted so that the water spewed out in the beautiful arching flow that we see today. Lady Exmouth’s waterfall has a clear drop of 230ft before it meets the natural stream again and continues on its journey, cascading down through massive rock formations into the lakes below and finally into the River Teign.

We are told that these Falls were created in 1890 when the kindly 3rd Lady Exmouth sought to help the redundant miners and employed them to divert the water. The problem with this story is that Lady Exmouth died in 1870, so the present owners are researching the oral history of the estate’s development. We are also told that she had made a fern garden among the rocks of the main valley. This is perfectly possible, not least because there was a craze for ferns for much of the second half of the 19th century, but no record of its existence has come yet to light among the estate’s papers and records.

Successive Viscounts lived at Canonteign for nearly 200 years, but the estate struggled to make ends meet until the 1980s, when the 10th Viscount opened the Falls as a tourist attraction. He also constructed four more lakes, beautifully landscaped, downstream from Swan Lake. In 1994, Christopher Baylis bought Canonteign House, together with 90 acres. Subsequent purchases have enabled the Baylises to acquire Canonteign Falls and build up a holding of 400 acres.

The Baylises were told about a Victorian fernery at Canonteign, but they had no idea of its site. Then, in 2009, a heavy snowfall damaged a venerable planting of cherry laurels and revealed the stonework of an extensive rock garden in a quarry-like area through which the original stream still flows. Clearly, this was the site of the long-lost fernery. The Baylises set to clearing it, firming up its boulders, and replanting it with as many varieties of fern as possible — including Dicksonia tree ferns from New Zealand that would not have formed part of the original layout, but which make a sympathetic addition to the site today.

They continued planting more ferns until they realised that they needed advice on how to source, cultivate and display them. Plant Heritage introduced them to Julian Reed, an enthusiastic and distinguished pteridologist, who had for many years taken over the collections of other fern-lovers who were no longer able to look after them. Mr Reed advised, researched, hunted for rarities and eventually built up Canonteign’s fern collection to some 400 cultivars.

In 2022, the collections of Dryopteris and Polystichum ferns, safely dispersed through-out the estate, were awarded the accolade of National Collection status by Plant Heritage.

The work of conservation continues and additions from Mr Reed’s private collection will ensure a secure future for these historic ferns at Canonteign Falls. Mr and Mrs Baylis are firmly committed to researching the history of the estate and protecting its future. The wellbeing of the ferns and the Falls alike are guaranteed for generations to enjoy.

Canonteign Falls, near Exeter, Devon — find out more about paying a visit at the Canonteign website.

This feature originally appeared in the April 15 issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

It is the scale of the garden at Mount Congreve that bowls you over — its size, its massive plantings and the huge number of different plants. Here are some facts and figures: Mount Congreve has 70 acres of woodland garden, four acres of walled garden and 10 miles of paths. There are more than 1,200 rhododendrons, 760 camellias, 300 Acer cultivars, 600 conifers, a nearly one-mile path lined with hydrangeas and thousands of herbaceous plants, including 600 yards of hostas.

Mount Congreve is in Co Waterford, not far from the city of Waterford itself, but perched high above the glorious Suir, one of Ireland’s best trout-fishing rivers. The history of the estate goes back to 1760, when John Congreve built the first house on the site, but the spacious shape of the present house and its garden are the work of the late Ambrose Congreve, who died unexpectedly in 2011 on a visit to London for the RHS Chelsea Flower Show — at the age of 104.

Congreve was a remarkable man. His conventional Anglo-Irish background sent him to Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge, but took an unusual turn when he then went to work for Unilever. In 1935, he married Marjorie Glasgow, whose American father owned a worldwide business that specialised in building gasworks. After the Second World War, Congreve took over the management of the company and eventually sold it, rather well, in 1983. In the cash-strapped post-war years, American money was a blessing for the garden. As late as 1989, Congreve employed more than 40 gardeners.

He began to develop Mount Congreve seriously in the 1960s, extending the house and starting to plant the garden that we see today, always with help from an exceptional Dutch head gardener, Herman Dool. The focus of his planting was a stretch of north-facing native woodland — oak, beech and chestnut — on the steep bank between the spacious lawn behind the house and the river below.

If you look at it on a map, the garden seems very long — at least one mile in length — and thin, but the paths are so carefully planned and the plantings so dense that you don’t notice that, in places, it is less than 200 yards in width. The soil is a crumbly, sandy clay, enriched by a great accumulation of organic matter in the top layer and with a pH that is perfect for acid-loving plants. The climate is mild and damp, with an average of about 42in of rain per annum; many of Mount Congreve’s plants would be too tender to survive further inland.

Open the garden door in early spring and you come face to face across the lawn with a spectacular planting of magnolias, the oldest in the whole garden: you will seldom see such tall and beautiful specimens of Magnolia campbellii, M. x veitchii and M. sprengeri var. diva. They are planted just below the level of the lawn, which brings their individual flowers down to a height at which they may be admired. A better view can be had from a cupola, known as the Temple, Congreve built on a high point within the wood itself. It is surrounded by a grove of Betula ‘Fascination’ and the highly scented rhododendrons ‘Lady Alice Fitzwilliam’ and R. ‘Fragrantissimum’.

The temple, where the ashes of Congreve and his wife, Marjorie, are buried, also has wonderful views across the river below and deep into Co Kilkenny to the north and as far west as the distant Comeragh Mountains. Its dome bears the inscription ‘Light and Shade by Turn but Love Always’. This wise reflection is sometimes engraved on sun-dials and Congreve first encountered it in Leopold de Rothschild’s garden at Ascott, Buckinghamshire, which he visited as a teenager.

It was Leopold’s son Lionel, a great friend of Congreve’s aunt Lady Bessborough, who had the most significant effect on his style of planting. Visits to Exbury in Hampshire not only ignited an early love of gardening in him (aged 11, he recalled), but also persuaded him to garden in the same grand manner. ‘When one plants anything,’ Con-greve declared, ‘whether it involves five or 50 plants, they should be planted together and not dotted here and there.’ This was the maxim that guided him all through his many years of planting at Mount Congreve.

An early example of his large-scale planting, 70 years ago, required no fewer than 70 plants of Rhododendron macabeanum, a Himalayan species with large, silver-backed leaves and pale-yellow flowers. News of this grouping had the world of rhododendron-lovers chattering for many years and Congreve applied the same principle to R. sinogrande, another out-size species. Everywhere at Mount Congreve, the plantings are on the greatest scale — vast groups of azaleas, hillsides planted with thousands of candelabra primulas and an extensive grove of scarlet Embothrium coccineum trees that have taken so well to the conditions at Mount Congreve (similar to their own birthplace in Chile), that they seed around in their thousands.

The most spectacular of all Congreve’s plantings is the Magnolia Walk, near the furthest end of the woodland. It is an avenue — a straight walk downhill, about 150 yards in length, lined on both sides by three different layers of magnolias. The tallest is M. campbellii, usually in full flower by St Patrick’s Day on March 17, closely followed by M. sargentiana var. robusta, then M. x soulangeana keeps up the display until the beginning of May. It is easily the longest such avenue in the British Isles. The sight of these majestic trees seen in March against a Mediterranean sky is nothing short of magical.

Many plants now in commerce originated in this spectacular garden, including named forms of Pieris and Correa backhouseana, but its magnolias take the prize. These include M. ‘John Congreve’ and M. ‘Lady Irene Congreve’, which commemorate Ambrose’s parents, a yellow form of M. campbellii now known as ‘Valentine’s Torch’ and M. campbellii ‘Ambrose Congreve’, which is always in flower on his birthday, April 4.

One way to gauge the extent of the mature plantings at Mount Congreve is to look at the roll of remarkable trees published by the Tree Register of the British Isles. This lists more than 100 outstanding specimens, including large-leaved Aesculus turbinata, huge davidias (the handkerchief tree) and no fewer than three record-breaking species of southern beech, Nothofagus betuloides, N. fusca and N. cunninghamii. These are relatively widely grown in Irish gardens — the surprise is to come across outsize trees that are much rarer, including the variegated field maple Acer campestre ‘Pulverulentum’ and elegant, but tender Cupressus cashmeriana. An older specimen, although not yet a record-breaker, is a Monterey cypress Cupressus macrocarpa, planted by Princess Marie-Louise on the occasion of Congreve’s baptism in 1907.

Mount Congreve is not only an early spring garden. Large plantings of Clerodendrum fargesii and C. trichotomum are at their best in autumn, as are the leaves of maples: Acer palmatum ‘Katsura’, ‘Beni-komachi’ and ‘Shishi-gashira’ are spectacular. May brings clouds of the coral flowers of the azalea Rhododendron ‘Favorite’ and an amphitheatre of dwarf R. yaku-shimanum in the old quarry. Snowdrops, daffodils and bluebells carpet the woodland floor before the tree canopy closes over.

The four-acre walled garden and its glasshouses are now focused on the propagation and conservation of rare plants. However, a pair of borders, 60 yards long, runs up the middle, with an historic planting of rare herbaceous peonies in every available shade of pink, red and crimson, plus some whites and yellows. It is fronted by Nepeta ‘Six Hills Giant’ and backed by blue delphiniums, all shown off by swags of the roses ‘Paul’s Himalayan Musk’ and ‘Veilchenblau’.

When Congreve reached his century in 2007, he planted a Wollemi pine that had been presented to him by his staff. The gardeners also kept a spare plant in case the original should fail, but, in fact, both survived and the second, of whose existence Congreve never knew, has performed very much better. The staff still joke that, had it been possible, he would have planted a clump of 100 to mark the occasion.

The Congreves had no children, so the estate is now in the process of being transferred to the Irish State. The first priority of the Office of Public Works was to restore and secure the adaptation of the huge house from a plutocrat’s private residence to the public and administrative functions required in the post-Congreve era. The garden is, however, infinitely more important and this was recognised last year by the award of a plaque from the International Dendrology Society declaring Mount Congreve as Distinguished for Merit. Castlewellan in Co Down is the only other recipient in Ireland. Inevitably, the garden slipped a little after Congreve’s death, but its restoration is now galloping apace and a new School of Horticulture passes on the immense knowledge that it encapsulates.

Find out more at the Mount Congreve website.

This feature originally appeared in the April 8 issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

‘I spent a career killing moles and mice and I’m never doing it again,’ says Josh Sparkes, the former head gardener at Forde Abbey, Somerset whose growing methods at Birch Farm in Devon are causing a stir. He advocates ‘natural farming’, in which netting and fleece are unnecessary, because there are no pigeons or cabbage white butterflies. He doesn’t hoe, as weeds are useful, and he doesn’t make or use compost, because it separates the soil from life above ground. In natural farming, the aim is to cooperate with Nature, growing food in a frictionless way. Moles are fine because no one minds if the ground is bumpy and mice are kept in check by their many predators.

The courses that Sparkes and his small team have been leading at the farm in Woolfardisworthy (known as Woolsery) are a hot ticket and the quality of food at these events is persuasive. The 17 acres of former dairy pasture he manages on the edge of the Atlantic (with all the wind and rain that entails) are bursting with vitality. It has taken five years to reach a level of equilibrium in which ‘pests’ are balanced by predators and are, indeed, welcomed. Sparkes is keen to disseminate the knowledge that he picked up in North America and Japan, where he went on study fellowships to find alternatives to the gardener’s endless round of whack-a-mole. ‘It’s not Nature being a pain,’ he says. ‘All of the problems we have with pests and diseases are because of us.’

When the mammals, insects and birds come for your crops, it’s indicative of an imbalance, explains Sparkes. This is clearly illustrated in the lifestyle of slugs: get rid of them and they come back. Continual removal means that their predators go elsewhere and are not so quick to return, leaving slugs and snails to do their worst. At Birch Farm, animals are encouraged to hunt and nest right in the middle (‘I want hedgehogs in my cabbages,’ he says). Hedgerows and herbal leys are known for supporting biodiversity, but their benefits are limited to the edges. ‘We allow abundance everywhere,’ explains Sparkes. ‘The birds don’t feel the need to eat everything… if a blackbird eats a strawberry, he will get the slug next to it as well.’

Wildlife began to return within a year or two of Sparkes’s arrival, when he was given the opportunity to experiment (with full cooperation from the farm’s owners, tech entrepreneurs Michael and Xochi Birch). ‘Since we’ve had lots of mice and voles, we’ve got lots of predatory birds,’ says Sparkes. ‘We don’t worry about pigeons any more because there’s always a hawk or a buzzard flying around.’ Simplicity is one aim of natural farming: when you know that slugs and beetles share the same habitat, it makes sense to create earthen beetle banks among the crops to facilitate the food chain. ‘I’m thinking about what’s best for the birds and the beetles and the bugs and then basing a system around that,’ he says.

Sparkes looks to the ideas of Masanobu Fukuoka, author of The One-Straw Revolution and proponent of a do-nothing approach to farming. It’s not quite doing nothing, but Fukuoka maintains that natural farming should be ‘pleasant’; there is no enjoyment to be had from tampering. Sparkes learned in Japan that it is more useful to observe and react in a measured way, in other words, to relax. Harvested areas are not immediately cleared because they provide excellent hunting grounds. ‘We don’t prepare a bed until we need it,’ notes Sparkes. ‘Blackbirds love an old kale bed; they run through the stems and use them as cover; beetles and snakes also love it. Leaving that bed standing builds up huge amounts of habitat.’

The permaculture technique, chop and drop, in which plant material is cut (not hoed) and left in situ to decompose, is another way of providing habitat for gastropods and arthropods. Pernicious weeds are dug out once a year, but, generally, weeds are cut with a sickle if they need to be cleared. Sparkes has found that because weeds and wildflowers automatically cover exposed ground, they are a carbon-free, effort-free (and simply ‘free’) equivalent of groundcover that is sold as a fertiliser and is often imported. Seeds are introduced as little as possible; the ambition is that vegetables (there are fifth-generation kales here), as well as trees, will come from the farm, which includes a pocket of ancient forest.

Produce beds are grown as polycultures, each consisting of five vegetable families, with five to 15 weed species on top of that. The diversity of plants increases biodiversity above and below the soil (including microbes) thus building soil fertility. One bed might consist of the contents of a salad bag, efficient to harvest, with rocket, beetroot, pea shoots, beans and spring onion. Every bed has an aromatic herb, which is not harvested. ‘The herb and its fragrance are healing, for us and the plants.’

Most of the farm is cultivated as a food forest. Based on the idea of a Japanese micro forest, a broad range of tree saplings and shrubs is closely planted, mimicking the natural world. Willow and poplar woodland pioneers are valuable for their foliage, maximising photo-synthesis, drawing carbon into the soil and accelerating growth among the others. ‘All of our agroforestry is based on the idea of quick forest succession,’ says Sparkes. ‘It seems to work absolute wonders.’ He compares the results to a rainforest; in this closely packed growing environment, nothing needs staking or protection from mice and voles (with no predators around, deer are fenced out entirely).

Sparkes was in the RAF before training as a gardener and there is a sense of military precision in the way he creates order out of potential chaos. Wouter van Eck is another thinker who interests him, a syntropic farmer who develops the concept of food forests as profitable agricultural systems. Ten acres of agroforestry at Birch Farm are based on syntropic agriculture and make an ‘efficient pick’, but Sparkes also values what he calls the smaller ‘romantic food forest’, which makes for an inefficient pick, but is closer to the medieval idea of the Garden of Eden. Agro-forestry, he maintains, is not dissimilar to an old-fashioned orchard. He doesn’t mind admit-ting that looks are an important part of the enjoyment; he is a former gardener after all.

Clearly, shade is an important commodity in a changing climate and there is a strong need to move away from unsustainable farm practices. Sparkes would love to flip the field-forest ratio in the British landscape and, more immediately, tip the balance away from high-input annual production towards perennials. He has been introducing unfamiliar flavours into the kitchen at The Farmers Arms in Woolsery and perennial salad bags sell out at the village shop (pub and shop are both owned by the Birches and part of the Woolsery Collective).

Of the perennial salad plant, salt bush, he says: ‘It’s one of the most nutritional things you can eat.’ Indeed, it is one of many plants that we could be eating now and which increasingly interest chefs. Sparkes is busy spreading the word that perennial growing is the future. ‘It’s going to be huge,’ he says. ‘You can already feel it.’

This feature originally appeared in the March 25, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe. Find out more at the Woolsery website.

Several Roman roads cross the Cheshire Plain, then an important region for harvesting salt, a valuable commodity. Indeed, much earlier, salt attracted Bronze Age traders who extracted it from the low-lying plain’s briny springs. From medieval times, the clay-based ground was exploited both for brickmaking and extracting marl, used for centuries to fertilise poor farmland. These local industries left behind thousands of pits that steadily filled with water to become irregular field ponds, still a distinctive feature of the area.

You may not be aware of any of this when driving through the county, for it conceals such secrets behind impenetrable hawthorn hedgerows that border the quiet, slender lanes with cascades of white blossoms in spring. They wind between traditional villages and hamlets, where dwellings are composed of timbers sawn from mighty oaks of centuries past and the famous russet clay bricks dug from the ground. You will, however, sense that this is ancient, pastoral land, still largely peaceful in character, composed of small-scale farms and grand estates, many with renowned gardens, including those at Arley Hall, Cholmondeley Castle and Tatton Park.

Cogshall Grange, set back from one of those pretty lanes, is a much more recent addition to Cheshire’s distinguished horticultural scene, having an intimate, early-21st-century garden of rare quality. Comprising an imposing, late-Georgian lodge and ancillary, connected buildings, the Grange sits near ‘the big house’ of Cogshall Hall, of similar age.

The gardens of both the Hall and the Grange were originally designed as one, by the studio of landscape architect Tom Stuart-Smith, before the properties were separated and sold off individually a few years ago by the previous owner. Nevertheless, they are dramatically different from each other. Whereas the gardens of the Hall are more formal and open in nature, leading seamlessly into substantial parkland, Cogshall Grange has complete possession of the old walled garden, as well as several acres of surrounding park and meadow. In earlier times, the walled garden’s role was traditional, providing year-round food for the Hall. Today, it is a modern work of art, combining shapeliness and serenity, with the emphasis shifting in defined ways through the seasons.

From whichever direction you enter the walled garden, located immediately west of the Grange itself, its compelling eye-catcher is a splendid avenue of cloud-pruned hornbeams, clipped in the Japanese manner known as niwaki. They are lined up alongside the garden room, a modern, glass and bronze-clad extension of the house. Kept shapely by hand-trimming three times a year, the hornbeams line a crisp, flagstone path, the first of several parallel paths that define the main north/south axis, the centrepiece of which is a long, rectangular waterlily pool. Converted from an old swimming pool, its updated role is reflective, mirroring the sculptural hornbeams along one side.

On the other side, the pool’s reflections highlight choice small trees, such as Oriental dogwoods, the stag’s horn sumach Rhus typhina ‘Dissecta’ and the smoke bush Cotinus coggygria, which rise above seas of prairie-style herbaceous perennials and grasses. This west side of the garden builds up steam through summer and autumn, but in spring its gravelled beds are lively with lemon-and-lime eruptions of self-sown euphorbias, scarlet-orange ‘Ballerina’ tulips and violet-blue spires of camassia.

Spring is a special time for the garden, with multiple foliar effects. The pruned hornbeams, for example, wear their ‘clouds’ with all the bright, lime-green freshness that explodes from their newly opened leaves. Forming a carpet beneath them, the underplantings are complementary, with bold groups of bronze-leaved Rodgersia podophylla, coppery-leaved barrenworts — Epimedium x versicolor and Epimedium x rubrum — and unfurling, emerald scrolls of Hosta ‘Devon Green’. They all look splendidly comfortable together.

Between the hornbeams and the pool is another long, rectangular bed, this one simply planted with a sheet of purple moor grass, Molinia caerulea ‘Poul Petersen’. Its calm, summer-meadow effect of gently swaying sheaves is preceded in spring by bright jewels of colourful tulips, erupting out of the new season’s grasses, before they have grown tall. This wonderfully adaptive Molinia tolerates a wide range of soils, from somewhat dry to heavy and damp, but it is all cut back to base by hand at winter’s end. The tulips in this section are reliable Darwin Hybrid and lily-flowered types, in rich colours of mauve, magenta, orange-scarlet and deep plum. Their flowers, on long stems, seem to float in an ethereal layer above the young grass, reflecting prettily in the lily pool.

All of the above areas can be viewed in a continuous scene from a very generous terrace at the garden’s north end. Looking southwards across rippling grasses and watery reflections, this is the place for sun loungers, family dining, entertaining or simply sitting and contemplating the garden’s engagingly calm nature.

Despite its suntrap location, the terrace also provides the option to dine in deep shade, within an abstract, bronze pavilion by the celebrated architect Jamie Fobert. The pavilion reveals its interesting geometry to those who venture inside. Here, you discover its ceiling of colliding triangular planes, like a magnificent, unfolding work of origami cast in sheets of bronze.

‘I have been known to lie on the table to look up into its roof and appreciate all the geometry going on,’ says Julia Kirkham, who has lived at Cogshall Grange for the past four years. A life-long and very knowledgeable gardener and sometime designer and florist, Mrs Kirkham continues to develop the gardens and put her own stamp on the seasonal plantings, always continuing, she says, to appreciate and enhance the walled garden’s tranquil atmosphere.

In particular, she has a special fondness for the summer and autumn flowers and grasses of the New Perennial style, that were a key feature of her former garden for some 24 years, the celebrated Crockmore House, at Henley-on-Thames in Oxfordshire. At Cogshall Grange, she is ‘planting a lot of my tried and trusted favourites — the echinaceas, rudbeckias, asters such as A. x frikartii ‘Mönch’ and ‘Little Carlow’.

Some seven acres of park, meadow and orchard surround the walled garden. Mrs Kirkham has transformed one area near the house into an engaging, hedge-enclosed garden containing a fine greenhouse and raised beds for growing edibles, roses and cutting flowers. ‘This area feels completely different,’ she says. ‘It’s lovely to sit out here in summer with a cup of coffee and feel as if you’re in France; its gravelled ground is a bit like a boules court and it’s a relaxing place to be.’

The park has many beautiful trees and a substantial natural pond near the drive. Did its original excavation provide the clay for the russet bricks of Georgian Cogshall Hall and Grange? That is unconfirmed, but it seems very possible, in this interesting region that is so closely connected with its ground.

This feature originally appeared in the March 18, 2026 issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

Why was Brown nicknamed Capability? It wasn’t simply because he was capable — although he undoubtedly was — but because he could see the ‘great capabilities’ of the landscapes of his clients, including George III.

By the height of his success in the 1770s, Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown (1716–83) was known to all by his moniker, hardly surprising given the breadth of his reach — he worked on more than 200 projects across England and Wales — with a never-ceasing demand from landowners who wanted him to cast his magic on their estates. Stowe in Buckinghamshire, Hampton Court in south-west London, Chatsworth in Derbyshire, Blenheim in Oxfordshire — ‘Immortal Brown’ worked on them all.

In the words of an anonymous poetic epistle of 1767 to Charles, Lord Viscount Irwin, he transformed the ordinary into: ‘Sweet waving hills, with woods and verdure crown’d/And winding vales, where murmuring streams resound.’

This genius of landscape design was also a clever businessman: after a ride through the estate in question, he was quick to identify what needed to be done to deliver perfection — clearing woods, creating lakes and planting or transplanting trees. This vision was then efficiently enacted using his own workers and, sometimes, those of his clients.

Born in Northumberland, his background was modest. His father, a farmer, died when he was four years old. Early details are sketchy: the local school; apprenticeship to the head gardener at Kirkharle in Northumberland. In 1741, he was taken on by Lord Cobham at Stowe, where he followed in the steps of Charles Bridgeman and William Kent.

The 1750s brought many important commissions: Burghley in Lincolnshire (where a cross-country feature at the annual horse trials is still known as Capability’s Cutting), Longleat in Wiltshire and Wrest Park in Bedfordshire among them.

Word spread and, in 1764, came his appointment as Royal Gardener and the move to Hampton Court.

Brown could hardly have picked a more convenient moment in history: the country was growing richer as a result of the Industrial Revolution, as Enclosure increased the acreages of many landowners. There was the land, the money and the desire to show off both.

Most remarkable perhaps is that his legacy still stands all around us — more than 170 of his gardens are thought to survive.

This feature originally appeared in the March 18, 2026 issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

On April 3, 1928, Vita Sackville-West wrote from their home, Long Barn in Kent, to her husband, Harold Nicolson, who was working at the British Embassy in Berlin, Germany: ‘My own beloved Hadji, such a funny expedition yesterday. Dotz [Dorothy Wellesley] wanted to go and see Penn’s Rocks — you know that place near Withyham.’

After describing how the approach winds through woods full of rabbits and primroses, she continued: ‘The house, which is red brick, William and Mary, stands up on a hill… Then I went around the corner into the garden… and I got such a surprise. A glade stretched away in front of me and to the right were huge rocks, covered in moss, littered about in a wilderness of oaks and cedars… It was absolutely fantastic, a mixture of the most absurdly romantic age — added to which it has the Old Buckhurst soil of peat and silver sand. Dotz is wild about it and wants to sell Sherfield.’

Sackville-West is recording the first visit of her lover, the poet Dorothy Wellesley (Dotz was Sackville-West’s abbreviation of Dotty, as she had been known by family and friends from childhood), to the place that Wellesley would indeed buy — within a few weeks, at the same time selling her previous family home, Sherfield in Hampshire. After many years of a peripatetic, indulged and often emotionally chaotic life (she separated from, but never divorced, her husband, Lord Gerald Wellesley), funded by the considerable family fortune she inherited at a young age, Penns in the Rocks would become a stabilising influence in her life and remain the beloved home where she died in July 1956.

The features that Wellesley fell in love with at Penns in the Rocks, as it came to be known — the long approach through sloping woods; the undulating landscape that falls away from one side of the house and rises up from another, with its woods and open spaces; and, in particular, the extraordinary huge outcrops of Wealden sandstone that give the place its name — are all as evident today as they were 100 years ago. One geology expert who visited recently estimated them to be 140 million years old and they never failed to impress, not least Virginia Woolf, who was an early visitor with Sackville-West and wrote in her diary afterwards: ‘Dottie’s rocks are powdered pale greys & bright greens, they are grey as elephant backs.’

After Wellesley’s death in 1956, Penns in the Rocks was bought by Patrick and Dione Gibson, who nurtured and developed the garden— Patrick later took the title Lord Gibson of Penn’s Rocks—with the help of their friend Lanning Roper (garden designer and regular contributor to this magazine). Today, it is home to their son Hugh and his wife, Frances, who have continued to perpetuate the quality and character the garden has enjoyed for nearly a century.

Gardening was a passion that Wellesley and Sackville-West shared and their letters and other writings clearly suggest that the two planned much of the garden at Penns in the Rocks together. Having started as a modest farmhouse, the present elegant 18th-century house was built and then extended in the 19th century by the family of William Penn, who founded Pennsylvania in America. The Penns sold the house in 1762 and there followed extensions during the 19th century. Sale particulars dated 1832 confirm that the walled garden to the east of the house was added later and that there were still farm buildings in front of the house on what is now the west lawn, which sets up today’s most expansive view with the rocks to one side.

Wellesley replaced vegetables with flowers in the walled garden, but her main additions were to the south of the house, where, beyond the walled garden, she built a swimming pool — then very fashionable — complete with a pavilion at one end and a seat designed by Edwin Lutyens at the other. In 1939, she built the Temple of Friendship perched on a rise, looking down to the house.

The temple memorialises her friendship with poets, in particular W. B. Yeats who had died earlier that year and who had been a regular visitor to Penns in the Rocks. A stone tablet in front records the names: ‘W. B. Yeats, Walter de la Mare, W. J. Turner, Ruth Pitter, V Sackville West, Dorothy Wellesley.’ Friendship was not always the order of the day; next to the tablet, Wellesley added an inscription for the great love of her live, Hilda Matheson, a pioneering journalist and producer at the BBC: Hilda Matheson, Amice Amicarum; today, the inscription has been clearly scratched out.

After a visit in May 1929, Sackville-West wrote again to her husband about the quantities of lily of the valley, which just appeared: ‘It really is not fair, there are sheets of them all over the woods.’ These lilies were originally planted by a previous occupant, but it is likely that the two women planted together what has become a remarkable late-winter feature at Penns in the Rocks, huge quantities of Lent lilies, the native British daffodil Narcissus pseudonarcissus ‘Lobularis’.

It would appear that the lilies were first planted in the woodland behind the Temple of Friendship and had only spread through this area by the 1960s. Since then, they have spectacularly lived up to their reputation as the best naturalising narcissus, spreading all over the slope in front of the temple, scattering across the area around the sandstone rocks and down the valley into the woods along the drive. At the time of year when trees and earth are bare and brown, their shades of soft yellow are an uplifting sight anywhere and quite exhilarating when on such a large scale as at Penns. Similar, indeed, to William Wordsworth’s ‘host of golden daffodils… ten thousand saw I at a glance/ Tossing their heads in sprightly dance’.

Winter is the best time of year to appreciate the surviving bones of Wellesley’s garden and the additions planned sensitively by Lord and Lady Gibson, which enhance the existing landscape without dominating it. From the west lawn, Lord Gibson (former chairman of the Financial Times, the Arts Council and the National Trust) enhanced the view in the 1960s by adding a lake with, on its far side, an Ionic temple (saved from a nunnery in north London), which peeps out from the woodland behind. On the slope in front of Wellesley’s temple, he planted two liquidambars to frame the view from the house.

Through the middle of the walled garden, he added an avenue of robinias and parallel to the swimming pool another avenue, originally flowering cherries, now white mulberry trees. These features give the garden structure through winter, but most memorable of all are the monumental eponymous rocks, with everything around them pared back and their mottled grey-brown shapes at their most impressive.

The garden of Penns in the Rocks, East Sussex, will be open for the National Garden Scheme on March 29, May 17 and July 26, and by arrangement from April to July for groups of 10 or more.

Long before anyone dreamt up the slogan No Mow May, the Irish-born Victorian gardener, writer and publisher William Robinson was urging gardeners to let the grass grow. In The Wild Garden Or Our Groves and Gardens made Beautiful by the Naturalisation of the Hardy Exotic (1870), he declared that ‘mowing the grass once a fortnight in pleasure grounds, as now practised, is a great and costly mistake’. It was far better to mimic Nature and plant things where they would be happy and become naturalised: turkscap lilies along a woodland walk, wild roses up old trees, little alpines in rocky ruins, herbaceous peonies in long grass.

If this sounds thoroughly modern, that is because we have come full circle and are rediscovering what Robinson knew more than 150 years ago.

He railed against much of what was orthodox: carpet bedding, flowers grown in straight lines, over-manicured beds, the annual autumn digging of shrubberies, which only disturbed roots and prevented little woodlanders taking hold. The plants he recommended read like a list of those of today — grasses, wildflowers, such as mullein, species daffodils, American prairie plants, including Monarda, even Japanese knotweed... he didn’t get everything right.

Robinson had an eye for publishing also, tapping into the growing enthusiasm for gardening among the middle classes with two magazines: The Garden, founded in 1871 (and acquired by Country Life publisher Edward Hudson in 1900), was followed by Gardening Illustrated.

At his home, Gravetye Manor, an Elizabethan house in West Sussex that he bought in 1884 ‘as a poor farm’ (Country Life, March 23, 1918), all his theories were put into practice. On the slopes and in the woodlands thrived thousands of narcissus; autumn crocus, camassias and scarlet windflowers grew in the grass; hepaticas and lily-of-the-valley spread themselves through the copses; fritillaries, leucojum, day lilies and water forget-me-not put down roots beside water.

On the slope above the manor, he built a magnificent elliptical walled kitchen garden and close by the house a flower garden of ‘Tea and China roses underplanted with pinks, carnations, forget-me-nots and perennial pansies’. This living legacy is now cared for by Tom Coward, head gardener at Gravetye Manor; and for those who wish to visit and pay homage, the good news is that Gravetye Manor is, these days, a hotel.

Visit the Gravetye website for more information.

This feature originally appeared in the January 21, 2026 issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

In early writing about railways, trains tended to kill people or destroy Nature. In Dombey and Son by Charles Dickens, they do both. In his poem of 1844, On the Projected Kendal and Windermere Railway, Wordsworth asked: ‘Is then no nook of English ground secure/From rash assault?’

Yet it turned out that railways rather suited the countryside. They carried crops to market and did not sully the landscape unduly. By the start of the 20th century, they were often depicted as bucolic. In The Railway Children, the porter, Perks, gives the children strawberries from his garden. They talk to him as they recline on the ‘hot’ grass of a railway bank.

The country station was promoted as an idyll by the 100 or so railway companies of the time and many ran station-garden competitions. In 1900, The Railway Magazine noted that the North Eastern Railway (NER) gave out 200 guineas in prizes to green-fingered staff. A repeated winner was Castle Howard station in North Yorkshire (now closed). ‘What traveller going from Scarborough to York has not admired the lovely station of the château of the Howards?’ the magazine quipped.

Competitions continued into the interwar era of the ‘Big Four’ railway companies. Perhaps the high point came in 1930, when the London & North Eastern Railway (successor to the NER) fixed a bench to the front of a tank engine, to facilitate inspection by judges of station gardens in the north London suburbs.

The promotion of station gardens was part of the campaign among the Big Four to pitch railways as a more civilised method of transportation than automobiles. The car was a threat to the country stations especially and most of the lines closed by Dr Beeching in the 1960s were country branches. Staff cuts flowed from the closures. In 1948, there were 50,000 railway porters; today, there are none. Many of those porters were station gardeners and, as they departed, the weeds encroached.

In 1993, Prof Paul Salveson (a former train guard) wrote a report called New Futures for Rural Rail, in which he envisaged volunteers assisting with station upkeep and coined the phrase ‘community rail’. Today, most of the surviving country branches benefit from the involvement of Community Rail volunteers, whose input is mainly evident in station gardens.

Prof Salveson commended the gardens at Pitlochry and Dumfries in Scotland and those along the Settle-Carlisle line. Among my own Community Rail favourites are those on Cornish branch lines, where sun-loving flowers such as petunias and zinnias, combined with palm trees, justify the old Great Western Railway’s audacious coinage, ‘the Cornish Riviera’.

The gardens along the branch between Norwich, Norfolk, and Lowestoft, East Suffolk, are also impressive. The last time I visited Cantley station, for instance, an old rowing boat had been used as a planter, in which a pyracantha mimicked a mast (the sudden intimacy of the gardens on this stretch contrasts dramatically with the wide East Anglia horizon rolling by in between stations).

There are still many station-garden competitions. Perhaps the best known is Transport for London’s In Bloom, which has its origins in a competition started by the District Railway in 1910. The scheme is run by Ann Gavaghan, who says the aim is to ‘create moments of delight and surprise’, whether for passengers (observing, say, the sumptuous annual displays at Morden or West Kensington) or for staff — because not all the gardens are visible to the public.

Among past winners is a garden created on the roof of Goodge Street station, initiated by a staff member carrying a suitcase of compost up to the roof. Marigolds, nasturtiums and wisteria ensued. Invisible to the public, yes, but benefiting all by their absorption of CO2 generated by traffic.

Railway stations and gardens go together because they are environmentally friendly. After all, the term ‘motorway service station garden’ does not readily trip off the tongue.

Andrew Martin is the author of the essay ‘Station Gardens’ in ‘The Untold Railway Stories’, edited by Monisha Rajesh (Duckworth, £22). His latest book, ‘To The Sea By Train’, is out now (Profile, £18.99)

Alan Titchmarsh: My garden is as pretty as I've ever known it, thanks to an idea I've rediscovered after 50 years

Alan Titchmarsh spent years not planting annuals, but he hasn't looked back since he started planting them once more.

By Alan Titchmarsh — read the full story.

'I bought it without telling Victoria. She didn’t want another project... I sat her down, gave her a vodka and tonic and told her what I’d done'

In October, Sir David Beckham guest edited Country Life — and as part of it, he invited Alan Titchmarsh to come and see his Cotswolds home and garden.

By Alan Titchmarsh — read the full story.

'A stately pile in my part of Hampshire has been on the market for years — but one buyer didn't even make it to the door before getting back in his helicopter'

As the old year went out and the new year came in, Alan Titchmarsh focused on the one thing that enhances a garden but can't be planted: peace and quiet.

By Alan Titchmarsh — read the full story.

How Harper Beckham created the perfect gardener's birthday present for her father's 50th — with a little help from David Austin Roses

Sir David Beckham's daughter commissioned a new rose for her father to mark his 50th birthday this year — a process which is enormously involved, as Charles Quest-Ritson explained.

By Charles Quest Ritson — read the full story.

'The whole house shook. Everything was white. For four months, it felt as if we were on Mars'

Back in June, Non Morris visited the gorgeous house and gardens at The Holt in Hampshire, and told its fascinating — and unsual — story.

By Non Morris — read the full story.

I've tried every slug control known to man, and these are the only things that have ever worked for me

Alan Titchmarsh is as charming, warming and friendly a man as anyone you'll ever meet. Unless, of course, you're a slug... in which case you'll awaken his ruthless side..

By Alan Titchmarsh — read the full story.

One of the truly great gardens of the world is at risk of having its vistas and tranquility blighted forever

Julie Harding reported on the threat to Rousham, the birthplace of the English landscape-garden movement.

By Julie Harding — read the full story.

'I blitzed it. Nothing survived. If you have one bit of surviving bindweed, you will have it forever’: A peek in to the ruthless world of the gravel garden

Sometimes you have to start from scratch to get what you're after, as Non Morris discovered when she spoke to some of Britain's most successful gravel gardeners.

By Non Morris — read the full story.

How Beth Tarling put together her dream terracotta pot collection

'I followed a lorry for miles just so I could ask the driver if I could buy his pot,' Beth Tarling told our Gardens Editor Tiffany Daneff back in February.

By Tiffany Daneff — read the full story.

The garden created by a forgotten genius of the 1920s, rescued from 'a sorry state of neglect to a level of quality it has not known for over 50 years'

'Garden restorations often reveal unexpected stories and surprises,' wrote George Plumptre in this piece from July. It was certainly the case at Knowle House, but this East Sussex garden has emerged in fine style.

By George Plumptre — read the full story.

Midwinter is a time for ancient things: bone, iron, stone, wood; the steadfastness of slow-growing hollies, the solidity of an oak silhouette and a desire to fight the darkness with traditions that endure. Few gardens fulfil that desire more perfectly than those at Helmingham Hall. Arriving through tall gates into a 400-acre park, echoing with the throaty bellows of bucks, you feel the old folklore of the winter solstice. Herds of fallow and roe deer have nibbled away for centuries at rolling grassland dotted with copses and magnificent solo trees.

Approaching the hall, barley-sugar brick chimneys gradually loom through the mist rising off the moat, where drawbridges are raised every night as they have been for hundreds of years. The Tollemache family, arriving at Helmingham in the late 15th century, continually improved the estate with gatehouses and avenues, ponds and neighbouring farmland; 20 generations later, with Ed and Sophie Tollemache as current custodians, this patchwork of embellishments and additions makes a magnificently unified whole.

The gardens, flanking either side of the hall, fall into two areas. To the west, the original productive garden was laid out around the time the hall was finished in 1510, but maps show it as an even older Saxon site. Moated for protection, it had a wooden palisade before brick walls went up in 1745. To the east, garden designer and former chatelaine Lady Xa Tollemache created a second set of garden rooms in 1982, including a historically sympathetic knot garden and rose garden. All of the designs have superb structure and an arresting geometry, emphasised by cruciform grass paths and expertly maintained evergreen topiary, a perfect foil for Helmingham’s romantic roses that are equally important in winter.

‘We use Damask and Moss roses to train over Xa’s maypole supports,’ explains the head gardener, Brendan Arundel, who arrived at the Suffolk garden in 2021 after training at the RHS’s gardens at Wisley in Surrey and Hyde Hall in Essex. ‘These varieties are pliable, with long whippy growth, so we can focus on a sculptural effect; other types can be too woody or firm,’ he elaborates. Rosa ‘Céleste’, ‘Madame Plantier’ and ‘William Lobb’ wrap horizontally across the supports; species roses with knock-out hips are gently manipulated into loose fountains: R. duplex smothered in fine spikes, R. virginiana dripping with shiny red baubles that last for months. Thick yew hedges, trimmed with concertina corners, enclose it all in cloistered calm.

Every part of Helmingham Hall emanates a sense of stillness. Walls, water, hedging, cedars, oaks: they all wrap around you, like layers of pass-the-parcel, and muffle the outside world. The walled garden is the epicentre of this protected idyll. To enter, you must cross a steep-banked earth bridge over the silent water of the Saxon moat; an island within an island, it predates the hall as the original, 1,000-year-old sanctuary. Long double herbaceous borders are backed by rusty iron posts and wires with roses trained in spider-web rings. ‘We needed more mystery,’ explains Mr Arundel, ‘so we created tunnels and screens. Otherwise, visitors would see the garden all at once.’ These help sub-divide the one-acre area into beautifully defined compartments within the eight main beds. Iron tunnels and archways, free of the sweet peas and gourds that cling to them all summer, become a Bridget Riley artwork, casting sharp black shadows in clear light. There are breathing spaces for wildflowers, lollipopped Prunus fruticosa ‘Globosa’ and gnarly pollarded Cercis canadensis. ‘We don’t want to see bare earth, we want to clothe it more,’ states Mr Arundel, who has interplanted steel-blue lines of cavalo nero with flowers and left asparagus foliage ripping like a wildfire across one stretch. The lichen-smattered walls, inside and out, carry a tracery of espaliered branches: shiny cherry bark, arthritic-knuckled pears, a smooth fan of fig. Around the base are themed borders: one hosts a merry menagerie of frogs, snowmen, acorns and rabbits; another has yew buttresses bouncing down in scalloped bookends. Calamagrostis bracytricha and molinias stand all winter along the Grass Border at the back, next to mahonias, daphnes, sarcococcas, Pittosporum ‘Arundel Green’ and the ghostly peeling trunk of Heptacodium miconioides.

Without the fanfare of flowers, the smaller details sing out: Buxus sempervirens ‘Suffruticosa’ trained into the Tollemache fret, iron supports such as heraldic Tudor poles, topiary cones in the Parterre mirroring the decorative brickwork. Weathered stone eagles brave the wind on entrance pillars, their talons furred with moss. ‘The juvenility of all the summer growth hides the garden’s age,’ agrees Mr Arundel. ‘Winter reveals its ancientness.’

It also reveals the skill of the gardening team, made up of four full-time staff and one part-time gardener, plus six volunteers. Grass paths are edged every week in summer to retain crispness; the box parterres and knots are alternately cut with an electric hedgecutter one year and hand shears the next so it becomes, as Mr Arundel puts it, ‘structured yet soft, like a blancmange’. Chris Reeve has pruned trees, roses and topiary at Helmingham for 26 years, coaxing every plant into a well-judged character. Giant sea urchin yews slouch along the edge of the moat, some precariously tipsy, a curving flowery mead snaking between. In winter, the Apple Walk thrusts its beautifully wonky symmetry into a pewter sky, bare boughs raised in a guard of honour.

Half a millennium of tending and tweaking and digging and shaping has given the garden a rare magic. It forces you to slow down, to linger, to stop and listen. Human time seems to come to a standstill. Visitors, Mr Arundel notices, ‘naturally respond to the blend of formal and informal, history and modernity. They always hone in on the spirit of the place’. In winter, that spirit is palpable and utterly captivating.

Find our more about visiting Helmingham Hall.

Lovers of old and antique garden tools, prized for their ergonomic design and hard-wearing good looks — not to mention the history they embody — will be familiar with Garden & Wood, which is run by Piers Newth and Louise Allen. They met as horticultural trainees at RHS Wisley in Surrey and ended their gardening careers at the Oxford Botanic Gardens. Kew-trained, she was curator of the gardens, overseeing horticultural and education staff, including a lot of fundraising, and he was in charge of the arboretum.

When Piers found he was spending as much time at his desk as he did outdoors, he remembered ruefully that during lessons at school he always gazed out of the window, because he really hated being inside. Meanwhile, Louise was sacrificing most of her free evenings and weekends searching for possible speakers because courses and lectures were such a good source of income for the garden. It was when they found themselves heading for Ledbury in Herefordshire on Piers’s birthday, to vet yet another possible speaker, that they began to have dreams of leaving. Quite what they would do without regular wages was not clear, but they told one another that ‘something would come up’.

What did come up was the day that Piers took a hurdle-making course and noticed how easily the instructor was cleaving the hazel branches. He asked if he could try the vintage billhook that his teacher was using. Unlike the modern version, which had been giving him tennis elbow, working with the borrowed tool was pain free, so he begged to buy it. It was an easy step to the discovery that well-made garden implements from the 1940s and 1950s were undervalued. Twenty years ago, junk shops were full of discarded forks and trowels and, as he was good at restoring the rusty or broken tools, the pair began to accumulate a collection. Could this offer a possible future that would allow them to work at home together?

They launched Garden & Wood in 2008 and began in a small way by taking a stand at the Cottesbrooke Hall garden fair in Northamptonshire: ‘It was beautiful, with real grass on the tables and matching umbrellas.’ The repaired tools sold steadily and, encouraged by the reaction at Cottesbrooke, they booked a stand at RHS Chelsea Flower Show in their holiday week. After two years of juggling work and trading vintage tools at plant fairs in their spare time, in 2010, they finally left the Botanic Gardens. At last, they could live and work in the same place, with no overheads. It was a much simpler life that became even easier with the coming of online trading.

The business has been expanding ever since and, two years ago, they realised that operations were becoming increasingly restricted by the small site around their pretty thatched cottage in Oxfordshire. When a former sawmill near Chippenham in Wiltshire came up for sale, it seemed the perfect option, with space for both living and a workshop under the same roof.

The flair and style that Garden & Wood brought to its Chelsea stands won it the Director General’s Award in 2024 and a visit to the sawmill shows these same qualities in the display of vintage wares: the workshop and vegetable plot with its repurposed greenhouse and rescued railings are immaculately stylish. When asked what governs what they sell, the owners reply: ‘Anything to do with gardening that was produced in the past.’ This might stretch from rare sprinklers — which are regularly collected by an American judge — to colourful seed packets and lead garden miniatures.

Between these extremes are the everyday useful tools that have been given a new handle or been cleaned and sharpened in the workshop. Once they have been through Piers’s hands, they return to being tools that will last and that are better and easier to use than many modern examples. Old secateurs and shears, however, tend to be collectors’ pieces because they will never do the job as well as new ones, so Piers recommends Felco secateurs for proper pruning. Ladies’ border forks are popular items (but I hanker for a ladies’ mattock, like the one I saw in the Bloomsbury exhibition at the Garden Museum last year. It had belonged to Vita Sackville-West and her initials were carved into the handle). Sometimes people bring their own favourite tools to be revived, but, sadly, quite often the work on these turns out to be a labour of love.

Terracotta pots are a particular speciality, with hand-thrown Sankey pots the most prized. It is, they say, hard to keep up with the demand for pots in all sizes. Occasionally, they find large orchid pots with several holes in the base. For the rarest items, they travel all over the British Isles, as well as to Europe. Recently, a collector from Germany has contacted them wanting to sell all his stock, which they find exciting. ‘What we like best,’ Louise says,’ is something we have never seen before.’

Now that they have more space, garden furniture, as well as larger items, can be stored and displayed. There are elegant, but strong antique tables and chairs, water bowsers on wheels and huge coppers for planting. Iron plant stands, cloches and galvanised watering cans are usually in stock. The best items are photographed and put on Instagram and they go quickly. Some designers have an alert from Garden & Wood so that they can be sure of securing things first. Fashion insiders, such as the new creative director of Dior, Jonathan Anderson, love the vintage tools. This September, some of the Garden & Wood finds were on offer at JW Anderson bearing the brand’s logo.

As they work from home, it is usually not difficult to open the shop for casual visitors, provided they telephone or email first. It’s a wonderful experience seeing what this pair of horticulturists have created in fewer than two years. The kitchen garden, which ensures that they are completely self-sufficient, only dates from this year. If you can wait until next June, there will be an added visual treat at the sawmill. What was once mown lawn behind the building was left to grow long in 2024, revealing triple-decker bee orchids, growing so close to one another that it was impossible not to tread on them. This summer, there were fewer bee orchids, but many more pyramidals and one green-winged orchid.

All these, like the vintage finds, are now in the best possible hands.

Most gardens have their ups and downs, even royal ones. The gardens at Sandringham in Norfolk reached their peak at the beginning of the 20th century, when Edward VII laid them out on an imperial scale and employed some 100 gardeners. Fifty years later, they hit their nadir, when the walled kitchen gardens and most of the formal gardens around the house were abandoned. Their recent resurrection by The King is little short of miraculous.

The kitchen gardens remain unmanicured, used as grazing for foals from the Royal Stud, but Sandringham’s 60 acres of pleasure gardens, surrounded by woods and parkland, are once again a showcase of the finest designs, expressed through an exceptional palette of plants. All this is the fruit of The King’s determination not only to give the great house a setting appropriate to its architecture and history — in the 1960s, there had even been plans to demolish the whole building — but also to plant a beautiful garden that visitors can enjoy and be inspired by.

The King, then Prince of Wales, took over the running of the 21,000-acre Sandringham estate in 2017, converting its agriculture to organic procedures and adopting the principles of integrated agroforestry, enhancing soil health, improving biodiversity, sequestering carbon and providing shelter from extreme weather. He realised many years ago that the gardens would need restoration, renewal and replanting, but it wasn’t until towards the end of 2022 — when the groundwork was in place — that he was finally able to turn his attention to these 60 acres of rich, free-draining, sandy soil.

We are fortunate to have a monarch who is passionate about good design, plants, conservation and public access; he has memorably shown us how to combine these interests at Highgrove, Gloucestershire. Yet Highgrove is a personal creation, a place where The King has learnt and practised his ideas about gardens and gardening since 1980. Sandringham is quite different. The site was acquired for the future Edward VII in 1862 and the estate was developed over the next 40 years. It reflects a time when the British Empire was at its most extensive and wealthy. Sandringham House, once considered ‘the most comfortable in England’, is too large for today’s Royal Family and its principal value lies in its historic importance and its potential for public benefit. It offers much for visitors to learn, admire and enjoy.

On the western side of the house, the land drops down towards the upper lake, bordered on one side by a fine rock garden constructed of Pulhamite stone, which The King has had restored, extended and replanted. It draws in visitors to explore its stonework, rare alpine plants and views across the lake. However, The King also knew that there had once been elaborate formal parterres just below the western terrace, the removal of which had left the architecture of the house without a proper grounding — there was nothing but grass (duly Dug for Victory in the Second World War) to connect its impressive façade to the ornamental trees on the far side. The King decided to rebuild those formal gardens in the modern idiom, giving rise to the Topiary Garden (in 2023), the Maze (2024) and the Sundial Garden (2025). The scale, the speed and the importance of what he has already achieved cannot be overemphasised.

The Topiary Garden was inspired by one of The King’s earliest boyhood memories — the magnificent topiary yews that Queen Alexandra planted in the ornamental garden of Sandringham’s Dairy Cottage. The maze also has a personal origin, as His Majesty assured our columnist Alan Titchmarsh when he remarked that ‘there’s nothing more enjoyable than getting lost in a maze’. In fact, the new one is not too lost-making, but is placed so that anxious parents can sit on a bank above it and guide their charges to the centre — and out again.

The King asked Khaled Azzam and Delfina Bottesini of The King’s Foundation for help with the design of the Topiary Garden and the Maze and the resultant geometrical shapes are heavy with symbolism. These are extended and developed in the maze, which draws on an unexecuted drawing said to have been intended for the Alhambra, Spain, in Moorish days. Both gardens explore the geometric and philosophical connection between the circle and the square, representing Heaven and Earth and Man’s journey between them. They also incorporate references to The King’s Coronation and to his desire to be a Defender of Faiths. The design of the Topiary Garden was partly inspired by the intricacies of Henry III’s Cosmati pavement in Westminster Abbey, perhaps most clearly seen in the Maggy Howarth mosaic at its centre, which was designed by the studio's Liz Clough and elegantly assembled by a number of their pebble mosaic artists, led by master craftsman Mark Currie.

The Topiary Garden is also planted with more than 5,000 perennial plants — the work of Catherine MacDonald, the principal landscape designer at Landform Consultants. Chosen to illustrate the importance of biodiversity, they are also very beautiful. Pollinating insects — and visitors — revel in the choice of plants, as songbirds nest in the tall yew hedging. There are roses, too, including some of David Austin’s best modern hybrids, such as ‘Tottering-By-Gently’ and ‘Gabriel Oak’, selected for their strong scent.

These new formal gardens near the house look as if they have been in place for many years, but the first excavator bucket went into the future site on January 24, 2023, and the whole Topiary Garden was finished by the end of September. Taxus baccata ‘Repandens’ was used in place of the box plants that would typically have been planted in the past.

Box is vulnerable to disease and insect damage, but this distinctive, slightly glaucous, dwarf-growing cultivar of yew is a stand-out winner in the RHS’s informal trials of substitutes for box. Some splendid new topiaries are already emerging and much of the woodwork, including the garden seats, are painted in contrasting shades of blue; throughout the garden, His Majesty has shown a remarkable eye for matters of detail. He also turns to local craftsmen and suppliers whenever possible — much of the hard landscaping associated with the new formal gardens was carried out by local contractors.

In the wider garden, The King has been personally involved in the extensive new plantings of ornamental trees, choosing his favourites, then going around with the head gardener to decide where each should be planted for best effect. The Acer Glade is a case in point. It occupies the middle distance between the new formal gardens and the long-established trees further away from the house. More than 100 new trees have been planted here. Many are forms of Acer palmatum — reliable small trees with many different shapes and colours throughout the year — protected by larger species that have good autumn leaf colour, including forms of A. x freemanii and A. cappadocicum. Around the edge are other colourful trees, such as the American hickory Carya ovata, the leaves of which turn beautifully yellow in October, and ever-popular Robinia pseudoacacia ‘Frisia’, placed to show up well against a mature purple beech. Here and throughout the garden, drifts of daffodils brighten the turf in spring; ‘Thalia’, ‘February Gold’ and ‘King Charles’ are favourites.

As an expression of The King’s wish to share His garden with the public — particularly to let people enjoy the moments of calm that Nature and a good garden provide — he is encouraging visitors to explore the out-lying areas. To this end, he has created two new features. The new Magnolia Walk is 400 yards long and planted with hundreds of different cultivars, including many of his personal favourites, which, when they open their buds in spring, will be quite magnificent. The display begins with March-flowering Magnolia campbellii, dark-pink M. ‘Felix Jury’ from New Zealand and our own magnolia breeder Maurice Foster’s M. ‘Premier Cru’, followed by forms of the Chinese species M. sprengeri. The magnolias are inter-planted with oaks and maples for year-round interest. Quercus dentata ‘Carl Ferris Miller’ is a favourite oak — a sturdy upright grower with very large deciduous leaves that turn yellow and red in autumn.

Beyond the magnolias, across the main driveway, three long island beds have been planted up this autumn as mixed borders to a scheme by Dr MacDonald. When Country Life visited, lorries were delivering shrubs for the newly prepared beds. These are designed for walking through, so that they appear as double borders, and they cover no less than one acre overall.

The standard of cultivation throughout Sandringham is outstanding. Walk down the Broad Walk, where a fine selection of flowering dogwoods — another royal favourite — is lightly interplanted with stewartias and magnolias, such as ‘Galaxy’, and you will find it hard to believe that all was planted earlier this year. Much credit, therefore, is due to the immensely competent young head gardener Jack Lindfield, who arrived in 2022 and heads a team of 15 full-time gardeners. Their work is not only confined to the 60 walled acres, it extends also to the nursery, the holiday cottages, the visitor centre and the new arboretum — totalling another 50 acres.

As in so many aspects of his life, The King is working not for himself or for his family, but for long-term public benefit. Watching these gardens develop and seeing how the trees in the parkland grow in girth and stature will be a pleasure in which we can all share.

The gardens at Sandringham, Norfolk, are usually open to the public from April to October.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a successful footballer in possession of a large fortune must be in want of a house in Oxted or Alderley Edge. Although David Beckham might once have resided in such predictable localities, his heart is now firmly planted in the Cotswolds. Granted, he also has homes in London and the US, where he is co-owner of Inter Miami CF, but it is the countryside near Chipping Norton in Oxfordshire that clearly exerts the greatest pull.

‘I just love it. I’m never happier than when I’m here,’ he enthuses. That much is clear from the way he and Victoria have developed the 26 acres of land that once formed a part of the Great Tew estate.

Eight years ago, David began the task of transforming the two existing derelict Cotswold-stone barns — one thatched and one stone-tiled — into an elegant country house. He also added a third building, opting to join the trio to a longer wing to create what historians will recognise as a tactful trend during the reign of Elizabeth I: a house in the shape of the capital letter ‘E’.

I ask him why he chose the Cotswolds. ‘Because it’s one of the most beautiful parts of the countryside and I knew that, if I picked the right location and the children could get there in a day from London, they’d come.’

Why this particular spot? ‘It happened by accident. I wanted somewhere in the country, but I was frustrated after six months of looking. I was disappointed by a house I’d been to look at and was driving past these ruins — and a pile of bricks. Two barns and a mess. I asked what was going on: “We’re rebuilding,” they said. I told them to stop and, within a week, I’d bought it. I had a vision of what I wanted it to look like.’

I ask him if it was a joint decision. ‘I bought it without telling Victoria. She didn’t want another project. We’d just done up the London house. I sat her down, gave her a vodka and tonic and told her what I’d done. I took her and the children to the barns and said: “You’re not coming back until it’s done.” Fourteen months later, on December 17, I brought them back when the house was finished.’

How does Lady Beckham feel about it now? ‘She’s in love with it. She sleeps longer here. She reads, we go for long country walks with the children. I come down on Friday morning; Victoria brings the children in the afternoon and we stay until Sunday evening. We have friends to stay and they absolutely adore it.’

Since buying the property in 2016, every bit as much care and attention has been lavished on the gardens and surrounding land as on the dwelling itself. Despite being restored to the highest specification — as you’d expect from a couple with a meticulous eye for design and detail — the house has not been slavishly restored in a historic style.

The dark-grey Crittall windows and doors give it a contemporary feel, without detracting from the structure’s 16th-century origins.Glazed doors and windows give way onto two large and sensitively planted courtyards, offering a soothing view from bedrooms, kitchen and sitting rooms.

The house seems to be wrapped around by the gardens — in the eastern courtyard, framed by two of the wings, an inviting swimming pool is caressed by low plantings of lavender, catmint and sub-shrubs, pleasantly softening the harsh and clinical lines that so often cause outdoor pools to sit incongruously, as if dropped from outer space. It’s clear that the owners enjoy being enveloped by Nature here, well away from the public gaze, in contrast to their homes in the more cosmopolitan — and frenetic — locales of London and Miami.

When asked where this affinity with gardens and the countryside comes from, David attributes it to his maternal grandfather. ‘I was an East End boy. I didn’t know the countryside existed apart from Epping Forest. My grandfather Joe did the gardening, then I’d kick a football about and knock all the heads off the roses.

‘I always loved trees — especially oak trees. But when Victoria and I lived in Hertfordshire, with about 100 acres — some of which was woodland — I never really got into it. Then here, in lockdown, I went tree mad. When we were allowed to leave the house, nurseries were about the safest place. I’m still learning; I know what I like, but not all the names. Victoria loves cherry blossom, so I planted one outside her study window.’ The gallant gesture now delights the lady of the house every spring.

What is the overall feeling engendered by the Beckhams’ garden and the surrounding landscape? There is an all-pervading sense of order about the place — raked drives of Cotswold gravel neatly edged with stone sets — with plants spilling forwards to soften their edges. For every dome of clipped yew, there is a waving ribbon of longer grass interspersed with trees of varying ages. Large areas of grass — not lawns, as such, but close-mown swards, as well as meadows — provide breathing spaces between more elaborately planted areas. The overall effect is stylish — no surprises there — but also friendly and comfortable and, above all, welcoming.

When the Beckhams came here there was but one tree: a maple. Over the years, they have added hundreds more. Pines and maples predominate, together with hornbeam and oak, yew and beech. The dry summer past proved a challenge on the Cotswold brash, which is fiercely drained, but planting of trees, native hedges and windbreaks will continue through the winter to add height and structure to what was once a gently undulating, but relatively featureless and windswept landscape.

Marcus Barnett was involved in laying out the courtyard gardens immediately adjacent to the house. Yet, since then, David has been responsible for the design. He finds it therapeutic. ‘Every weekend, I have another idea — I really love organising. And tidying up,’ he confesses. ‘I can’t really admit it to most people, but my idea of heaven is what I did this weekend — sorting things out, making jam from the plums and spreading it on toast.’

Four years ago, during lockdown, the Beckhams added a lake to encourage waterfowl. Wrapped around by a ribbon of Hidcote lavender (something of a Beckham signature), it is traversed by an elevated and sinuous timber walkway that links the lake’s edge to a central island. A friend gave David seven ducks for his 50th birthday (seven is a dominant number in the household: it was the number on David’s shirt when he played for Manchester United and is his daughter Harper’s middle name.) Wild duck and Canada geese add to the complement.

‘He loves the country,’ confirms his operations manager, Shane McFadden. Shane is a former Irish Guardsman who, as is head gardener Carly Holmes, is clearly devoted to David and determined to keep the estate in good order whether ‘The Boss’ and his family are in residence or not.

Whereas a walk around reveals some expected trappings of a highly successful former international footballer — an open-fronted oak barn sheltering several highly polished Land Rovers, their seats covered in Scottish tweed (a Beckham preference) — there are other features that surprise, such as a dedicated bee garden, where four quartets of WBC hives sit among beds of pollen- and nectar-rich flowers. Their residents are still busy foraging as summer draws to a close and David gives me a pot of his home-produced ‘Golden Beez’ honey. At the bottom of the label, in small print, it says: ‘Made in Our Garden by Dad and Cruz.’ At home, it is my turn to spread it on toast. Delicious.

Around the bee garden and beyond, paddocks are surrounded by handsome cleft-oak railings. The kitchen garden, by contrast, is enclosed by a white picket fence of the sort that childhood dreams are made of. Within its confines are oak-encased no-dig beds cherished by Miss Holmes, in which espalier plum and pear trees act as a backdrop to muscular kale, potatoes and onions, salads and roots, together with feathery-topped carrots that are dug up for me to approve their size and quality — David’s carrots are the source of much amusement on Instagram. All the produce is grown for the family kitchen and, when they are in London, it is shipped to their townhouse.

David is a hands-on gardener within this white picket fence. The low Euonymus japonicus ‘Green Spire’ hedge (a good alternative to box) was only half planted when Miss Holmes left for the weekend. When she returned on Monday morning, ‘The Boss’ had finished the job for her.

Woven-willow plant supports hewn by craftsman Jay Davey support peas and beans and help to protect vulnerable plants from hares, as do chicken-wire cloches from mail-order company Crocus. A large graphite-grey Alitex greenhouse provides the backdrop. It is a greenhouse designed for entertaining, containing some understated staging, as well as a vast dining table capable of seating 20 down its centre. The diners are able to see the short journey their food has made from fork to fork.

Pass through an archway in the neighbouring hedge and you will come upon the ‘working greenhouse’, which is home to tomatoes and peppers, aubergines and cucumbers, potted pelargoniums and citrus. This is a more modest-sized construction of western-red cedar built by Woodpecker Joinery — its cedar-encased water butts disgorge their excess water into an underground reservoir from which it can be pumped in drier weather. Alongside it is Miss Holmes’s neatly ordered office-cum-potting shed.

Before taking up her post here more than a year ago, Miss Holmes worked at nearby Soho Farmhouse and, before that, at The Lost Gardens of Heligan in Cornwall. Growing food is her particular delight and, here, she has charge of a model kitchen garden run, as is the entire estate, on organic lines. An orchard is planned for the adjacent patch of land.

Next to the kitchen garden is the chicken run, home to a small flock of Cotswold Legbar hens that is presided over by a burly Brahma cockerel, who struts his stuff beneath The Penthouse, a veritable prince among chicken coops — almost an avian duplex. ‘He’s a friendly chap,’ notes David of his cockerel.

A walk around the grounds, along winding paths and wider driveways, makes it clear that the garden is well used for entertaining. Across the acreage, there are firepits and sitting areas, sculpted from the landscape, as well as a huge semi-permanent ‘tent’ that houses David’s Wild Kitchen, which was built by The Cashmere Caveman Company, replete with gleaming copper-topped heated tables and a shiny oven. ‘Cooking relaxes me more than most things,’ he reveals, freely admitting to a love of order and tidiness. It is a predilection that is reflected across what its owner is reluctant to call ‘an estate’. ‘It’s just “The Barns”,’ he clarifies. ‘A country house set in beautiful countryside. We feel so lucky to be here — to have the space.’

Beyond the lake is another sitting area, this time incorporating a wood-fired hot-tub alongside a small black dome — a sauna by Iglucraft — manufactured in Estonia.

It becomes clear that the Beckhams regard their Cotswold retreat as an important sanctuary in their busy lives and an escape from the demands that international commitments — in both sport and fashion — require of them. It is essentially a family home where they and their children can relax in what, thanks to the vision of this retired England football captain, has become a sheet anchor in their lives.

If anyone was in doubt about the Beckhams’ commitment to Nature and their affinity to this part of the Cotswolds, a visit to their domain quickly dispels any hint of cynicism. Here are two world-famous people, renowned as ambassadors in many glamorous spheres of public life, who have realised, in middle age, the restorative and beneficial qualities of gardening and thoughtful land management. David and Victoria have created at Great Tew a delightful and durable legacy.

This feature originally appeared in the October 22, 2025 issue of Country Life, guest edited by Sir David Beckham. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

Anyone can create a pretty garden, full of flowers and colour, in spring and summer. It’s much more difficult to make a really satisfying display in autumn and winter, but the best of all gardens are those that are wonderful all through the year. You have to be a truly knowledgeable plantsman to create a thing of beauty that never ceases to bring delight — not only to yourself, but to critical visitors at every season. That is precisely what John Massey, VMH, nurseryman, plant breeder and multiple Chelsea Gold medallist has achieved in his own garden, next to his famous Ashwood Nurseries near Kidderminster in Worcestershire. ‘John’s Garden’ is one of the finest private gardens in the UK and, many would say, the best maintained.

Mr Massey’s parents hoped he would train to become a doctor, but, from an early age, plants were his great and only love. His father, a civil engineer, bought Ashwood Nursery in 1967 and Mr Massey started work there the very day after he left school. The business grew steadily and, in 1986, he was able to buy a small house next to the nursery that came with 10 acres of extra land. However, he did not begin to plant a garden there until 1998. It is incredible now to look at some of the enormous trees and realise that they have all been planted since that date. His inspiration came from two famous gardeners who had become friends of his — charismatic Christopher Lloyd of Great Dixter in East Sussex and the formidable Princess Greta Sturdza of Le Vasterival in Normandy, France. Both were energetic and knowledgeable plant-lovers, and both were blessed with artistic sensibilities. Their influence is visible everywhere in John’s Garden today.

The soil here is a sandy loam, free draining, but also requiring irrigation in dry weather. Its pH is about six, which means that almost all plants grow well and happily. The main garden is long and narrow, but designed to give an impression of much greater space than its 2½ acres would suggest. Space management is all too often ignored by garden makers, but not in this plantsman’s paradise, where plants are displayed in borders large and small, within a fluid modern design. There is always so much to see in plantsmen’s gardens that, sometimes, they are nerdy and boring, but John’s Garden is bowl-me-over exciting because of the way he positions, cultivates and trains plants to create his artistic effects. There is no pause — not only does he walk through his garden every day of the year, but he also insists that it is possible to have something in flower on every one of those 365 days. What’s more, he insists that every bed or feature within the garden should stop you in your tracks.

Every detail in John’s Garden has been planned and brought to perfection. Large ornamental pots, planters and troughs are everywhere, bursting with plants of good colour and shape, together with architectural urns, seats, sculptures and ornaments. A large ceramic tub near the house is always filled with floating flowers. The nearby ruin garden is pure theatre, replanted twice a year. A selection of plants in pots, up to 25 or even 30 of them, is arranged and re-arranged in an ever-changing display that is reviewed and revised at least once a week. Mr Massey also knows how to intensify the garden by limbing up trees to lift their canopy. This draws the eye to their trunks, creates long views and frees up space for new plantings in new habitats.

The birds do well in John’s Garden. Along one side of the drive, in what might be called the front garden, is a fine collection of rowans, including berry-rich Sorbus pseudohupehensis ‘Pink Pagoda’, dark pink S. pseudovilmorinii ‘Eastern Promise’ and a rare, fastigiate cultivar with scarlet berries called S. Autumn Spire, closely related to our native mountain ash. Here, too, is a selection of crab apples: the best display, says Mr Massey, comes from Malus ‘Comtesse de Paris’, which has yellow fruits, although ‘Indian Summer’ lasts longer, well into the new year. The first winter waxwings do not starve.

Praise is often lavished on old box hedges that are clipped to imitate a cloud formation. Mr Massey shows us how to create this effect on the other side of the drive, by planting a line or two of holly plants on short stems of varying height, and pruning each into a neat lollipop. As they continue to grow and fill out, the individual spheres merge to create the appearance of evergreen cumulus clouds. The berries brighten the surface for many months through autumn and into winter.

Mr Massey’s sense of theatre extends to the leaf-colour of trees in autumn and, as a nursery-man, he knows which are the best cultivars to use. Acer rubrum ‘October Glory’ is spectacular, especially when contrasted with white-trunked birches — the form of Betula utilis subsp. jacquemontii known as ‘Doorenbos’. Named varieties of Liquidambar styraciflua, such as ‘Lane Roberts’ and ‘Worplesdon’, give a rich red display over many weeks. Some autumn colour effects are standalone, drop-dead statements of beauty that need no foil from other plantings. The autumn foliage of the ginkgo trees turns to uniform yellow — a rich pure colour untinged by other tints or shades; the sun seems to glow from every leaf. A fastigiate cultivar called ‘Blagon’ stands close to a ‘witch’s broom’ form of Metasequoia glyptostroboides named ‘Schirrmann’s Nordlicht’. Tall shrubs, including Rhus typhina Tiger Eyes, give a brilliant display of reds and oranges in October, shortly followed by another new cultivar, Radiance.

Autumn leaf-colour is everywhere among the garden’s deciduous shrubs. Cornus sericea ‘Hedgerows Gold’ adds red tints to its yellow variegation and C. alba Baton Rouge and ‘Kesselringii’, grown principally for their winter stems, also turn into wonderful hues. Autumn leaves and seeds are contrasted in the deciduous spindle bushes — heavy-fruiting Euonymus planipes ‘Sancho’ is joined by E. alatus f. ciliatodentatus, the leaves of which turn bright pink, as short-growing E. alatus ‘Compactus’ — so seldom seen in gardens — packs a tussle of scarlet leaves and orange seeds.

Many are the rare and curious plants that visiting plantsmen want to acquire. Berberis sieboldii is a small shrub with reliable autumn colour that few have ever seen before — and the same is true of the rare witch-hazel Hamamelis ‘Yamima’, probably a cross between a H. vernalis hybrid and H. intermedia. Other rare plants include a sweet-scented form of Hydrangea petiolaris found by Bleddyn and Sue Wynn-Jones on Yakushima island in Japan and Aesculus hippocastanum ‘Monstrosa’, the ‘monstrous horse chestnut’, which is no more than 6ft high with curious, fasciated branches.

Underrated plants are only one joy of this extraordinary garden. You could walk round it every day, as Mr Massey does, and always notice something new. All is maintained by his ‘dream team’ of two full-time and three part-time gardeners, whose knowledge has been greatly enriched by working in John’s Garden.

John’s Garden and Ashwood Nursery, Kidderminster, Worcestershire, are both now part of a charitable foundation set up by John Massey. The nursery is open daily, and the garden every Saturday throughout the year, except in January.

Bluebell Arboretum started life on March 11, 1992, when Robert and Suzette Vernon bought six acres on the borders of Derbyshire and Leicestershire. They celebrated their purchase later that day by planting two seedlings of Sequoiadendron giganteum, 4in high at the time, but well over 50ft today. Both trees have flourished, perhaps surprisingly, in the wet clay soil and the arboretum now has more than 75 giant redwoods.

The six acres are roughly split between the oldest part of the arboretum and the nursery that supports it, which uses its trees and shrubs as a source of propagating material. In 2004, the Vernons were able to buy another six acres to extend the arboretum and new plants are constantly added to the collection. Its great value — apart from the rare trees themselves — is that it shows what can be achieved in less than 33 years and is, therefore, an inspiration for would-be makers of arboreta who want to know to what they can aspire. It also demonstrates the use of trees and shrubs to create structure and the changing of colours through the seasons.

The arboretum is laid out in an informal manner. The siting of new trees is decided when they are ready for planting, according to the space then available, the many microclimates and only after much thought for where the new plants would grow best. The fine design features include a deliberately irregular avenue of sequoias and a double row of all the wisteria cultivars that were given an Award of Garden Merit in the RHS’s recent trials. Mr Vernon is especially fond of two of those cultivars: Wisteria brachybotrys ‘Okayama’, which has coppery new leaves and rich violet flowers, and W. floribunda ‘Lawrence’, which he prunes Japanese-style as a cloud shape — a transformation that is not difficult to achieve and can be applied very successfully to many other cultivars.

Perhaps the most original feature of the design — even unique — at Bluebell Arboretum is the clipped metasequoia hedge, which is clearly visible on Google Earth. Metasequoia glyptostroboides is the deciduous conifer that was known to botanists only as a fossil until rediscovered in the Chinese region of Hubei in 1943. It is capable of growing to a great height — as much as 150ft — but the Vernons planted a circle of metasequoia seedlings and cut them back to make a thick hedge no more than 6ft high, a wonderful sight in autumn when the leaves turn to gold or russet brown.

Several visitors have copied this choice of hedging in their own gardens, but the circle planted at Bluebell Arboretum contains a hidden symbolism. It is almost exactly 36ft in diameter — the width of the trunk of the record-breaking General Sherman redwood in California, US. In the middle of the circular hedge is a young redwood, Sequoiadendron giganteum, which may also acquire that girth in 3,000 years’ time.

The Vernons met as students at the Hillier Arboretum in Hampshire, the best 20th-century collection of woody plants in Britain, and, from the start, they were insatiable collectors of interesting and beautiful trees. They have an almost complete hand of Metasequoia cultivars, a substantial collection of maples and more than 100 magnolia species and cultivars. Flowering dogwoods are another speciality and so are birches with outstanding bark in winter — these are power-washed annually to show off their colours. Betula utilis is the most numerous species and the trunks of ‘Grayswood Ghost’ are among the best because they are indeed a ghostly white, but with lenticels — the horizontal stripes in the bark of all birches — of a pale buff-pink shade.

Other fine white-trunked forms include ‘Trinity College’ and ‘Silver Shadow’. B. utilis is variable in the wild and its bark may also be very dark in colour: a form called ‘Chris Lane’ in Bluebell Arboretum has chocolate-coloured bark with white lenticels, whereas ‘Bhutan Sienna’ has dark brown flaky bark that rivals the well-known Prunus serrula. Even more startling is B. dahurica ‘Maurice Foster’, a species characterised by its shaggy bark, but here a shade of brown-black that also has a metallic sheen. There is no better way to spend a morning at this time of the year than looking at Bluebell Arboretum’s birches as their last leaves turn to yellow and their bark in all its glory is revealed on the naked trunks and branches.

This is also the time of year at which to look at maples — the last of their autumn colour and the amazing patterns of their bark. Acer x conspicuum ‘Phoenix’ offers pure-yellow autumn colour, followed by bright-red twigs and striated bark in shades of orange, white and pink. It is, perhaps, the most brilliant maple in winter, although it has to compete with A. negundo ‘Winter Lightning’, which Mr Vernon prunes hard to show off its remarkable yellow stems — its leaves, too, turn pure yellow in late October.

Best of the all-rounders are the many forms of Acer palmatum, which have beauty to offer at every season. A. ‘Eddisbury’ has yellow autumn foliage, often tinged with red, and coral-coloured bark that rivals the better-known ‘Sango-Kaku’ (syn. ‘Senkaki’). ‘Eddisbury’ turned up as a seedling in Cheshire 50 years ago and has at last been honoured by the RHS’s Award of Garden Merit. Finally, among the hundreds of maple species and cultivars to admire at Bluebell Arboretum is a fastigiate form of our native field maple, A. campestre ‘William Caldwell’, positioned where it is much admired by visitors. It has all the virtues of the species, including beautiful yellow autumn colour, but a notably upright form of growth.

If you return to Bluebell Arboretum at another time of the year, the range of trees and shrubs that catch your eye will be quite different. Come again in spring, when flowering cherries grace the paths within the whole garden and look out for early-flowering Prunus campanulata ‘Felix Jury’, bred in New Zealand and much hardier than you might suppose, or the double-flowered form of our native blackthorn P. spinosa ‘Plena’ with star-shaped blossoms that transform a spiny hedge-plant into a billowing mass of beauty. Compact P. ‘Jacqueline’ is another favourite: its large pink flowers, carried in great quantity, have a crimson base to their petals and, as with many ornamental cherries, its leaves turn to brilliant shades of orange and red in autumn.

The magnolias also have a long season — Mr Vernon especially admires Magnolia ‘Alex’ (syn. ‘Columnar Pink’), a seedling from the Kent garden of the great plantsman Maurice Foster, and vigorous, fast-growing M. ‘Westonbirt Hope’, their own introduction, which blooms later than many magnolias, so that its flowers are less frequently caught by frost. ‘Margaret Helen’ is another favourite magnolia because of its long season in flower; Mr Vernon says that its frosted flowers, if any, drop off the tree instead of hanging on ‘like used tea bags’.

A plant without labels is of no value to visitors, so it is a pleasure to discover that every tree and shrub at Bluebell Arboretum is invariably labelled with its name and date of planting. Many of the trees also have an A4 aluminium noticeboard with a full history of the plant, its origins, its value in a garden, its cultivation and its distinctiveness. These provide a valuable educational experience for everyone from chattering schoolchildren to studious adults who are thinking about planting more trees — or even an arboretum of their own.

The soil at Bluebell Arboretum has a pH of 6.8, which is not ideal for such plants as rhododendrons that love more acid conditions. The Vernons used sulphur chips to lower its pH and make the soil more suitable for such plants. The size and vigour of the camellias is testament to the success of this strategy, which has also improved the autumn colour of the maples, red oaks and liquidambars. All are stars of the garden in autumn.

The adjoining nursery — always open to visitors — has a busy mail-order trade, but is best seen at the same time as visiting the arboretum, because it is full of rare trees and shrubs that one may have walked past without noticing. Suzette Vernon died in 2022 after a long illness and her husband is now in his seventies, but, fortunately, their elder son, also called Robert, read Horticulture at university and has taken over much of the responsibility for both the nursery and the arboretum. His commitment to the future of Bluebell Arboretum is as passionate as that of his parents. There is so much to see, admire and think about.

Bluebell Nursery and Arboretum, Annwell Lane, Smisby, Ashby-de-la-Zouch, Derbyshire — www.bluebellnursery.com

This feature originally appeared in the print edition of Country Life — here's how you can subscribe to Country Life magazine.

Shane Connolly, florist By Royal Appointment, has been saying that flowers should be ‘grown not flown’ for years. ‘I have been preaching British since the early 2000s and certainly promoted it at the wedding of The King and Queen in 2005, even more so for The Prince and Princess of Wales in 2011.’ For the 2023 coronation, all the flowers were grown in the British Isles and it seems that this example is changing the way we buy cut flowers.

More than 80% is still imported from Holland, the global market leader, but Brexit, concerns about sustainability and the influence of Mr Connolly are shifting habits. Since 2011, when Gill Hodgson set up trade association Flowers from the Farm, more than 1,000 local growers selling fresh homegrown bunches have joined, with more being added all the time.

Smaller growers come and go, but, at Chippy Flower Farm near Chipping Norton in Oxfordshire, there is a proper business plan. It looks as if this is a flower farm that will succeed. Tif Loehnis and Anna Benn, who set it up four years ago, have a more professional approach than many, with a strategy for long-term survival.

It helps that the acre where the flowers are grown already belonged to Mrs Loehnis’s family, because starting a flower farm is expensive. Initial outlay involved deer and rabbit fencing, a polytunnel, a shed for the welcoming shop, another for preparing and arranging flowers and a third for teaching days. Council waste had to be spread over planting areas and containers for enough water installed. Once the infrastructure of paths and plant supports had gone in, shrubs were chosen for shelter, as well as to provide backing material for home-grown bunches, and masses and masses of perennials and bulbs had to be bought.

Mrs Loehnis had been a successful literary agent; Ms Benn is a garden designer with huge practical experience, and both acknowledge that they couldn’t survive without their wonderful team of supporters and gardeners. However, what they have achieved is impressive: after only three years, they were breaking even — this year, they should make a profit.

I went to see them on a sunny autumn day when the picking season was almost over (the farm closes from the end of October until the start of March), but there was still plenty to see and buy and flowers are usually available to order online until December.

I was interested to know where their customers come from and imagined that, because they are less than 10 minutes from Soho Farmhouse in the heart of the richest Cotswold area, that their target would be wealthy weekenders.

‘Far from it,’ said Mrs Loehnis. 'We want to do local weddings and we also welcome people coming to pick their own.;

Both feel that a visit to the farm ought to be enjoyable. There is a pick-your-own enclosure that has recently been expanded and people who need more help can order a bucket full of already conditioned flowers and foliage in their chosen colour scheme, which they can then arrange themselves. It’s an economical and sustainable way of providing flowers for an event, as well as giving any occasion a much more personal feel. For those with less confidence at floristry, bouquets and posies can be made to order.

Ms Benn is chief grower and her plant palette is huge and varied. The farm is organic, which can make control of pests and diseases difficult at the start, but as biodiversity increases even slugs should soon be a thing of the past. She chooses plants that have many seasons of interest, as well as a long vase life, and is quick to dismiss anything that is not working.

There are the usual foliage favourites, such as eucalyptus, alongside some things you would never find in a flower shop. Raspberry leaves, snowberry and herbs — especially mint for scent — are regularly included in mixed bunches. I saw hips and haws and species roses and plenty of grasses and, from every roof in the three sheds, flowers were hung out to dry. ‘We like dead beauty,’ Mrs Loehnis says, and you can’t help agreeing when there are perfect alliums like falling fireworks and loops and giant mossed balls of everlasting flowers above your head.

There was a workshop on drying flowers planned and another on wreaths before Christmas; this year various gardening, painting and arranging sessions were held. Chippy Flower Farm seems to generate enthusiasm and excitement. ‘We want everyone to have a magical time here,’ Mrs Loehnis adds. Perhaps because everyone who works there seems to be enjoying what they do enormously, the customers are happy, too.

See more about Chippy Flower Farm in Little Tew, Oxfordshire at www.chippyflowerfarm.co.uk

Chippy’s flower recommendations

• Best annuals for picking Daucus carota for being beautiful at all stages, clary sage for sowing itself so reliably, corncockle for airy elegance and helichrysum, which is enjoying a renaissance as fashionable dried flowers, but is also lovely and useful fresh. ‘A new one for us last year was Amberboa muricata ‘Desert Star’, which had a really long picking season’
• Best perennials for cutting Patrinia scabiosifolia is a great and less well-known late-flowering filler. Geums come to the rescue in May with pretty accents when everyone wants flowers, but their gardens haven’t got going yet. Sorrel, left to go to seed, produces amazing limey-bronze spikes. Limonium tatarica (sea lavender) is pure dried-flower gold
• Reliable foliage for floristry Alchemilla mollis for zinginess, snowberry and flowering currant for plugging the May gap and senecio for being a year-round workhorse. Osmanthus burkwoodii has many seasons of usefulness. ‘We also use lots of herbs’
• Conditioning tips Burning the ends of Icelandic poppies with a match is essential to ensure long vase life. ‘We dip lots of stems in boiling water, too: a couple of seconds for flowers and longer for woodier stems. Hydrangeas and orlaya get

'My earliest memories are of the garden. My parents had a cottage in Suffolk when I was tiny, and I remember being in the vegetable garden with my dad and of him digging up potatoes; the day was beautiful blue and he was wearing his beloved navy jumper with holes in it.’

Sophie Conran has her own vegetable garden now in the 70-acre grounds at Salthrop House, a pretty, Grade II-listed Regency manor tucked away in a hidden landscape on the edge of the Marlborough Downs in Wiltshire. It’s an idyllic spot, sheltered by mature trees, with a long open view from the sitting room and over the main terrace, but, other than a few shrubs — a Judas tree, a tree peony and yews — there was no garden other than the stone flagged terraces, when she came here 11 years ago.

Yet, clearly, she has inherited that Conran gene for making places you dream of living in — and doing so apparently effortlessly, as a walk around the garden reveals. The immediate setting helps, with a weathered stone wall curving easily around the environs of the house and scatterings of old outbuildings beyond. In one, cut flowers from the vegetable garden wait in buckets to be brought indoors; another houses the garden office; there’s a potting shed, a shed for the tractor and everywhere are pots and seed trays of annuals waiting to go in.

Miss Conran does have a great team under head gardener Anne Roberts, overseen by Kate Gatacre, formerly head grower at Linley Walled Garden in Shropshire, but the vision is all her own. A copper-beech hedge looked stiff and wrong, so that went, as did the Leylandii, which were replaced by a mixed hedge ‘full of dog roses and wildlife’. She has made a meadow in the old horse field, seeding it with yellow rattle before dropping in ragged robin and Gladiolus byzantinus, both of which reappear each year to light up the long grass with shots of bright pink. Four beautiful Saddleback pigs arrived a few weeks ago and are doing a wonderful job of clearing a nearby area of wild ground—and helping control an area of Japanese knotweed.

The muted blues and pinks and the billowy softness of the planting on the terrace beds outside the sitting room are just the thing to marry the house to the wilder areas beyond. Several rectangular beds — anchored at the corners with box mounds and euphorbia clumps — link the terrace to a small and easy-going lawn, which is there for sitting and drinking in the view.

No hard edges bring one up short, instead, the beds are divided by turf paths partly hidden beneath the leaves of a geranium or Alchemilla mollis; cracks in the paving on the terrace are left for self-seeders, the house beds are brimful of roses in summer and more scramble up the walls. Set out on an assortment of tables, terracotta pots and half pans are filled with flowering plants from the greenhouses. It all adds to the impression of soft abundance. Later in the year, pink Japanese anemones play a similar role in the beds beside the house. Those nearest to the fields are left for naturalistic perennials that blur the line between the gardened and the wild.

Behind a yew hedge and enjoying the deep shade it casts over a rubble-strewn slope (the remains of an old building) is the fern garden. The ferns were already here, but, rather than fighting them, this yew-bounded green enclosure has been given a simple, but confident brush-up by adding stands of the dependable white Hydrangea arborescens ‘Annabelle’ and, at their feet, the ever-useful glossy green paddles of bergenia.

It comes as no surprise that this isn’t the first garden Miss Conran has made. That was in Australia, where she did a gardening course after moving there in her mid twenties. She dug vegetable beds out of the heavy clay and sculpted terraces. ‘We did all sorts of things and it ended up being lovely and I planted loads of trees that are now proper trees. And then we came back here to a little farm in Dorset and we did quite a lot of work there, turning fields into terraces and putting in stone steps with water running down them.’

At the heart of the garden here at Salthrop, spiritually if not physically, is the vegetable garden, which is built on the memories of her own childhood. ‘When I was six, my mum and my dad bought a beautiful house that had been turned into a school. There were big walled gardens and all the greenhouses had been smashed to bits, so they rebuilt those and renovated the garden and that was really my playground. I’d go out and eat peas and strawberries and be a fairy or run around looking at things and smelling things. The house was always filled with people from my dad’s work and my mum was writing cookery books and there were my brothers, so there were lots of boys and noise, and the garden was where I could be free.’

The Salthrop potager was made from scratch on ground that turned out — according to a 1747 map that predates the house and was discovered by garden historian Marion Mako — to have been the site of a former productive garden. After generations of mulching, the soil here is rich and fertile, with seams of greensand running through it. On the footprint of the old glasshouse, there now stands a Woodpecker Joinery greenhouse filled mainly with pelargoniums — indeed, they hide the whole of the back wall — together with citrus, streptocarpus and several impressively large money plants, Crassula ovata, that were cuttings from her father, Sir Terence Conran, and are now nurtured by his daughter.

Her mother, food writer Caroline Conran, and her grandmother, both grew pelargoniums, but the memory that sticks in her mind is of her mother, ‘digging these long beds, and me and my friend Susie—we must have been about eight—took all our clothes off and ran up and down the beds in the drizzle and mashed it all up after my mama had spent I don’t know how many days tilling the soil. I think she cried. It’s fixed in my memory: the joy of running in that lovely wet mud’.

The timber-edged growing beds (dug out of the grass, with cardboard laid down before the compost went in) are divided by a narrow row of bricks for easy access. The beds are allocated pretty much half and half to annual flowers for cutting and vegetables. Brassicas are netted, berries fill the fruit cage, the arbour is threaded with sweet peas and gourds and dotted between the productive beds are shrub roses. The

turf path to the greenhouse is framed by heaps of nasturtiums, from which rise giant globe artichokes. To complete the picture as you wander through is the constant noisy companionship of the ducks and chickens —35 chicks hatched this year — and the hum of honey bees from the nearby hives. It is truly an idyll for all ages.

Salthrop Manor, Wiltshire, will host rare plant fairs on May 10 and September 11, 2026 — see www.rareplantfair.co.uk for more details.

This feature originally appeared in the print edition of Country Life — here's how you can subscribe to Country Life magazine.

British gardeners can take pride in two of our greatest inventions: landscape parks and herbaceous borders. The landscape movement was a development of the old deer parks, but we owe the borders to our mild, damp climate and our love of flowers. The history of herbaceous borders goes back a long way. In the 18th century, Philip Miller clumped different plants together for ornamental effect at the Chelsea Physic Garden in London and, by 1800, our ancestors were making mixed borders of shrubs and hardy plants.

It was the writings of William Robinson and, especially, of Gertrude Jekyll, however, that turned herbaceous borders into essential features of any respectable country garden. Jekyll’s books Colour in the Flower Garden (1908) and Colour Schemes for the Flower Garden (1919), both of them published by COUNTRY LIFE, were extremely influential 100 years ago and remain both practical and inspirational today.

Jekyll was championed by Graham Stuart Thomas, the leading gardener of the second half of the 20th century. He articulated her principles in his books and applied them to the many gardens he designed for the National Trust. The Trust style of planting was from the start intended to be the exemplar of good taste, although the need for economy — maximum effect for minimum cost — meant that easy-to-grow groundcover plants were often chosen to simplify maintenance.

The classic herbaceous border offers a succession of flowers from June until the first frosts. Perfectionists plan their border month by month. It is possible to make a border that is all blue, pink and white in June, but a mass of hot reds, yellows and oranges in August. Most gardeners maximise colour, valuing it more than shape, form and texture. Other owners look for continuity and prefer to plant each section of a border so that its colours are consistent throughout the season. They seek out plants such as fuchsias and Geranium Rozanne that are always in flower. A typical scheme might run from cool colours to hot in the middle, then back to cool again at the far end. The ideal is a succession of harmonious groupings, each of them different, where shapes and colours combine to come together well. There is no short-age of choice for every conceivable situation.

Single-colour borders are not easy to sustain. Vita Sackville-West’s white garden at Sissinghurst in Kent has inspired thousands of imitations, but white flowers, together with silver and grey foliage, are better as foils to other colours.

Traditional herbaceous borders are dull in winter when all the plants have been cut back and the surface topped with compost or manure. The traditional way to put some life into them is to use clipped evergreens, especially topiary in box and yew. Sometimes yew hedges, not too tall, are planted to run from the back of the border right to the front, thereby restructuring the bed as a series of compartments. Evergreen flowering shrubs are also valued: mixed borders will have Daphne bholua at the back, choisyas and Euphorbia characias in the centre and hebes and lavender towards the front. The influence of designers such as Piet Oudolf in recent years has added some evergreen sedges and grasses. Jekyll herself incorporated ferns.

Some gardeners like to see flowers in every month of the year. It is easy to add plants that flower between November and March. Bergenias and Oriental hellebores are wonderful winter bloomers and their handsome leaves contribute to the composition after they have finished flowering. Spring bulbs, especially tulips and daffodils, can be chosen to flower successively over several months. Many gardeners also take inspiration from summer bedding. Gaps open up, for example, after the spring bulbs have flowered, and the wise gardener will fill them with bedding plants or annuals. It is important to sustain the display.

Biennials are also useful, especially early in the season. Foxgloves, Canterbury bells and sweet williams can then be succeeded by dahlias and chrysanthemums. These glorious late bloomers may need to be lifted and replanted every year, but they make such a show that most gardeners consider them essential constituents of their herbaceous plantings. The same is true of monocotyledons: irises, lilies, galtonias, gladioli, crocosmias and crinums will all add enormously to the display.

The best herbaceous borders are designed not only to show off their flower power, but also to create contrasts or harmonies of shape and colour. Some plants have always been incorporated because, although their flowers are insignificant, their foliage is a fine foil to others. Giant cardoons and Macleaya cordata are always impressive, whereas Alchemilla mollis, which was surprisingly little known until the 1950s when Graham Stuart Thomas championed it, is invaluable. Grey- and silver-leaved plants are useful not only for their own qualities, but also for blending different colours. It is hard to imagine a modern herbaceous border without silvery artemisias, Stachys lanata and Lychnis coronaria.

Most borders are planted against a wall or hedge. Climbing plants, such as roses on a wall, will deepen the display, whereas hedges of hornbeam and beech are especially beautiful when clematis and honeysuckle weave through them. Scarlet Tropaeolum speciosum threading its way through clipped yew hedges is almost a cliché of Scottish and Irish gardens. Remember, however, that hedging plants have roots that extend a long way into the border, which will affect the choice of plants. A path between the hedge and the back of the border is essential for access for hedge cutting and maintenance.

There is no consensus on whether the front of a border should be neatly defined, typically by low box hedges, or edged with an intermediate feature, such as paving slabs, that plants can flop over. Lavender is a good choice because it has every desirable quality — handsome grey leaves, colour and a scent to grab you as you walk along.

The way to learn about making borders is to visit good gardens and study what you see. Christopher Lloyd’s Long Border at Great Dixter in East Sussex has been famous for 50 years. The double border that runs up to Battleston Hill at RHS Wisley in Surrey is better than ever now and you should also see the newly reorganised Oudolf borders. For sheer grandeur, it is hard to beat the double borders at Newby Hall in North Yorkshire, which run due south for 200 yards from the house to the River Ure. Look back up, and see how perfectly they frame the gorgeous 18th-century mansion.

Some borders are designed to be seen from inside the house. The double borders at Bramdean House in Hampshire — England’s finest, pictured at the top of this page — are stupendous when seen from above, not least because they are planted as mirror images of each other. Because they are cut out of the lawns with no hedge to back them, Bramdean’s borders may also be studied not only from the central path, but from the outside.

Large beds devoted to a single genus can be spectacular, but are suitable only for very large gardens. Nevertheless, one can but goggle at the 100-yard border of peonies at Penshurst in Kent and the massive displays of asters at the Picton Garden attached to Old Court Nurseries in Herefordshire. There is much to be learned from walking slowly along these displays, noting the good plants and plantings that catch your eye. Indeed, that is the way to study all the best borders.

Many of the principles laid out by writers from Jekyll to Thomas can be applied to much smaller areas within the garden. Herbaceous borders or plantings do not have to be of any particular shape. The island beds promoted by Alan Bloom at Bressingham in Norfolk have for many years been a major source of ongoing education to gardeners in search of inspiration. Herbaceous borders are also a useful source of flowers and fragrance for the house, although the grandest gardens usually have dedicated cutting gardens, often in the walled garden alongside fruit and vegetables.

Planting a border requires considerable thought and preparation, but its subsequent maintenance is no less demanding. Constant weeding, splitting, mulching, deadheading and staking are needed to keep it in good condition. Borders are most rewarding creations, but expensive in time and money. Their origins, after all, date back to a time of industrial wealth, inexpensive skilled labour and the expectation that gardens should be maintained in great style.

One of the joys of gardening — but especially of borders — is that everything is always work in progress. Borders will never look the same as they do right now. Plants grow and flower at a slightly different season every year, so the combinations that entrance you today may not come together next year in quite the same way. Owners look at their borders and make alterations to the plantings all the time — moving, replanting, removing and adding.

What, then, makes a successful border? One answer is this — good plants, thoughtful planting, harmonies of colour and shape, and succession. And, above all, deep commitment on the part of the owners.

Bordering on brilliance: Where to see the best borders in Britain

• The Long Border at Great Dixter, East Sussex — 01797 253107; www.greatdixter.co.uk
• The peony border at Penshurst Place, Kent — 01892 870307; www.penshurstplace.com
• The massive displays of asters at the Picton Garden attached to Old Court Nurseries, Herefordshire — 01684 540416; www.oldcourtnurseries.co.uk
• The double border that runs up to Battleston Hill and the new Oudolf Landscape at RHS Wisley, Surrey — 01483 224234; www.rhs.org.uk
• The double borders at Newby Hall, North Yorkshire — 01423 322583; www.newbyhall.com
• The mirrored double borders at Bramdean House, Hampshire, which open for the National Garden Scheme on September 14 — www.ngs.org.uk
• The island beds planted by Alan Bloom at the Bressingham Gardens, Norfolk — 01379 686900; www.bressingham.co.uk

This feature originally appeared in the print edition of Country Life — here's how you can subscribe to Country Life magazine.

It is a privilege indeed for Country Life to be shown the large composting area at the National Trust for Scotland’s (NTS) 54-acre garden at Inverewe on Loch Ewe in Wester Ross. ‘I don’t bring many people up here,’ says Kevin Ball, who has been head gardener since 2006.

Composting has always been important in a garden conjured from bare rock and Mr Ball and his team pride themselves on producing large volumes of high-quality material within six months. It is here that woody and herbaceous waste, seaweed gathered from the shoreline and all the bamboo cutlery and paper cups and plates from the café end up. The materials are layered like a lasagne in long windrows and monitored by a digital probe to alert the gardeners when the heap gets close to 60˚C, so it can be turned (five times), then moved to another area to decompose further before being returned to the garden. ‘It’s a very professional system,’ says Mr Ball. ‘It kills off all the weed seeds and the nasty diseases and pathogens.’

That’s not all there is to admire backstage: next, the Exeter retort, a large metal drum on wheels that can be moved around the estate or lent to other NTS gardens. It is where the team makes biochar, a premium-quality charcoal created without oxygen to produce pure carbon in a process called pyrolysis. It is then crumbled and added to the compost as a supersonic soil improver to neutralise acidity, improve water and nutrient retention, aerate and offer habitats for microbes.

These self-sufficient innovations would surely have met the approval of Osgood Mackenzie, the garden’s creator. In 1862, his mother, Mary (née Hanbury), the wealthy second wife of Sir Francis, 12th laird of Gairloch, bought him the 2,000-acre estate to secure his financial future. Mackenzie wrote later of the high red-sandstone bluff that juts into the sea loch: ‘This promontory, where the rock was not actually a bare slab, was mostly covered with short heather and still shorter crowberry, and the only soil on it was some black peat, varying from an inch to two in depth… with the exception of two tiny bushes of dwarf willow about three feet high, there was nothing in the shape of a tree or shrub anywhere within sight.’

Whereas many 20 year olds might have accepted the gift of this most remote of locations, more than 75 miles north-west of Inverness, through gritted teeth, Mackenzie had inherited a love of plants from his father and grandfather and had faith. Although the land lies at 58 degrees, the same latitude as Moscow and Hudson Bay, and is battered by salt-laden Atlantic winds, the warm air of the Gulf Stream allowed him to plant a magnificent and varied garden of exotic species from around the world on the seemingly unpromising site. It would eventually be given to the NTS in 1952 by his daughter Mairi Sawyer, an equally keen plantswoman, who had further developed it after Mackenzie’s death in 1922.

Leaving the building of a Scottish baronial mansion to his mother (it burnt down, to be replaced by Sawyer in 1937 by the present house), Mackenzie initially set about planting a shelterbelt consisting largely of Scots pine, including 100 young trees grown on his half-brother Sir Kenneth Mackenzie’s estate at nearby Loch Maree — although he did later regret not having begun with the tougher, non-native Pinus montana. Were it not for this protection from the prevailing southwesterlies, it is unlikely that tender species from New Zealand and South Africa, shrubs and trees from Chile and Tasmania, rare rhododendrons, Chatham Island forget-me-nots, tree ferns and, more recently, a grove of Wollemi pines, would have survived in what would become known as the ‘oasis of the north’.

Mackenzie had the shoreline hand-picked of thousands of pebbles and brought in tons of soil to make the famous one-acre walled kitchen garden that slopes down to the loch on wide curved terraces like an amphitheatre. Vegetables, fruit bushes and trained trees, many of them old Scottish varieties, are still grown there, largely for the staff to harvest, dotted with colour breaks of flowers, such as calendula, sweet peas, nicandra and dahlias.

It’s not only the star players, such as Californian redwoods, Tasmanian snow gum and the collection of aeoniums, that are important at Inverewe, but those species that require a closer eye to appreciate them: ferns, lichens, liverworts and mosses that flourish in the warm moist air. With its high rainfall, Inverewe is part of the temperate rainforest of the west of Scotland and the dappled shade in the woodland creates a humid, glade-like habitat in which epiphytes can flourish: dozens of lichen species thrive on the spreading limbs of the magnificent variegated turkey oak, Quercus cerris ‘Argenteovariegata’.

As elsewhere, the changing climate is having its effects and rainfall has increased by 6in since 1960. ‘We have dry periods in spring that go on for weeks and when we do get rain in the gaps between, it is torrential and can last for days,’ says Mr Ball.

With such intensity, nutrients are leached from the soil and the arid spells affect the garden’s rhododendron collection, as their shallow root systems can dry out in the spring and summer, when their growth largely happens. This is where the supercharged composting and mulching helps, to keep replenishing and protecting the soil.

Most damaging are the winter storms, which can have far-reaching effects: January 2022’s Storm Corrie brought down many trees in the high viewpoint by the jetty. The biggest pine, dating back to Mackenzie’s day, also fell, wiping out several trees and opening up an area to the wind. Clearing up the damage to make the garden safe for its 60,000 annual visitors is a time-consuming exercise.

With some of the original planting more than 160 years old, ‘we’re trying our best to focus on the shelterbelt, because without it there won’t be an Inverewe garden,’ says Mr Ball. The gardeners have saved cones from the fallen pine and others in the area, as well as genetic material from species rhododendrons, such as an R. arboreum that was planted by Mackenzie. The rhododendrons are being propagated and the pines’ progeny are being planted out to replenish the ageing shelterbelt. The cycle of life continues and hope springs anew in the oasis of the North.

Find out more about Inverewe at the NTS website

This feature originally appeared in the print edition of Country Life — here's how you can subscribe to Country Life magazine.

As soon as you enter the barely there, wrought-iron gates of Ballynure House in Co Wicklow, Ireland, the estate deploys its magic. A small lake appears on your left, a flawless Monet painting with a gently arched bridge and a mournful weeping willow. Two mute swans glide across the glassy surface. Further on, the leisurely avenue is densely planted with young oak and beech. Their slim trunks partially screen the view, as green leaves confer a pale, watery light.

The vista opens again on a handsome pastoral landscape where paddocks and farm fields sweep down to a fringe of woodland along the fast-flowing River Greese. The Georgian house, assuredly pure in all its lines and a warm biscuity colour, comes into sight. It commands the pleasing bucolic prospect and that of the distant mountains of Keadeen and Lugnaquilla.

Ballynure House, together with its 35 acres of gardens and pleasure grounds, is set into a 300-acre farm. It is impeccably maintained and continually improved. It was not always so. When the late David Reid Scott inherited from his grandparents in 1976, the property — which had been in the family since 1617 — was in a sad state. As is the way of old buildings, the house had begun to crumble and rampant scrub had engulfed the gardens. By the 1990s, Reid Scott, an investment banker, was able to start restoring the house and gardens. Both were dear to him; he and his brother, Malise, had been orphaned young and had been largely brought up by their grandparents in the old house. Their grandmother, Star Mitchell, had been a great gardener, as was her sister, Phyllis, who moved in temporarily during the Second World War, and never left.

Reid Scott died in 2020 after a riding accident, but his wife, Clare, shared his passion for the historic estate and has carried on his work. Their son, Nico (who recently graduated from university), is undaunted by the thought of inheriting in the coming years: ‘Dad was so organised. He left it all in such an amazing state. It is so well managed, and that takes off the stress.’

Clare is ably supported by an enthusiastic staff, including head gardener Brian O’Reilly and farm manager Mick Murtagh. ‘They are employed,’ she says, ‘but they are family. I couldn’t live without any single one of them.’

In the 1990s, the laurels, brambles and saplings that crowded around the house were bulldozed away and the land was shaped into graceful contours. Cool, verdant lawns now act as a foil for the handsome and stalwart house, as crescent-shaped herbaceous borders on the south and west sides make a brightly-embroidered collar. Reid Scott loved the razzle-dazzle of fiery-toned flowers, although his wife prefers ‘pretty and lovely pastels’. Plantswoman June Blake — whose remarkable garden is 30 minutes up the road, near Blessington — was brought in to help with the planting.

The four beds that make up the borders have distinct moods: hot for him and cool for her. Lofty eutrochiums, more than 9ft tall, are repeated in beds of both temperatures, lending rhythm and consistency. They are mobbed by dozens of small tortoiseshell butterflies. Brian is keen on pollinators and grows as many attractant plants as possible. The caterpillars of the colourful vanessids (small tortoiseshells, red admirals and commas, among others) are sustained by nettles in the woods and all along the field margins.

The hot beds are filled with extrovert plants, such as red monarda and bistort, apricot-and-plum alstroemeria and hot-pink echinaceas. Dramatic dahlias brashly grab attention; among them are ‘Natal’, a deep-red pom-pom, and the semi-double ‘Waltzing Matilda’, which is suffused with coral, cerise and orange. The quieter beds, known as ‘Clare’s beds’, are home to gentler pinks, mauves and whites: phloxes, veronicastrum, agastache, salvia, Allium ‘Summer Beauty’ and the dahlia ‘Paradise City’. Lobelia ‘Hadspen Purple’ adds a note of vivid violet and annual cosmos, both white and pink, is used to fill gaps in late summer. Because Ballynure can get a ‘good bit of frost’, Brian lifts and stores the borderline and tender plants: dahlias, lobelias, salvias. As the wind can be forceful and damaging, plants ‘are staked to the hilt — but invisibly. A shed-load of staking goes on here. If you stand here long enough, you’ll be staked!’

Hydrangea paniculata bears creamy blossoms over a long period and is used to back ‘Clare’s beds’. Farther away from the house, a gathering of different hydrangeas is massed along a low stone wall. The wall was built to retain an inconvenient, sloping bank and its awkwardness is completely disguised by the many-toned, candy-coloured flowerheads. Along another wall bordering the old farmyard, a flock of fuchsias flourishes, their thousands of little bells trembling in the breeze. Reid Scott loved fuchsias, so they are also planted in huge terracotta pots by the house.

Yew hedging is used throughout the garden to delineate spaces, provide shelter and create areas. It thrives at Ballynure, which is fitting, as the Irish name Baile an iubhair means town of the yew. There are mature yews here also, as well as many other fine trees in the parkland. The Reid Scotts have continually planted, so there are young and lithe specimens in attendance to the venerable, lichen-encrusted characters.

The different habitats — garden, grassland, woodland, river and lake — give sanctuary and sustenance to much wildlife. Wrens and robins nest in the tree ferns and house martins fly in each year from Africa to raise their chicks under the eaves of the old house. The lake, which was made in 1995, is visited by swans, herons, kingfishers and red squirrels. An osprey, a bird persecuted to extinction by the 19th century in Ireland, has been spotted. It is a scarce passage migrant that depends on fish for its diet.

The entire estate is, in the words of farm manager Mick: ‘Heaven! And no one knows it’s in here. That’s the best part, I think.’ Clare agrees: ‘As soon as I set foot in London, I’m counting the days till I can get back.’

This feature originally appeared in the print edition of Country Life — here's how you can subscribe to Country Life magazine.

Glenarm Castle sits in an enviable location at the western end of its attractive village, surrounded by an elegant park. The salmon- and trout-rich Glenarm River and adjacent forest margin the park to the south, but a very short walk northwards from the castle brings you to a crescent bay and the rugged Antrim seashore. From here, you can see Scotland on a clear day, notably the Mull of Kintyre, not far away.

A big draw at Glenarm, especially in summer, is its four-acre, trapezoid walled garden, built in the 1820s to shelter all the fruit and vegetable produce then required by the castle. Today, it is primarily ornamental, but productivity has been reinstated, via a small and very charming potager just over the wall, beside the old gardeners’ bothy and mushroom house.

Within the walled garden, you cannot help admiring the magnificent trees that surround it (including fine conifers, sycamores and oaks). When the sun drops lower, you can particularly appreciate the garden’s strong bones, the contrasting textures and colours of its yew and beech hedging and the intriguing effects of golden light and green shadow. In this ancient place, it might come as a surprise to discover that nearly all of the present garden was made in the 21st century.

Randal McDonnell, the present (15th) Earl of Antrim, took over the Glenarm estate from his father in 1992, when he was only 25 years old. He recalls taking on somewhere that would need a lot of time, work and investment to turn it around and earn its keep.

‘I was rather excited, actually. I wasn’t remotely daunted, although, with hindsight, I should have been,’ he says. ‘It was really just a farming enterprise. The walled garden had been let go completely; there were sheep in it and I was advised to turn it into a tree nursery.’ Unsurprisingly, cash-crop Christmas trees or rows of saplings had no appeal, but he felt the garden had other possibilities in the longer term.

Since the early years of the new millennium, Lord and Lady Antrim have together been developing the gardens, beginning with the lower, eastern end and the south-facing wall with its very long range of beautifully restored Victorian glasshouses. Various talented people have injected their expertise over the years. Early on, the Antrims brought in Nigel Marshall, a retired head gardener from the renowned Mount Stewart gardens, also close to Ireland’s north-east coast. ‘He was a wonderful plantsman — he planted up the borders, including the one we call our hot border, which reaches its crescendo of colour in high summer,’ says Lady Antrim.

The Irish garden designer Catherine Fitz-Gerald was commissioned in 2006 to create a coherent plan for the upper half of the garden, taking in an existing circle of beech hedging and a short stretch of crinkle-crankle curved hedges, planted by Lord Antrim’s grandfather in the 1960s. Mindful of a request for low-maintenance options, but wanting to retain the spirit of the place, her interesting solution was to divide the area into six hedge-enclosed areas, most of which suggest fruit orchards. Thus, one compartment is devoted to pears (both free-standing and espaliered). Others are for free-standing apple trees, crab apples, cherries and medlars. The cherry on the cake, as it were, occupies the top of the garden, where a grassy mount is ascended via a spiral path. Its summit gives marvellous bird’s-eye views, so that you see how everything fits together, within the greater landscape.

The Antrims’ most recent adviser is gardens consultant Neil Porteous (coincidentally, also formerly at Mount Stewart). A well-travelled plantsman with a liking for exotic species, Mr Porteous has been steering new initiatives and refreshing the borders for the past four years. ‘Neil is pushing us into exotic areas, which is very exciting,’ confirms Lord Antrim. ‘We’ve got a banana border and I think a few more flourishes might be a good idea.’

To this end, the restored glasshouses are very much a working area for raising seeds and cuttings of various exotic species. Some are tender, others of borderline hardiness and most will try a turn outdoors, to test their garden-worthiness. Mr Porteous points out many species he is nurturing, such as the cherry-red Mexican bush mallow, Phymosia umbellata, and fast-growing Salvia gesneriiflora, from the Mexican mountains. The latter grows to about 10ft and, unusually for a salvia, produces its scarlet blooms from late winter into spring.

Floral activity outdoors is chiefly confined to deep borders hugging the garden walls, each having its own character. Among them, the hot border, facing south, is warmed by orange tiger lilies Lilium lancifolium, golden rudbeckias, Crocosmia masoniorum ‘Dixter Flame’, crimson penstemons and scarlet Monarda didyma, amid contrasting grasses, and tall Eutrochium maculatum Atropurpureum Group, a magnet for butterflies.

The east wall marks the lowest part of the sloping garden with its interesting mix of shrubs, perennials and wall climbers. Foliage is a large part of the effect here, from tree peonies, dark-bronze Cotinus coggygria, a copper-coloured acer and tall grasses, illuminated by the pale-violet flowers of Hydrangea aspera. Tucked in among them is a beautiful mother-and-child sculpture carved long ago by Lord Antrim’s grandmother, when she was a teenage art student.

Summer’s pièce de résistance, however, is a classic double herbaceous border cutting across the middle of the garden, accessed by a broad, turf path. Replanted three years ago in shades of mauve, pink and white, it sits very comfortably in the soft, Irish light, with pink astilbes and phlox, airy, mauve Verbena bonariensis and Thalictrum delavayi. Highlights erupt with white lilies, agapanthus, white phlox and silvery spires of perovskia. It leads to a small herb garden within a great circle of yew, the latter being a lone survivor from the heyday of the Victorian garden.

Lord Antrim explains that renovating the garden became the foundation for other, unexpected things: ‘Apart from it being a source of great enjoyment for us and, we hope, our visitors, it has enabled us to create a sort of hook to hang other things on that we might not otherwise have done. Food and beverage, a retail shop and other activities. Beef shorthorn is one of the things where we have created a very strong reputation, as well as an organic-salmon business in Glenarm Bay, the acceptable face of salmon aquaculture.’

Indeed. Here is a perfect example of the acorn that has become a mighty and life-enhancing oak.

Visit www.glenarmcastle.com to find out more about visiting; and read Non Morris’s 2017 piece looking in detail at the walled garden at Glenarm Castle.

This feature originally appeared in the print edition of Country Life — here's how you can subscribe to Country Life magazine.

Great Dixter in East Sussex means inspirational gardening — and has done for more than 100 years. Plants, design and artistry come together in a manner unparalleled in any other garden that I have visited or heard of. Country Life readers know it well through the weekly columns of Christopher Lloyd, from 1962 until his death in 2006. His influence on sophisticated garden owners cannot be overstressed.

The house was assembled and the garden first laid out, shortly before the First World War, by Christopher’s father Nathaniel Lloyd, who wrote a book about topiary. It was called Garden Craftsmanship in Yew and Box and was published 100 years ago in 1925. Reprints are still available from your favourite online bookseller.

I first visited Great Dixter in October 1970 and met Lloyd Snr’s widow — rather a forthright old lady who wanted to show me her giant Turkish turban gourds. Nothing was said about the spectacular plants of cannabis that their son grew in tubs outside the front door. Cannabis was still a popular bedding plant at the time, although I was later told that the specimens at Great Dixter were well known to students at the University of Sussex.

My interest in Great Dixter had been aroused by the younger Lloyd’s highly successful book The Well-Tempered Garden, which had just been published. It was based in part upon his essays in Country Life and it taught me the basis for using and choosing plants. It was one of two publications that set me on the road to becoming a keen gardener — the other was Russell Page’s The Education of a Gardener. Both remain as constant sources of inspiration more than 50 years on.

I never knew Lloyd well enough to call him ‘Christo’, as so many of his friends still do. He was one of those people who could be both kind and unkind, and I remained in awe of him and his wisdom, although I was pleased to see some of my own books in his study on a visit about 20 years ago. Friends remember him as excellent company, rather opinionated, but a generous host, a fine cook and a lover of chamber music and Lieder.

I have continued to visit Great Dixter over the years, piqued or intrigued, first by Lloyd’s column and latterly by reports of changes wrought by his visionary heir, Fergus Garrett. I felt that Lloyd’s destruction of his rose garden had been a mistake because, had he chosen to seek out newer cultivars than the black-spotted oldies he decried, he could have enjoyed more and better roses for years to come. I have also never seen better-grown examples of those period beauties ‘Madame Butterfly’, dating to 1918, and its descendant ‘Chanelle’, introduced in 1959.

Nevertheless, such was the power and influence of Lloyd’s writings that members of the rose trade still blame him for the decline in their popularity. In fact, there are many roses at Great Dixter, even in the Exotic Garden, and they are one of its glories in due season. Anyone with a garden in London should study the plants in the Exotic Garden, which is a model of how to create a glorious jungle of shapes and colours in a small space.

Not all changes have been an improvement. Lloyd Snr’s topiary garden was the perfect foil to his pseudo-ancient house. It was photographed time and again as an example of how the shapes of clipped yews could suggest an English idyll of antiquity. Their bulky forms were grounded in a fine, flat lawn, a symbol of civilisation that stood in contrast to the wild landscapes beyond the garden’s boundaries.

Alas, the work of nearly a century has been undone and the grass allowed to grow to create a meadow, quite inappropriate as a context for the topiaries, creating a wilderness far too close to the house. Perhaps the time will come when this rewilding is seen to have been a trendy mistake and the elegant lawns will be restored.

I remember that I was puzzled, on that first visit 55 years ago, by Great Dixter’s Long Border. Lloyd experimented constantly with the way he chose to combine and display its plantings, but, back in 1970, I thought the reality did not conform to the vision I had conjured from his writings — a series of contrasts and harmonies of shapes and colours that would guide and inspire me in my own first garden. It got better on subsequent visits: I took innumerable photographs of it, section by section, and studied them when I got home.

Under Fergus’s guidance, however, its plantings are the best I have ever seen — brilliant combinations of form and colour throughout the seasons. Visiting gardens has been part of my job for many years, but my latest trip to Great Dixter, last month, was the high point of all my garden visiting for a long time. I cannot recommend it too highly to anyone who wants to learn how to garden in the style in which the English have for so long excelled.

Charles Quest-Ritson’s book The Olive Tree (Ediciones El Viso, £50) is out now

This article first appeared in the August 13 2025 edition of Country Life. For more information on how to subscribe, click here

At flower shows, everyone wanted to talk,’ remembers nurseryman and grass specialist Neil Lucas. ‘It was both the plant and the advice they wanted. This place is built around that.’

At Knoll Gardens in Dorset, Neil has spent decades experimenting, testing and observing how grasses work in every sort of environment. ‘When we arrived in 1994, this was a botanic garden run as a tourist attraction,’ explains Neil. ‘We would serve 100 cream teas a day.’ Undaunted by coach parties and gaudy bedding-out, he set about transforming his four acres into an innovative, sustainable and naturalistic garden and nursery.

At first, he had no thoughts of being a grass specialist: ‘I just wanted to develop the nursery and if you specialise, you stand out. Grasses are also so adaptable. They aren’t really interested in soil type: it is about sun or shade, wet or dry.’ A trip to California in the US was a further epiphany, where the native plant communities helped him ‘understand the processes and principles that led to beautiful arrangements’. Piece by piece, Neil reshaped Knoll into a series of habitats, where hundreds of different grasses blend with perennials, bulbs and shrubs.

Immediately striking is the profusion of mature specimen trees. The original arboretum, planted in the 1970s and limbed up by Neil, included beautiful willow oaks, Quercus phellos, a Eucryphia x nymansensis that now hurls flowers far into the sky, as well as colossal eucalyptus and ginkgos.

There are plentiful smaller trees and shrubs, too: spindles dangling neon fruits among the autumn seedheads, jaunty fuchsias, crimson acers and Itea ilicifolia, whose catkins are, according to Neil, ‘a nightclub for moths’. The varied canopy meanders over much of the garden, throwing rippling light and shadow onto the planting below and avoiding the monotony of many grass-dominant schemes. Narrow paths weave through areas of woodland, opening suddenly to broad lawns or densely packed borders, before heading back into deep banks or undulating scree. Knoll offers a masterclass in the adaptability of grass.

In the Stream Garden, swathes of libertia and sanguisorba push through Panicum virgatum ‘Blue Steel’ and Deschampsia cespitosa, as the evergreen slender sweet flag, Acorus gramineus ‘Ōgon’, forms soft round pillows along the path edge towards the Damp Garden and Shady Meadow. In the sunbaked Gravel Garden, Neil used light, airy Poa labillardierei, a steely-blue Australian tussock grass, in spacious pools of planting with Scabiosa columbaria and Oenothera lindheimeri. The Dragon Garden, recently replanted in a prairie style, goes all out for colour and drama. Neil wanted ‘new varieties, more exuberance and a greater celebration of variety and form’. Towering grasses and perennials are arranged around a formal, circular pool, with a single, tiny path in and out, so that silky tassels of Miscanthus brush your cheeks. Solidago rugosa ‘Fireworks’ and Persicaria amplexicaulis ‘Fat Domino’ jostle with Stipa gigantea, Pennisetum alopecuroides ‘Black Arrow’ and Panicum amarum ‘Sea Mist’. Calamagrostis x acutiflora ‘Karl Foerster’ stands to attention, threaded through with Symphyotrichum ‘Prairie Purple’. It is the horticultural equivalent of a musical’s big closing number, jubilant and uplifting.

Grasses are easy-going, points out Neil, requiring little other than a cut back in February or a combing through of evergreen species when looking a little tatty. The hardest thing about them is their bewildering number. He suggests starting with broad groups: ‘Pennisetum make a rounded, solid dome with bushy flowers. Panicum have tiny flowers, but millions of them, like a cloud. Miscanthus are tall with fluffier plumes, Calamagrostis are stiffer.’ You can also plan a rolling succession: ‘An early-season grass, such as Stipa calamagrostis ‘Algäu’, will already have seedheads in August, when the molinias will only just be getting going.’ New shoots start to form a vibrant green tapestry across the garden in April, creating a fresh backdrop to summer perennials, then the grasses seize the limelight for their vivid autumn climax before fading into soft shades of caramel, toffee, silver, biscuit and ivory.

Knoll’s encyclopaedic website has a picture gallery for each part of the garden throughout the year, with recommendations for dry shade or which species best catch the morning light; the exceptionally knowledgeable staff answer dozens of questions a day by email or phone. ‘In the past, people had a single ornamental grass as an individual in a lawn,’ notes Neil ‘whereas now they are whole-project led and understand their influence on the environment. The toughness and durability of grasses is valued more than ever.’

Visit the Knoll Gardens website for more information

This feature originally appeared in the July 30, 2025, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe

James Alexander-Sinclair and Monika Horder don’t bother dancing around dainty conversational niceties: ‘How many times did I tell you that you were taking on rather more than you can cope with?’ asks the designer of his German-born client. ‘Every time we met, which did of course rather irritate me,’ says Monika.

James now eats his words somewhat, as Monika, a retired Lloyds underwriter-turned-letter-press printer, has proved herself more than equal to managing the acre of ornamental and kitchen garden he created for her and her husband, Michael, around their home in Somerton, Somerset. ‘It is a challenge that Monika has taken up admirably; it is quite extraordinary the way she has kept the garden going, whereas other people would have given up and turfed half of it over.’

When Michael and Monika were thinking about leaving west London for the country in 2016, their architect, Neil Choudhury, advised them to ‘buy the ugliest house with the nicest view’. In the end, they bought two adjoining properties, knocked them down and built a contemporary house of blue lias stone and concrete, with lots of raw grey metalwork and a black zinc roof, tucked a little further down the slope than the original railway houses, to give it more privacy.

Based on the principle of a Somerset longhouse, the reception rooms and the main bedroom are on the upper floor, with two wings hinged at a wide angle. This allows views over the whole reunited plot to the borrowed landscape of the neighbour’s land beyond the stream. A field hedge topping the other slope creates a near horizon, so the house looks out at a private green amphitheatre: rooms, indeed, with a nice view. It is, however, a tricky site that includes multiple viewpoints and changes of level. ‘As you see it all at once,’ points out Monika, ‘if you get it wrong, you get it really wrong’.

Step in James, whose cheery, informative blog she admired: ‘It was very amusing; it came from the heart.’ As the house was to be contemporary in style, she asked if he would help her create something similar: a garden in the country that wasn’t a traditional English country garden. On his first visit, the designer and his potential client stood at the top, surveying the overgrown land below. ‘By the end of a couple of hours, we thought “this is going to be quite fun”. As to the brief: “Make Monika happy.”’

Wildlife would also find a happy habitat. When the house was being built, down came 35 poplars to create a clearer view of the land — they have been replaced with carefully placed fruit trees that don’t constrain this — and the pond was enlarged. ‘James said to make it three times the size,’ says Monika. ‘You don’t have so much planting to do — you just have water — and it costs less to look after. I’m not so sure about that last bit, as it needs annual cleaning and dredging, but it is an integral feature of the garden and attracts lots of wildlife, so it was worth it. We have herons, egrets, wild duck, moorhens and have even spotted an otter.’

Otherwise, once the builders had left, the garden was a blank canvas on which to work. A wide terrace of engineering brick extends to the south of the house, underneath which is a tank that can hold 10,000 gallons of grey water for irrigation. Neither James nor Monika were keen on terracing the slopes below, however, so, instead, long beds of tall grasses and strong, soaring herbaceous plants stretch like fingers down the slopes, their architectural forms suiting the rather raw, industrial style of the building: ‘We have a lot of skeletons in winter,’ says James. Blue-lias gravel paths run down between them, with changes of level discreetly dealt with by concrete steps, yet, when you are looking down from the terrace, it looks like one big block of texture and colour. To the north and east of the house are quieter areas evoking a woodland, including silver birches, which remind the Horders of the area of west London they left and a border of nut trees and fruit bushes planted specifically for wildlife.

Down by the pond, the robot mower trundles around the grassy areas, occasionally falling into the water, but otherwise doing the job of an under-gardener. ‘James told me I had to get a Mr Corduroy,’ says Monika. ‘One came and said “oooh, it is a bit of a mess; we will take out all that” — and I thought, uh uh, he is not going into my garden.’ Consequently, it is all down to her, save for invaluable occasional input from Agapanthus Landscaping Services.

To create a further rod for her own back, Monika had always dreamt of a kitchen garden — here, Michael comes in, as he is an excellent cook and enjoys picking his own ingredients. There is a hedged area with raised beds of vegetables and fruit bushes, plus several fruit trees dotted around the place that include many unlikely to be available in the village shop, such as medlars, pomegranates, szechuan pepper, cobnuts and Chilean guava.

James returns at least twice a year. This prompted a crisis in his client in its second year when she was still finding her way horticulturally and was worried he would be cross about the way his designs had been looked after. ‘He said “I’m coming” and I said “no you are not, because I am so ashamed and embarrassed”.’ Nevertheless, he turned up, to find a tearful client. ‘He sat me down and said: “Do not worry. It is not my garden, it is yours. If it makes you happy, that is all that matters.”’ It certainly does; brief fulfilled.

Were Chris Vanderspar to need a motto, ‘onwards and upwards’ would be most suitable. Having recently retired from 47 years of travelling the world as principal cellist at the Royal Opera House, he has fully turned his attention to further developing the 3½ acres of garden he shares with his wife, Cathryn, at Ash Park near East Prawle in the South Hams district of Devon. He shows no sign of saying ‘enough, we’re done’.

Situated three miles from the ferry to Salcombe, East Prawle is a pretty village on the brow of long slopes down to the English Channel. Just below the village, down a steep lane and tucked in under a steep escarpment that offers some protection from the winds, as does the shelterbelt of tough shrubs and trees, is the Vanderspars’ property. This includes their garden of surprises from around the world — from gingers, cannas, cordylines and bananas to monkey puzzles, cacti and camellias, as well as a grove of bamboos.

‘We have a lot of South African plants, such as proteas and lampranthus, and plants from other parts of the southern hemisphere, including the fantastic Chilean fire tree (Embothrium coccineum), with its scarlet flowers in the spring,’ says Mr Vanderspar.

It is, in places, a steeply sloping scene, which bothers Mr Vanderspar not a bit. In fact, he is still extending the garden up the rocky outcrop, creating vertiginous, narrow winding paths in order to reach new areas. Whether up here, where the views are 180 degrees wide over the fields spreading down to the sea, but the soil thinner and the land more exposed, or heading to a bench on the other side of the lawn in the lush dell beneath, one feels like a drunken sailor at times as one traverses the incline. Carrying a cup of coffee requires a steady hand and a spirit level.

The couple bought Ash Park 11 years ago, first as a holiday house from their base in Norfolk, although, more recently, it has become their main home. It wasn’t an entirely random decision, as they had been to East Prawle as young sweethearts, camping in the field immediately above the house (not that they noticed it or the garden then). ‘That was more than 40 years ago and it hasn’t really changed. You can’t say that about many places,’ says Mr Vanderspar.

The original house, built hard against the rocky backdrop, was Edwardian and old photographs show it surrounded by stone walls in a neat rectangle. ‘We’ve got pictures from the 1930s of the families who lived here and, clearly, the garden was much enjoyed,’ says Mrs Vanderspar, who is a retired lawyer and non-executive company director. That house burnt down in the early 1980s and the then owners rebuilt it, retaining some of the Edwardian characteristics. They were keen gardeners and also bought land to either side of the original plot, bringing in Hillier Nurseries to provide a landscape design.

By the time the Vanderspars arrived, however, the house was being used for holiday lets and large parts of the garden had become neglected, despite the attentions of Mark Cater, who has been the gardener here since the new house was built. ‘He is marvellous; he has such knowledge of what will do here,’ says Mr Vanderspar. As Mr Cater was only employed for one day a week, it took all his time to maintain merely the lawns and flowerbeds immediately around the house.

He does, however, have a knowledge of what had gone before and, now that he works two to three days a week for his appreciative employers, the garden has revealed itself. ‘All sorts of things had been covered in brambles,’ says Mrs Vanderspar, who considers herself the under-gardener of the trio. ‘It was like the Secret Garden. Digging out, you suddenly say: ‘Oh my goodness, there’s a wall! There are steps!’

Another revelation was the pond, which was leaking (resulting in a major repair project) and gunked up with gunnera. Sorted out now, it attracts myriad dragonflies and is a favourite haunt for a couple of ducks. ‘I didn’t even know it was there,’ says Mr Vanderspar. ‘There was also a smaller pond, which we discovered a year or two later. We are still coming across plants and features that we knew nothing about.’

When the Vanderspars first saw the house in 2014, they were slightly disappointed by the fact that some of the best views were blocked by the more mature trees in the shelterbelt. Be careful what you wish for: a big storm in 2014 felled several of them, mainly pines and leylandii, which opened up the views, but did away with the protection. They have since planted more Monterey pine, oaks and beech, as well as sturdy shrubs (see box). ‘There are very few trees in this area because of the wind, so we are making a point of keeping them,’ says Mrs Vanderspar.

The garden at Ash Park has not been one of rediscovery alone. Mr Vanderspar has been able to make his mark, too, not only in small tweaks such as cutting a path through a grove of deep-red camellias, to make a winding woodland walk where the ground is covered with red petals in spring, but in shaping trees such as mulberry and pine to embrace the architectural feel to the garden, especially near the house and the outcrop. ‘The rock is so much part of the garden, so I’m trying to incorporate the sort of plants that look good with it.’

Again referring to the rock, Mr Vanderspar has added to the existing collection of cacti, huge spiky agaves, towering echiums (which self-seed all over the place), aeoniums and other succulents in gravel beds, whereas at the bottom of the slope in the shelter of the windbreak, things are more lush and subtropical, with the likes of dahlias, gingers, cannas, hedychiums and bananas, which can be left out all year.

The couple have a nice laissez-faire attitude to the self-seeders, the wanderers, the clumps that need dividing: there’s plenty of room and, if they are happy, so are Mr and Mrs Vanderspar, as they are keen to follow and preserve Nature in their precious patch of colour and form within the wider agrarian landscape. ‘The sea, the fields, the changing seasons and the view are all part of what the garden is about,’ says Mrs Vanderspar.

Ash Park, East Prawle, Devon, opens for the National Garden Scheme. For details, visit www.ngs.org.uk

If ever there was a couple capable of tackling the 40 acres of neglected landscape at Caisson House, Combe Hay, near Bath, it is Amanda and Phil Honey. Both are from Somerset farming stock (Mr Honey and his seven siblings grew up a stone’s throw away) and know how gently to nurture the land, but, for many years, they ran Palmbrokers, a company creating elaborate green scenery for big-budget films and events in high-pressure environments: they worked on everything from Hollywood blockbusters such as Troy, The Woman in Black and Miss Potter to shampoo commercials and the plants for the Big Brother house. ‘Going into an empty set and building a forest or garden in three days; not that many people have that experience,’ says Mr Honey.

Rolling up their sleeves to create something of wonder and beauty in unusual, tricky spaces is, therefore, their bread and butter — no bad thing, as, together with the Georgian house and dilapidated farm buildings they bought in 2010, are 15 abandoned canal locks at the bottom of the garden. These are the ghosts of a series of 22 locks that was built between 1795 and 1820 as part of the Somersetshire Coal Canal, which once ran through the Cam valley carrying barges from the pits that dominated the area around Paulson to join the Kennet & Avon Canal.

Despite the poor state of the property and its industrial graveyard, Mr and Mrs Honey both knew as soon as they saw Caisson that it was the one for them; a place into which they could breathe new life. Surrounded by trees on the higher slopes of the valley, it also has long views of the countryside beyond: ‘There was something very magical about it,’ says Mrs Honey.

The house, built in 1815, had been the headquarters of the canal company and home to the chief engineer, but its name summons a further ghost. A caisson lock was an ambitious piece of engineering designed to take barges from one level of the canal to the other by way of a watertight wooden box floating through a 50ft-deep body of water. Unfortunately, after a couple of trial runs, it failed and had to be filled in; it was eventually replaced by the present series of locks.

Mrs Honey trained as a garden designer when the youngest of the couple’s two children started school and the 2½ acres of gardens now have the strong narrative one might encounter in one of their film sets; dreamy scenes of scented plants and secret corners through which to wander, but with the bonus that the trees are not made of polystyrene; if the plants are in pots, they are there to stay.

The flagstone kitchen terrace, for example, looks like one you might come across in France, where the couple spends a lot of time. It is enclosed by espaliered crab apple Malus ‘Evereste’ and a series of pollarded mulberries intensely underplanted with ‘Iceberg’ rose and billowing white herbaceous borders.

To distract from the tennis court beyond is a line of limes, underscored by long, formal box hedging that sits on top of a stone wall, ‘our tribute to Russell Page,’ says Mrs Honey. Should a film crew be looking for a colourful, productive walled kitchen garden of heightened imagination, they would find it at Caisson.

In front of the house, which is covered with fragrant Rosa ‘Madame Alfred Carrière’, are terraces of stone setts gathered around the grounds, with soft herbaceous planting and a parterre with hero pieces, as Mrs Honey calls them: box, beech and yew topiary, that were, like the limes and mulberries, bought mature to give some instant initial age to the garden and justified the outlay. They also provide structure for the winter months, before the garden wakes up with great drifts of snowdrops.

Nourishing the soil is of primary importance, as it was seriously depleted when the Honeys bought Caisson. Homemade compost has been vital and an old cow barn looks like a wizard’s workshop with rows of neatly labelled jars. This is where Mr Honey tests out various potions based on Korean practices of fermentation (see box), which he learnt from Joshua Sparkes, now at The Collective at Woolsery in Devon.

Not all areas called for improvement — rather the converse. From a round pond in front of the house, a rill gently curves and crisscrosses in a double ribbon across the narrow sloping lawn, down to a rustic oak gate. The grass to each side grows long and blends into the wild flower meadows beyond. This not only saves on mowing time — labour is confined to Mr and Mrs Honey and the gardener, Tristan Thomas — but one of the critical reasons that the Honeys were drawn to Caisson was that the land had not been intensely farmed with chemicals and pesticides.

Left to its own devices, it is a haven for wildlife, filled with several varieties of orchids, yellow rattle, knapweed and clover. Ragwort also appears. This is allowed as it provides good fodder for the tiger moth, but when it looks as if it is going to seed, Mr Honey will venture forth to pull it out before a local farmer comes to cut the meadows for hay.

For years, the locks lay buried under rubbish, brambles and self-seeded ash, but they are now celebrated as part of the property’s industrial heritage: deep stone chambers set a slightly eerie scene with walls covered in a variety of ferns and mosses. What was once the pound — the holding area between locks five and six — has been dammed, creating a large pond where newts, freshwater mussels and other wildlife flourish. An oak boardwalk skirts gracefully along the bottom of its steep banks, which are planted with fennel, valerian and sweet rocket, all cut back once a year with a hedge trimmer.

In a long shed where once coal barges would be rested up for repair, workshops of a 21st-century variety are held on such subjects as botanical block printing and Christmas wreath-making. It also serves as somewhere to gather on garden tours and open days.

As to where the actual caisson chamber lies, it remains a mystery and that is the way Mr Honey would like it to stay for now, as he doesn’t fancy his lawn being dug up to look for it. Some ghosts are best left sleeping.

Visit www.caissongardens.com

This feature originally appeared in the June 25, 2025 issue of Country Life — you can subscribe to the magazine here.

‘It was always my grandmother’s wish,’ says Magnus Birch Throckmorton, of his ancestral home, Coughton Court by the River Arrow in Warwickshire, ‘that we would move in and look over the house and garden.’ The 25-acre gardens had been made by his grandmother and mother almost 30 years ago, embellishing ‘the lovely bones of the Tudor house, walls, two churches and lake’ with colourful planting. Yet Mr Birch Throckmorton and his wife, Imogen, knew nothing about gardens when they arrived in 2017.

‘I was a wine merchant and Imogen worked in London.’ Since then, he adds, ‘Imogen has worked alongside the very able team of gardeners and I provide some muscle occasionally. Now, we love the beauty and historic atmosphere of the house and gardens, rather than feeling overwhelmed by the responsibility.’ As a result, they are ready to take back the running of the whole property from the National Trust from February next year.

When the Trust took on the house in 1946, the Throckmorton family retained control of the 17-acre formal garden. They planted an extensive orchard containing local heritage apples and fruit and a superb vegetable garden. Some of the daffodils, in The Daffodil Garden, had been bred by an American offshoot of the family, Dr Tom D. Throckmorton of Iowa. He named 50 cultivars and devised a colour-coding system that is now used by the RHS. Two thousand bulbs were planted in 2005, featuring 20 Throckmorton cultivars, although some of them haven’t thrived in the British climate.

The garden’s star attraction, however, is undoubtedly the Rose Labyrinth, set within a 1½-acre walled garden and created in 1996 by Mr Birch Throckmorton’s mother, Christina Williams. She trained at the Chelsea Physic Garden and made the garden as a birthday present for her mother, Clare McClaren-Throckmorton, affectionately known as ‘Mrs T’. It contains 200 varieties of rose, including a large selection of ramblers and climbers, Damasks, Albas, Teas, Noisettes, plus more modern blooms. In 2006, the Rose Labyrinth became the first British garden to be given the prestigious Award for Garden Excellence from the World Federation of Rose Societies.

‘Christina still masterminds the design,’ says her daughter-in-law. ‘Grandma had the vision, however, so it was very much a mother-and-daughter partnership.’

When you walk through the stout oak door in the high walls into the rose labyrinth, you’re hit by the scent of roses and waves of toning colour. Meandering paths draw one on through the carefully chosen plantings — one of the great strengths of the garden is the way the roses have been complemented with other plants. The silver foliage of lamb’s ears, Stachys byzantina, and Artemisia ludoviciana ‘Valerie Finnis’, A. absinthium ‘Lambrook Mist’ and ‘Lambrook Silver’, for instance, were deliberately chosen by Mrs Williams to subdue brighter-yellow roses. The addition of the silver-leafed vine, Vitis vinifera ‘Incana’, adds yet more sparkle.

‘Alchymist’, an egg yolk-yellow climbing rose with fully double quartered flowers, is a favourite here despite producing only one summer flush. This renowned medium-sized climbing rose is always smothered in flowers in June and is a useful plant, as it copes with poorer conditions and will even succeed on a north-facing wall. As were many ramblers, ‘Dorothy Perkins’ was raised in 1901. Its large trusses of fully double dark-pink flowers fade to lighter pink and are well partnered by the mauve-blue viticella clematis ‘Emilia Plater’.

Viticella clematis make perfect follow-up acts for summer-flowering roses because they flower in July and August. ‘Alba Luxurians’, a green-washed asymmetrical white clematis, has a natural, wild appearance as if it could be straight out of a hedgerow. Here, it lights up an arch in a shadier corner. The fully double damson-red ‘Purpurea Plena Elegans’, the flowers of which could be mistaken for a rose, is one of the best viticellas and is thought to date from the 16th century. The plummy flowers link up with dark penstemons, such as ‘Raven’, purple sage (Salvia officinalis ‘Purpurascens’) and the sultry Verbena ‘Bampton’. Further along the wall, there’s an ornamental purple vine, Vitis vinifera ‘Purpurea’. You’ll also find the deep-purple ‘Étoile Violette’, the most popular and obliging viticella of all. ‘Huldine’, a long-flowering pearlescent white, with open flowers, is head gardener Clare Loble’s favourite clematis.

Repeat-flowering roses are widely used, too, because they will produce flushes of flower throughout summer and autumn. Some have family connections. ‘Sir Walter Raleigh’, a warm-pink Austin rose named in 1985, is grown here to honour Raleigh’s wife, Bess Throckmorton. ‘Roald Dahl’, a highly fragrant apricot rose launched in 2016 to mark the centenary of Roald Dahl’s birth, does very well at Coughton. The author was also connected to the family, through his marriage to Felicity, ‘Liccy’, the sister of Mrs T.

Upright spires lift the planting and cultivated forms of our native foxglove, Digitalis purpurea, can be spotted flowering among the roses. It does so well that some seedlings are removed. Others are left to self-seed, their white and pink midsummer spires overlapping with the roses. Mrs Loble raises ‘Sutton’s Apricot’ every year because the softly hued flowers go well with deep blues, such as Anchusa ‘Loddon Royalist’. Later, the tall, deep-blue salvia ‘Amistad’ becomes a feature.

There are tall airy plants, too, and the tiny pale-pink saucers of the mallow, Althaea cannabina, will go on pleasing the bees until November. Verbena bonariensis also provides an airy presence until late into the year. There’s an emphasis on simple flowers and several blue hardy geraniums, such as ‘Brookside’ and G. x magnificum, line the paths, together with Nepeta ‘Purrsian Blue’ and lady’s mantle (Alchemilla mollis).

Wander on further, through an avenue of ‘Grosso’ lavender, and you’ll find several garden rooms and two colour-themed borders, one cool and the other warm to hot. It is almost 30 years since the gardens were planted and, as Mr Birch Throckmorton says, ‘they now feel mature’. Most importantly, they are beautifully planted and maintained, a tribute to all the hard work of everyone involved. As Mrs Loble says, ‘we all want the best garden possible’.

This feature originally appeared in the June 18, 2025, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe'.

Gardeners often comfort themselves after a disaster with the thought that the loss of a tree or favourite plant offers opportunities for planting something new. The destruction of such a building as the great medieval tithe barn at Bledlow Manor, which burned down one night in 1967, must have been a truly appalling blow. Yet its loss was the catalyst for the creation of the South Garden and much that followed, as Rupert Carington, 7th Baron Carrington of Upton, explains.

Lord Carrington is standing above a sunken square pool reached via shallow brick steps at each end and edged with brick walls topped with contrasting fresh green beech hedges. A plain and perfectly judged fountain gives life at its centre and blue-painted benches invite one to sit awhile. It makes a deliberately strong statement and one that is surely preparing the visitor for what is to come. ‘None of this,’ he says, ‘would be here had the tithe barn not burned down that night.’

The Caringtons have owned Bledlow Manor since the end of the 18th century, but none of them lived here until Lord Carrington’s parents, Peter Carington, 6th Baron Carrington, the distinguished politician, and his wife, Iona, moved here in 1946. The manor was built in 1647, added to in 1700 and yet again in 1802. To begin with, they shared the house with the tenant farmer. ‘There was no garden then and cattle grazed where the lawn is now,’ the present Lord Carrington says, referring to the lawn between the manor and its walled garden, the oldest surviving part of the present 12 acres.

The Caringtons made the best of that devastating loss by engaging the help of the designer Robert Adams. He devised a plan that successfully incorporated the awkward variation in the levels of the site and brought a sense of unity between the red-brick manor house and the several large agricultural buildings around it by employing brick for the new walls and paths. The garden has some views out to the Chilterns, but his design focused mainly on the buildings — which include a handsome 18th-century red-brick granary raised on its original staddle stones — adding beech and yew to divide the garden with hedges and pleached avenues.

The work was completed in 1969 and has weathered well, the brick softening with age, yet still delivering a powerful presence. As part of a major programme of renewal that Lord Carrington began after inheriting Bledlow in 2018, all the hedges planted in his parents’ day are gradually being taken back to their original design size, thus reinstating Mr Adams’s intended views of the manor and its farm buildings.

Lord Carrington grew up at Bledlow and knows every shrub and tree. Indeed, he is often to be found working in the garden or, as Mark Thompson, Bledlow’s head gardener puts it, ‘doing overtime and extra time’. In total, there are two full-time and three part-time gardeners. All needs to be kept in order for the 10 or so groups that visit each year, as well as the openings for charity and for the National Garden Scheme. Bledlow Manor also hosts an annual rare-plant fair.

To help with the task of replacing and updating the planting throughout the garden, much of which was past its best, Lord Carrington sought the advice of the plantsman/designer Sean Walter of The Plant Specialist nursery in Great Missenden, Buckinghamshire, who has been working with the team here since 2019.

The terraces beneath the north front of the manor that overlook the lawn have been very successfully replanted with his help to provide year-round shape and interest from reliable subjects such as Mahonia ‘Soft Caress’, hydrangeas, the evergreen Japanese forest grass Hakonechloa macra, the white Japanese anemone ‘Ruffled Swan’, a pretty pale pink-tinged white Japanese quince and a Daphne bholua ‘Jacqueline Postill’.

A new brick planter has been built on the northside of the lawn to replace a grass bank and planted with amelanchier, magnolia Stellata Rosea, deutzia and several bushes of the repeat-flowering English shrub rose ‘Olivia Rose Austin’. At its centre, Lonicera ligustrina var. yunnanensis ‘Baggesen’s Gold’ is being trained through a wire frame shaped like a griffin (which appears on the Carrington coat of arms), a project that had first been tried and abandoned by Peter Carington. ‘I found the shape in a shed,’ says Lord Carrington, ‘and thought I’d move it here.’

On the far side of the lawn, three formal reflecting ponds are set in generous brick borders, clearly the work of Mr Adams, who, after completing the South Garden in 1969, returned to help rationalise the area to the north east of the manor.

As well as the reflecting ponds, he created two long, low brick-edged raised planters with chaenomeles against the wall, with box balls, agapanthus, iris and heuchera below. His most significant contribution, however, is the Sculpture Garden, created from scratch in 1990, which makes up the western edge of the garden. The entrance to this is through a small opening in another yew hedge, which gives onto a striking arrangement of 10 yew-edged parterres that radiate out to a curved hedge forming a semi-circle.

A sculpture, Primitive Form by Marzia Colonna, sets the scene for the sculpture garden beyond. Modern and contemporary works are displayed here among deeply curved beds, providing secret spots to display the works. Trees and shrubs form the backbone of this garden with mature limes and chestnuts on the upper slopes from where you can look down over newly revealed pieces. Works by, among others, Peter Randall-Page, Saidi Sabiti, Charlotte Mayer and Paul Vanstone are arranged among an equally interesting selection of plants, so there is always something to draw the eye. There’s Xanthoceras sorbifolium with its pretty white flowers in late spring and a mature Rosa ‘Cerise Bouquet’, which gives one glorious burst of pink flowers in summer, but, says Lord Carrington, is horribly prickly. Parrotia persica turns a rich red in autumn and in winter there is a lovely view through the trees to the 12th-century flint-faced walls of Holy Trinity, Bledlow.

It is a garden full of the unexpected, just as its opening vistas promise. This is largely because of the very different character of its several parts. The walled garden remains very much a traditional kitchen garden, with beds filled with vegetables, cane fruits and cut flowers. Paths are edged with Nepeta racemosa ‘Walker’s Low’ and Iona Carington’s peonies still bloom against the walls. The Snail Garden — planted in memory of Lady Carrington with all of her favourite plants — is a mass of roses in summer, notably ‘Phyllis Bide’ and ‘Ballerina’, and is dominated by a sculpture of a snail, ‘her least favourite garden pest’.

There’s a very different atmosphere, again, in the Coracle Garden, one of three garden rooms designed by Mr Adams. This, the largest of the three, gets its name from the William Pye bowl fountain that stands at the centre of this square garden. Currently a work in progress, it promises much. The spot is hot in summer and dry in winter, says Lord Carrington, who is replacing those plants that have come to the end of their lives with mainly Mediterranean species that will tolerate such conditions. Columnar cypress add to the atmosphere and in place of the many roses that have been removed are lavenders, including L. intermedia ‘Phenomenal’, rosemaries, such as Salvia rosmarinus ‘Sissinghurst Blue’ and S. rosmarinus Prostrata Group, Phlomis italica, the hibiscus-like Anisodontea ‘El Rayo’ and several spectacular indigofera, including I. howellii, together with shrubs such as Callistemon leavis (bottlebrush), Myrtus luma and Loropetalum chinense.

When you consider the status of the Manor Gardens — it is one of the few important gardens made in the 1980s — its variety and the care with which it is made and maintained it is no surprise that it was selected as Judges’ Choice for the Historic Houses Association Garden of The Year Award in 2023.

Yet there is still more: across the road from the manor lie the Lyde Gardens. Created from three former watercress beds and designed by Mr Adams, the dramatic water gardens, hidden in a deep declivity with trees reaching more than 100ft to the light above were completed in 1988 and are opened daily to the public. Gravel paths and wooden duckboards lead over and beside the Lyde — a tributary of the River Thame fed by 25 springs — past flat plates of Darmera peltata, gunnera, colourful astilbes, ferns and a huge group of rodgersia. It is an unforgettable spot and almost Japanese in its sense of spirituality and place.

Bledlow Manor, Buckinghamshire, will host the Rare Plants Fair on July 20 — see www.carington.co.uk fore more details.

The Holt is the handsome 17th-century home of Edward and Katherine Wake, set within the South Downs National Park. The William and Mary façade looks out onto a blissful Arcadian landscape. Red Ruby Devon cattle and Wiltshire Horn sheep graze peacefully under spreading beech trees and would continue right up to the front door if it were not for a barely perceptible ditch and stretch of estate fencing.

‘This is how ha-has were originally designed,’ explains eminent landscape architect Kim Wilkie, who has helped the Wakes (who happen to be both old friends and near neighbours) integrate the house more comfortably into its surroundings. Importantly, the entire estate is run with a mission to improve and develop biodiversity. Mrs Wake manages the farm and Mr Wake’s great love is the garden — but the aim is for everything — garden, hay meadow, woodland pasture and farmland — to be integrated. ‘The magic happens,’ says Mr Wake ‘not in the different compartments, but in the junctions between them.’

Mr Wilkie’s great leap forward, 15 years ago, was to sculpt the land to the south and east of the house into a series of curving, gently sculptural terraces that are somehow both strong and soft and wrap around the building, settling it in the landscape. Mr Wake describes the oppressive feel of the heavy yew hedge that used to grow right up to the house: ‘One February day, I looked out of the south-facing drawing-room window. All I could see was black yew sucking up the light.’ He had a powerful urge to move earth away from the house and even entertained a fantasy that he could do it himself if he took 10 days off from running his specialist travel company and worked with his friend Jerry, who had a JCB…

Mrs Wake was relieved to bump into Mr Wilkie at a lecture and persuaded him to come over. ‘I find very often that houses that were built in the 17th or early 18th centuries were positioned for protection from the weather. At The Holt, the slope rose very steeply behind the house, there were these funny little platforms cut into it and the whole place was ringed around with high hedges. I agreed that cutting away a huge amount of ground here and creating a sort of amphitheatre would be a great idea and would give the house room to breathe — and I offered to give the Wakes a hand.’

It took a 22-ton digger four months, first to scrape off the topsoil and then to create a series of tiers, like the wings of a bird, from the chalk below. ‘The whole house shook. Everything was white. For four months, it felt as if we were on Mars,’ remembers Mr Wake. ‘To create terraces on the flat is fairly straightforward, but to have them both folding in so that they are descending in towards the zigzag — which is effectively the bird’s spine — is actually incredibly complicated to draw,’ adds Mr Wilkie. ‘In the end, the only way I could do it was to take a shovel and a rake and do it myself by hand.’

Excess spoil was used to create a mound and, once the newly carved surfaces were covered in a 3in layer of topsoil, they were hydroseeded and then sensitively managed to encourage wildflowers. It took eight years of careful mowing to encourage the indigenous wildflowers to seed themselves and get the balance right.

Even in the first year, 29 species of wildflower emerged among the quaking grass Briza media, (the sign of ancient meadow). Bee, common spotted and pyramidal orchids followed, and 56 species of bird have been counted. Mr Wake loves ‘the contrast between the horizontal areas that reflect the light and the soft swishy banks in between’. The amphitheatre looks particularly magical as the shadows grow long in summer and again in cool winter light.

With the landform established, Mr Wake, who has a degree in horticulture and botany, began to enjoy planting close to the house. A pair of Ginkgo biloba trees, grown from seed 30 years ago, now stands sentinel on the front drive. There is fragrant wintersweet, Chimonanthus praecox, to welcome you in the parking area and the vanilla-scented Azara microphylla to enjoy through the kitchen window.

You enter the immaculate walled kitchen garden (once ‘half Christmas tree, half ground elder’), under an arch of pink Rosa ‘François Juranville’ and, on your way to the headily peach-scented greenhouse, you will find eggs from Mrs Wake’s bantams hidden under spreading courgette leaves.

The mound became key to making sense of the remaining landscape. Mrs Wake’s grandmother had planted avenues of lime and beech in the 1950s, to which further avenues of oak and yew were added, creating a radiating patte d’oie, best enjoyed from the top of the mound in the evening sunshine. There is also a reflecting pool, which you cannot see from the mound, but from which the mound can be sighted due to a rise in the terrain.

A Love Temple, built using recycled Portland stone from the old portico, is used as an airy place for a candlelit dinner and a stretch of close-grown beech trees has been high-pruned in a shaggy, slightly wonky way to create a tremendous Darkling Rectangle, inspired by early Dutch landscape paintings. Mr Wilkie designed the sturdy estate fencing to keep out deer and cope with feisty cattle ‘rubbing their bums on it’ and underlines the opportunity such fencing offers to ‘create sinuous curves and make possible the most fluid and subtle relationship with the farmed land beyond’.

Swallows circle over the elegant rectangular pool in the Orchard Walled Garden. At dusk, there will be bats and then barn owls. Mr Wilkie tells me that it ‘has been a complete thrill to have friends and clients who really understand what they are doing’ and to be able to continue making plans for the garden as it develops over the years. ‘I firmly believe that you can only get so far with style and design. It is the way a garden is managed for botany and wildlife that gives it its integral beauty.’

The scent — fresh yet ancient — will hit you before you see them, some 1,000 roses tumbling over walls and rollicking in beds. ‘Most old roses bloom only once a year,’ mused Audrey Hepburn when she visited Mottisfont Abbey in Hampshire, in 1993. Here, ‘at the height of the season in June... during high rose tide, the magic of old roses still weaves a spell.’

The unparalleled walled garden in the grounds of an Augustinian priory-cum-country house has come into bloom two weeks early this year after the extraordinarily warm and dry spring. Hundreds of pre-1900 varieties — an important National Collection created by horticulturist Graham Stuart Thomas in the 1970s — are currently at their finest, including highly scented shrub Rosa gallica officinalis, or the Apothecary's Rose, which came to England from Persia during the Crusades.

Elsewhere on the Mottisfont estate, the romanticism of an artist modelling the face of an angel on that of his paramour in a mosaic surrounded by lush green foliage has certainly stood the test of time. Boris Anrep, little known today, was one of the 20th century’s leading mosaicists and an exhibition at Mottisfont — home to his patron and lover Maud Russell — examines his legacy.

The socialite and collector is known for her friendships with Ian Fleming and Rex Whistler, whom she commissioned to create the famous trompe-l’oeil drawing room at the country house that she and her husband transformed from crumbling priory ruins. She also helped her Jewish relatives escape the Nazis.

After Russell and Anrep met in 1934, he often visited Mottisfont, depicting her in the portrait Mrs Gilbert Russell, Sitting in Bed, the aforementioned medieval-style mosaic on the exterior south wall of the house and even as ‘Folly’ in a sketch for one of his floor mosaics in the National Gallery; these include all manner of contemporaries, including Sir Osbert Sitwell as Apollo, Virginia Woolf as Clio and Diana Mitford as Polyhymnia.

‘From the mid 1940s, Maud worked hard to promote and patronise Boris's work and looked to secure his artistic legacy through donations of sketches and work to institutions,’ explains National Trust curator George Roberts.

After Anrep died in 1969, Russell buried his ashes in the gardens at Mottisfont and continued to champion his talent. ‘His work as a mosaicist in Britain is perhaps not as well-known as it should be, and I hope this exhibition will encourage visitors to seek out more of his work in public buildings.’

Visitors to Tate Britain might spot his Proverbs of Hell (1923), with further mosaics at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst chapel, Westminster Cathedral, the Bank of England, Bayswater’s Saint Sophia Cathedral and the Cathedral of Christ the King in Co Westmeath, Ireland.

‘The Making of the Mottisfont Angel: the Artistic Legacy of Boris Anrep’ runs to July 13 and features mosaics such as Anrep’s Spirit of Reasoning, depicting ballet dancer Vaslav Nijinsky, as well as paintings, photographs and furniture by Anrep and other connected artists, such as Augustus John and Bloomsbury group members Vanessa Bell, Roger Fry and Duncan Grant.

On a hot summer’s day, the herb garden just below the main house — a Victorian rectory in the Cotswolds — is busy with activity. Apart from the honey bees, hoverflies and bumblebees that provide a reassuring hum under a cloudless sky, Mansi Amin and her daughters are busy picking calendula flowers and sage leaves. The flowers are for a picture, the leaves will be used to make a sage honey.

Wild strawberries have self-seeded through the gravel edges of this small terrace, where a mulberry tree drops its midday shade on drifts of lemon balm, rosemary, mint, thyme and catmint — the latter will be used to produce an insect repellent. There are currants for picking and Cistus ladanifer, which thrives here. Ms Amin uses the herb garden assiduously to produce tinctures, oils and potions for the family. Anaya and Liyana are concentrating on the calendula design, working at the impressive stone table (of which more later) and from where one begins to understand the layout of the property.

The 1872 stone rectory dominates the top of a fairly steep slope that drops in stepped terraces providing dramatic views, firstly over the formal flower garden, then the meadow beyond to the tawny hedge-fringed fields and distant woods. The Victorian builders had managed the slope by constructing two dominant stone bastions, upon one of which the herb garden rests. (Hence the splendid view.)

The formal areas around the house — which also include lawns and a swimming-pool garden with clean lines of flagstones — only take up two acres, leaving the much greater part of the land — five acres — to an orchard, an area of woodland surrounding a lake at the side of a sweeping meadow dotted with trees and a wildflower meadow. This naturalistic treatment makes complete sense here. It reduces the amount of regular maintenance — there is one full-time gardener — as well as merging into the soft folds of the Cotswold landscape that wraps around the property in an easy and familiar relationship.

Herbs, old roses, single-flowered annuals and airy perennials in a soft palette of dusty pinks and grey-purples flow easily across the terraces that carry the planting down the slope. Here and there are hot pinpricks of cerise Rosa odorata ‘Mutabilis’ and deep-burgundy buttons of Knautia macedonica. All this has been dreamed up by the designer Jinny Blom, who was brought in by the family a couple of years after they first moved here from a three-bedroom flat in London in 2017

The garden she first encountered was very different from the one the family enjoys today. It had been created for the former owners by an international designer who had laid out a bold conceptual design that had required a huge amount of hard landscaping and was underpinned with architectural box hedging. Apart from some lavender, there were no flowers, no colour, nothing soft or anything that complemented the gentle quality of the landscape. The new family, however, had moved from the city in order to be in the country: ‘We wanted areas left for wildlife and foraging and for the health of the land,’ recalls Ms Amin. ‘We wanted to bring Nature back into the garden to encourage more wildlife.’

When Ms Blom first saw the garden, the box and lavender had died. ‘There was only hard landscaping; it was windswept and bleak.’ A plan was made to retain as much of the hard landscaping as possible — why waste well-laid, good-quality materials? For the same reason, the decision was made to keep the large stone table, which had been cut to order in the Sierra Nevada, Spain, before being shipped to the Cotswolds. Other than rearranging some of the spaces and making flowerbeds where there had been none, the bulk of the work would be planting — after a gargantuan amount of clearing. ‘We carted off 2,000–3,000 cubic metres of builders’ rubble and spent two years clearing the box and carting away the muck,’ she remembers. ‘It was a massive job, but the rubbish soil has now been replaced with good soil and proper organic manure.’

Counter-intuitively, it was necessary, also, to add more hard landscaping around the swimming pool as that had been set in grass. ‘Grass is hopeless in England — it squelches — so I paved it and made a gravel garden around the pool.’ She also replaced the grass around the house with gravel paths softened with planting in beds and on the house walls. ‘I envisaged covering the house in climbers rather like Miriam Rothschild did at Ashton Wold in Northamptonshire. I wanted to make it sing, to make it very romantic, a bit Gilbert White meets Ashton Wold.’

Since moving to the Cotswolds, Mr Shah has become as much an enthusiast of the garden as his wife and, determined to understand the garden they would be making, he devoted a year to studying horticulture at Capel Manor College in Greater London. As gardens should be, this one is always evolving. ‘We try to work on two or three projects every year,’ he says. He has added more trees to the orchard that has been planted in the top field above the house and more than 100 heritage fruit trees have been set in the limestone brash that lies beneath the field. They have prioritised Gloucestershire varieties whenever possible and otherwise chosen heritage trees, pears, cherries, quince, plums, damsons and many apples. The vegetable garden is tucked away at the back of the orchard where it is more sheltered. To avoid chemical sprays, plants are mulched and given regular seaweed sprays from mid March to midsummer.

The north-facing courtyard at the entrance to the house — once bare gravel and little else — has been softened with climbers and new beds by the walls, now filled with a combination of bulbs, shrubs and perennials, including Rosa rugosa, sweet box Sarcococca ruscifolia and clumps of Euphorbia wallichii with ferns, all punctuated by dark yew columns. These echo the huge yews on the bank at the other end of the house, which started life as a Victorian hedge. Dozens of snowdrops have been planted along the bank and will gradually spread themselves under the yews.

The steep bank that drops from the driveway to the meadow, now clear of the old dead lavender, is much more happily filled with masses of English roses in shades of pink and white, with scent that is caught in the warm air and draws in the honey bees from the four hives in the woodland. From here, one walks into the meadow, where mown paths lead through the long grass. There are some mature trees, such as the Wellingtonia, but Ms Blom has planted relaxed groups of flowering natives that are settling in nicely. It is hard to believe that all this was once empty lawn, but then it is even harder to believe that there had previously been none of the gorgeous flowery generosity that is now the most enchanting feature of the garden.

When George Harrison bought the 30-acre estate of Friar Park in Henley-on-Thames, Oxfordshire, in 1970, he found the famous historic gardens in an almighty mess: glasshouses were glassless, the grand lakes silted up and full of rubbish and the famous topiary garden had knitted together, forming an impenetrable thicket.

The demise of Sir Frank Crisp’s masterwork — created in the late 1890s and once cared for by 45 gardeners — was emblematic of the entropy that had set in following the two world wars: all over the country, gardens suffered.

There was no longer the money to pay for the gardeners and, in so many cases, the men had been lost on the battlefield or had left for better-paid work in the factories. Formerly productive kitchen gardens lay idle or were given over to act as glorified stock pens; flowerbeds and tennis courts had been dug up for victory and dock, nettles and elder had wormed their way through the roots of every once-loved peony and rose.

Over the past 50 years, however, the gardens at Friar Park, like many other country houses — far too many to even hazard a guess at the numbers — have been rescued from their thorny slumbers. After Harrison’s death, his widow, Olivia, put all her energies into continuing his work to bring the gardens back to life. She sought out photographs and documents — including from the Country Life archives — that shed light on the garden’s former glories, she visited specialist nurseries, consulted experts and employed the gardeners necessary. Still the work continues, partly because this is a very large space, partly because the work in gardens is never done.

Much changed in that decade: only five years later, Sir Elton John bought Woodside, a house with 37 acres in Old Windsor, just outside Windsor Great Park in Berkshire, and asked Rosemary Verey to help with the gardens. In paintings by Thomas Robins the Elder, the gardens appeared as Rococo with a Chinese kiosk, inspired by the pagoda at Kew. Later, Sir Roy Strong remade Verey’s Woodside White Garden into an Italian Garden.

It was the noisy arrival of the 1980s, flush with new money and renewed confidence, that really kick-started the renaissance of the country-house garden. The purchase of Highgrove in Gloucestershire by the then Prince of Wales, now The King, in 1980 and his evident enthusiasm for plants and gardening confirmed the royal imprimatur.

Dame Miriam Rothschild advised on the planting of a wildflower meadow at Highgrove where there had been little garden at all. Lady Mollie Salisbury, who, from the 1970s, had been working her magic on the garden at Hatfield House, Hertfordshire, helped the Prince create the Sundial Garden and Verey made the Cottage Garden. When the designers Julian and Isabel Bannerman were asked to make a stumpery there, they recalled how ahead of its time the garden was on their first visit in 1992 in being cared for organically — something that’s now more usual than not.

Up until then, there had been only a handful of garden designers, notably Percy Cane, Russell Page and Lanning Roper. There were the grand lady gardeners, too, who still remembered how to create the big Edwardian borders tumbling with roses and filled with the scent of catmint and lavender. Verey and Penelope Hobhouse would often be invited to lunch and asked for their opinions on a garden, but Arabella Lennox-Boyd was probably the first of the modern landscape designers. She became interested in gardens after seeing wonderful country-house bounds with terrific views and masses of hybrid musk roses and Pyrus salicifolia.

‘Nancy Lancaster and Geoffrey Jellicoe had made a wonderful garden at Haseley Court in Oxfordshire full of tumbling roses,’ says Lady Lennox-Boyd, who recalls that, in the mid 1980s, she had to move her office out of its tiny basement with one secretary and take on more people to cope with the amount of work that was coming in.

‘Arabella used to ask clients how long they planned to live in the house,’ says Rosie Atkins, who had been the editor of Gardens Illustrated at its launch in 1993, when the magazine tapped into the new horticultural mood. ‘People didn’t do that back then. The owner simply commissioned the designer, much as you’d commission an artist.’

Before then, points out the designer James Alexander-Sinclair, vice-president of the RHS, you inherited your country house. ‘That all changed in the 1980s and people who had never had a big garden didn’t know what to do with it. That is where the garden designer was born. Nowadays, you can barely throw a heavy brick without it hitting a garden designer.’

Money was always the deciding factor on what could be achieved. The garden designer Mary Keen, who sat on the National Trust’s Gardens Panel in the 1980s and 1990s, recalls worries over kitchen gardens. ‘We were perpetually laying them partly to orchard, partly to wildflower meadow.’ In her book Paradise and Plenty (2015), she describes the anti-thesis to this: the restoration she oversaw of the Rothschilds’ walled garden at Eythrope in Buckinghamshire, where there were the gardeners to ensure that every square foot of space was properly cared for.

To mention only a very few ways in which private walled gardens have been adapted to 20th and 21st-century lives and budgets: at Hopetoun, near Edinburgh, Lady Hopetoun filled the four walls with mounding perennials that make it look like a painting; for clients near Culham in Berkshire, Dan Pearson dug out a cup-shaped depression in the ground for star-gazing and created a viewing mound from the spoil; at Broughton Grange, Oxfordshire, Tom Stuart-Smith designed a jewel box of plantings around formal water; and at Easton Walled Gardens, near Grantham in Lincolnshire, Ursula Cholmeley transformed the limestone-walled Tudor enclosure into a meadow in which roses are trained over iron supports made by a local blacksmith.

Lady Cholmeley chairs the gardens committee of Historic Houses, which launched its annual awards to gardens more than 40 years ago. Sponsored by Christie’s, the awards ‘recognise the importance of gardens to the public’. The winner in 2021 was the huge (almost eight acres) walled garden at Gordon Castle in Moray. This had been ingeniously redesigned for the Gordon Lennoxes by Arne Maynard in a dramatic scheme that divided the garden into four quadrants, subdivided again, and is a great draw with visitors, being visually exciting, floriferous and useful.

Another very different, but equally thrilling project overseen by Maynard is the replanting of the gardens that surround the magnificent medieval Haddon Hall in Derbyshire. He remembers his first visit: ‘The house was untouched and there was a magic about the gardens, but the roses were grown in that 1950s and 1960s manner in bare earth and we wanted to put back some of the romance with wildflowers, native orchids and softer roses. We looked into all the plants that had been introduced and were available in Tudor and Elizabethan days and pulled together a palette that would work.’ Inspired by historic tapestries inside the hall, he included plants that would have been used for dyeing the threads — woad, achilleas and hollyhocks, to mention a few. So far, the team has worked on the Fountain Terrace and Bowling Lawn Terrace and plans are afoot for planting out more terraces this year.

Access to new plants and healthier cultivars has underpinned the horticultural renaissance. As the designer Catherine FitzGerald, who has reinvigorated her garden at Glin Castle, Co Limerick, Ireland, notes: ‘When Beth Chatto brought her unusual plants to Chelsea [in 1977], these were plants we had not seen.’ Again, in the late 1990s, when Northern European gardeners brought their naturalistic grasses here, she explains, ‘they completely collided with the English aesthetic, creating a flowering of a new vision of English gardens’.

It is no wonder that many country-house gardens have become commercial enterprises. The Duchess of Northumberland’s creation of The Alnwick Garden is an obvious example of the appeal to a mass audience. More recently, the garden at Hadspen House, Somerset, once the home of the Hobhouses, has been transformed into The Newt. Other gardens have been rescued as part of the transformation from a private home to a country-house hotel: examples include William Robinson’s garden at Gravetye Manor, West Sussex; the Humphry Repton gardens at Endsleigh overlooking the Tamar in Devon, Le Manoir aux Quat’Saisons in Oxfordshire and Verey’s garden at Barnsley House in Gloucestershire, now part of The Pig hotel chain.

As confidence in gardens grew, many owners commissioned a masterplan that would project works 10, 20 and 30 years into the future. Stoker, the 12th Duke of Devonshire, commissioned a masterplan for the Chatsworth gardens and parkland from Stuart-Smith and work on the Derbyshire estate has been extensive yet gradual, with the restoration and replanting of Joseph Paxton’s famous rock garden in 2021 and the subsequent replanting of the woodlands to create a new Arcadia.

At Lowther, near Penrith in Cumbria, Jim Lowther inherited a castle without a roof, historic lawns that had been ruined by tanks manoeuvring over them (not to mention the depredations of a battery chicken farm) and the loss of the rest of the Thomas Mawson garden to stands of conifers.

‘Lowther had 30–40 gardeners in its Edwardian heyday,’ says designer Pearson, who was invited to draw up a masterplan for how to manage this white elephant. ‘Making the masterplan, you go through all the layers of history asking yourself what are the most important layers that you can draw from and include, but to which you can give a modern and practical approach in terms of staffing and funding.’

He adds: ‘The question was what could you do within that setting that was convincing, that is telling the story. Using the principles outlined above, we created a garden in the ruins of the castle so that when you are standing in what was the drawing room you can look up and see the fireplaces in what were the bedrooms, where Clematis "Bill MacKenzie" is growing through the windows.’

Work continued with a new rose garden and the restoration in the past two years of the original Mawson waterworks. ‘The rock garden, Japanese garden and scented garden were overgrown with wild raspberries, dock and ground elder, all of which have been carefully removed.’ Rather than replace the Edwardian lead storks and cranes in the Japanese garden, Pearson has used his experience of working in Japan to ‘conjure that spirit using the existing framework and replanting with native Japanese woodland perennials’.

At Dunira, a Mawson garden in Perthshire, the new owner called on the designer Simon Johnson to oversee the work. ‘When I first saw Dunira, there was hardly anything there, it was like Machu Picchu with bits of masonry poking up here and there. But Mawson’s archive in Kendal was very helpful and the Country Life archive is such a wonderful tool with all those amazing photographs.’

Dunira is a good example of a significant garden where enough of the original survived for an accurate reconstruction to be possible. ‘Stonework and hard surfaces, once restored, don’t need much maintaining, Johnson notes. If staffing is limited, when you indulge yourself horticulturally in one part of the garden, you have to restrain yourself in others. Plants have to really earn their place.’

‘There can be hundreds of years of layers of different things done over different generations,’ points out landscape designer Pip Morrison, who is managing the restoration and reimagining of the Auckland Palace garden and parkland at Bishop Auckland in Co Durham, which have been altered by successive bishops for 900 years. ‘You have to analyse everything, past and present, and consider what belongs and what feels out of place. It’s thinking about the character of a place and editing out the elements that are cluttering it up to get back to one voice and a strong personality specific to that place.’

This approach ensured the success of his restoration for Tom and Rosamond Sweet-Escott of the formal gardens at Chettle, a fine Baroque house in Dorset. ‘The big reflecting pool was completely new, but in the style of the 18th century.’ Surrounding it with wildflower meadow instead of lawn was the final touch of genius — because, in the words of FitzGerald: ‘We’re all wanting a softer approach. People like to walk on a mown path through a wildflower meadow. We crave long grass and woods and bluebells.’

It looks as if whatever other fashions in the garden change, meadows, which were given the royal stamp of approval when The King encouraged the creation of new wildflower meadows to celebrate his mother’s Diamond Jubilee — are likely to stay with us — even if they look scruffy for months each year.

It wasn’t until 1913 that the RHS’s jewel in the crown show pitched its then-solitary marquee on the lawns at the Royal Chelsea Hospital. The Great Spring Show — as it was then known — was lauded by Country Life at the time as: '…undoubtably the best and most extensive that the society has ever held.'

Among the novelties on show were the-now Spring staples of Darwin and May-flowering tulips, which apparently were not in fashion at the time. The report notes their inclusion in the show: '…would lead one to think that at last the merits of these beautiful and useful flowers are being properly realised.'

Fast forward 112 years, and the 2025 Flower Show now covers an astonishing 11 acre site. As preparations get underway for Chelsea, we take a gentle meander (Pimms in hand, naturally) through the Country Life Archives for 10 gardens from across our Isles where inspiration may be sought to create your own, personal horticultural idyll.

Scampston Hall and Walled Garden, Malton, North Yorkshire

Quietly situated off the roaring A64 to Scarborough is a gem of perpetual reinvention. At Scampston Hall, not only do you get a majestic, generous 80 acre landscape laid out by Capability Brown in the 1770’s, you also get an early, and still the largest privately commissioned Piet Oudolf planting in the UK.

Conceived in 1999, the Walled Garden at Scampston has been divided into 10 distinct compartments, each showcasing different, perennial schemes to delight in.

Open March to November.

The Harold Peto Garden, Heale Gardens, Wiltshire

Seemingly remote, yet only four miles from Salisbury, Heale House and Gardens were purportedly Charles II hid for almost an entire week following the Battle of Worcester in 1651.

Moving into the 20th century, Harold Peto was commissioned to re-shape parts of the gardens to modernise them in line with the property’s East Wing creation, under the watchful eye of Detmar Blow.

Architectural features mix with innovative planting, a signature of Peto’s work.

Open March to October.

The Cottage Garden, Gwaenynog, Denbighshire

It’s hard to think of a more delightful cottage garden than the one that inspired Beatrix Potter to write and illustrate the Tale of the Flopsy Bunnies.

The home of Potter’s uncle Fred Burton, the gardens feature the prerequisite vegetable plot, complete with lush, giant cabbages, and the potting shed which acted as the model for the antagonistic Mr McGregor in the book.

The gardens open occasionally in aid of the NGS.

The Rose Garden, Borde Hill, West Sussex

Owned by the Stephenson Clarke family for over 130 years, the Borde Hill estate features thirteen 'garden rooms' — one of which is its jaw-dropping rose garden.

Conceived by Robin Williams in 1996, the garden features over 750 varieties of rose, the majority of which are from the David Austin nurseries. Prepare for a gentle assault on the eyes and the nose as you enter this most fragrant of gardens.

Open February to December.

The Water Garden, Stobo, Scottish Borders

For all of its drama, the constant water pressure in Stobo’s water gardens provide a peaceful, zen-like environment in which to reconvene with nature. Conceived in the early 20th century, when all things Japanese were in vogue, expect to be treated to bridges, tea houses and of course, Acers.

Open occasionally to the public as part of the SGS.

The Formal Garden, Kinross House, Kinross-shire

With a path precisely aligned with Loch Leven Castle, the symmetrical formal gardens at Kinross House point directly to where Mary Queen of Scots languished as a prisoner for 1567-68 before making a daring escape.

Occupying about five acres, the gardens feature box quadrants enclosing beds now filled with contemporary planting.

Open by prior arrangement.

The Gertrude Jekyll Garden, Munstead Wood, Surrey

Currently closed after it was purchased by the National Trust in 2023, the gardens Munstead Wood were not only the entire creation of Country Life’s very own early gardens expert, they were also where the great plantswoman lived — and in a house designed for her by her great friend Sir Edwin Lutyens.

Munstead Wood was where Jekyll experimented with colour-graded planting and where she kept her nursery of plants for her clients.

It is expected to be open to the public again in due course.

The Topiary Garden, Levens Hall, Cumbria

Five miles south of Kendal, Levens Hall is home to purportedly the world’s oldest topiary gardens.

Conceived in 1701 by one M. Guillaume Beaumont, 'professor of the topiary art' to James II — now there’s a job title — the finely clipped yew and box hedges fell from fashion for over a century.

What can be seen today is mainly believed to be from a restoration in the early 19th century.

The Fantastical Beasts Garden, Mount Stewart, Co Down

Dotted around the gardens of Mount Stewart, sometimes peaking out at you from unexpected corners, you’ll find all manner of concrete creatures employed in useful professions. Orangutans proffer urns and Dodos forlornly flank a giant Ark.

The Ark and the animals commemorate the Ark Club, formed in London under the shadow of the First World War. Led by Lady Londonderry —who later took residence at Mount Stewart — the club met once a week to raise funds and devise help for the war effort.

The Autumn Colours Garden, Chatsworth, Derbyshire

Visiting this idyllic area of Derbyshire on a cool, misty autumnal morning you will be greeted with a magical vision of deer grazing within a fiery backdrop of orange, red and yellow leaves.

Considered one of England’s 'Treasure Houses', the generous, naturalistic-looking parkland was laid out by Capability Brown, but venture closer and look down for smaller, but no less breathtaking gems such as white wood asters nestling beneath the canopy.

Open year-round.

The Country Life Image Archive contains more 150,000 images documenting British culture and heritage, from 1897 to the present day. An additional 50,000 assets from the historic archive are scheduled to be added this year — with completion expected in Summer 2025. To search and purchase images directly from the Image Archive, please register here.

You never forget your first RHS Chelsea Flower Show — a heady concoction of big-budget show gardens, colourful, independent nursery exhibitors and high profile sponsors. The ‘Spring Show’ is the date for garden lovers everywhere and its prestige pulls in an enormous crowd (about 170,000) of committed RHS members, green-fingered celebrities and tourists alike. BBC prime-time coverage is consumed by a further three million viewers.

It has to be seen to be believed.

The show has taken place in some form or another for more than 100 years, and while it’s received some criticism for being out of touch and inaccessible, considerable efforts have ben made to address this, and the environmental cost of the show. ‘RHS Chelsea Flower Show is not just for the stalwart gardener but also for the next generation discovering their green thumbs too,’ says Gemma Lake, RHS Chelsea Show Manager. ‘Show garden designers have embraced new ways of gardening this year to appeal to a younger audience, from embracing technology in their designs to finding unusual edibles that break away from the traditional allotment of fruit and veg. Gardens this year also speak to the wellbeing power of plants and the positive environmental impact gardening has.’

As a garden designer and writer, I’ve had the pleasure of visiting many times; in my 20s, as an RHS member pressing through the throngs, and then just last year as a designer, where I got to experience the wonderful collaborative atmosphere of the build weeks, working alongside Kent Wildflower Seeds (more on them later). The showground itself isn’t that big, but the sheer number of visitors and exhibitors make it an absolute rabbit warren to navigate. That just means that planning, as ever, is key. So, if it’s your first time visiting the show, here’s what you need to know.

Do your homework

RHS Chelsea Flower Show has evolved from a single tent exhibition into the spectacle it is today. No one is better placed to reflect on how much it has changed than multi-award winning garden designer and writer Jo Thompson, who’s returning to Chelsea for the first time since 2018 with a garden for Glasshouse, a social enterprise that supports women in prison by using horticulture to create opportunities and transform their lives when their sentences are finished.

Thompson is renowned for her incredible use of colour and heady, romantic orchestras of plants; if you want ideas for your own garden and to see what’s going to define planting trends for the next few years, take good notes on Thompson’s planting palette.

One huge change since she first started exhibiting, she says, has been the arrival of social media. ‘I used to write a [behind the scenes] blog 15 years ago and getting this glimpse felt like something very rare — a real revelation into a mysterious world, whereas now you can easily get updates about each garden’s progress.’

Following your favourite nurseries and designers on Instagram for weeks before the build will give you amazing insights and more context into what you will see on the day. Once you’re at the show it can be hard to fully appreciate the scale of the designs and have a good look — not least because of the huge crowds. It’s also worth checking out the BBC coverage the night before you go so you can plan your day a bit and make a list of the things you want to see.

Start with the Main Avenue

You’ll likely arrive at the Show via Sloane Square — no need for a map, just follow the stream of floral dresses. Get there as early as you can and tick off the big show gardens before they get too busy.

A single show garden can cost hundreds of thousands of pounds to build. Sponsors are usually charities in partnership with a deeper pocketed partner; since the pandemic an initiative called ‘Project Giving Back’ has helped give this and other show garden categories — Sanctuary, Balcony and Container gardens and ‘All About Plants’ — a proper funding boost.

The winner takes it all

When you’re at Chelsea, it’s easy to forget that just three weeks prior none of the infrastructure existed. However, the process for designing and building a Chelsea garden can take years, with the RHS announcing the line-up the previous autumn. Towards the beginning of May, huge teams of landscapers and volunteers arrive to bring to life intricate designs that comprise complex water features, towering pavilions, and lots of carefully planted blooms.

There’s a lot of preening and pruning because this, after all, is a competition. The judging is done before the Show opens to the public and medals are awarded at different times depending on which category a garden or exhibit is in. If you’re particularly interested in visiting the award-winning gardens, have a look online beforehand and determine where they are — it’s impossible to tell once your on site because the plaques and signage are all very small.

Views, views, views

Don’t walk straight down the Main Avenue, step-in-step with everyone else; instead, weave between it and Eastern Avenue. You’ll be rewarded with more interesting views into and across each garden and there will be fewer heads and shoulders obstructing your sightline.

The gardens I’ll be keeping a watchful eye out for include Jo Thompson’s Glasshouse garden, Nigel Dunnet’s Hospitalfield garden and The Avanade Intelligent garden, designed by show regular Tom Massey and his co-collaborator, Je Ahn. It’s jubilant embrace of all things artificial intelligent (AI), means it’s already considered one of the most controversial Chelsea gardens of all time.

Size doesn’t necessarily matter

Though the Main Avenue is typically the biggest draw of the day, the smaller show gardens and independent nurseries can be just as interesting — and easier to look at. In keeping with the RHS’s own attempts to appeal to a broader audience, exhibitors are increasingly catering to different levels of expertise.

If you’re on the hunt for small garden inspiration, then you must check out the Balcony and Container gardens which is when talented young designers often cut their teeth. One such designer is Caroline Clayton, founder of Viriditas Studio, a first-time Chelsea designer whose been tasked with creating a balcony space in partnership with Me+Em (above). ‘The Chelsea Flower Show is the pinnacle of garden design — a place where creativity, innovation, and passion come together in the most inspiring way,’ says Clayton. ‘The Balcony Garden section is one of the most exciting areas because it reflects how so many of us live today — in cities, with limited outdoor space,’ she continues. ‘It proves that you don’t need a huge garden to create something beautiful, personal, and green. It's about reimagining what’s possible in a small space.’

Save the best till last

If you’re looking for plants to grow indoors, there’s always much to be admired at the Alitex stand — the a designer go-to for beautiful, Victorian-style greenhouses. From there, head to and finish at the Great Pavilion, the beating heart of the show and a totally different kettle of fish to the big Show Gardens. If you can, try and talk to the exhibitors — they are some of the most knowledgeable and passionate people you’re likely to come across (about indoor-growing plants and much, much more).

What-is-more, the pavilion is increasingly populated with younger designers and growers, bursting with cutting edge ideas — all thanks to the RHS’s various grants and mentorship programmes. One such grower is Charlotte Denne, from Kent Wildflower Seeds — the first wildflower company to ever exhibit inside this space. Last year, I had the great privilege of working with Denne on her first Chelsea Show concept, in partnership with Ffern.

This year, they’ve teamed up with regenerative whisky brand Fielden to create another powerful display (above) which questions why we prize non-native plants, at the expense of native ones (the latter have huge, proven benefits to above- and below-ground biodiversity).

Denne recommends stopping by Peter Beale for their amazing range of rose, and saying hello to members of the Plant Fairs Roadshow. For all things water, try Lincolnshire Pond Plants; for grow-you-own-mushrooms, the Caley Brothers should be your go-to.

Last but not least — wear comfortable shoes. It’s a long day!

The Country Life 'Outdoor Drawing Room' is at stand PW210 at the Chelsea Flower Show from May 19 to 24 May. For more information, visit the Country Life Chelsea Flower Show hub or the RHS website

Dereen is an outstanding woodland garden in Co Kerry, where the rocky Beara Peninsula projects deep into the Atlantic Ocean. It has all the characteristics of Ireland’s best gardens — a beautiful natural position, a long history of intelligent cultivation, trees of record size and a huge range of tender plants. Yet Derreen’s unique feature is the thousands and thousands of tree ferns that have naturalised all through the garden over the past 150 years. There is nothing to match it anywhere in the northern hemisphere.

Derreen has belonged to the Fitzmaurice family since at least 1300. For most of that time, the windswept peninsula supported a subsistence economy supplemented by fishing. Its inhospitable landscape was covered by sparse native woodland of the Irish (or sessile) oak Quercus petraea and birch trees Betula pubescens, with blackthorn and scrubby holly underneath.

In 1600, an English force captured the old Fitzmaurice castle of Listowel, also in Co Kerry. Thomas Fitzmaurice, 18th Baron of Kerry, was forced to allow his five-year-old son to be taken to England, where he was raised as an Anglican. Thereafter, the Fitzmaurices made their way as courtiers and politicians in England, becoming Earls of Kerry in 1723 and Marquesses of Lansdowne in 1784. The 3rd Marquess improved Derreen by planting sycamore, ash and beech, as well as Scots and maritime pines to break the force of Atlantic gales. However, it was his grandson, the 5th Marquess, who initiated the horticultural plantings that are of such beauty and importance today.

Lansdowne was interested in estate management and saw that forestry would improve the value of his Irish estate, as well as providing shelter for the house and for the garden that he intended to create. In 1870, he began to plant 400 acres of woodland — an economic improvement on the scrubby oak and thin rocky landscape that housed his ever-growing collection of exotic trees and shrubs. His son’s verdict, written years later, was that ‘the mountain slopes adjoining [Derreen] have been clothed with thriving plantations, the success of which has shown how land of no agricultural value can be turned to good account under the favourable climatic conditions which prevail in the West of Ireland’.

The garden occupies much of a 90-acre peninsula at the head of Kilmakilloge Harbour with views of the wild and weather-worn Caha Mountains. Among Lansdowne’s earliest plantings at Derreen that have survived until modern times are Chamaecyparis lawsoniana ‘Erecta Viridis’, now more than 105ft in height, and two Monterey pines, Pinus radiata, 100ft high, as well as a Eucalyptus globulus, all dating from the 1870s. He also planted more than 100 ironclad hybrids of Rhododendron arboreum, mainly from English nurserymen, such as Waterer’s in Surrey, and, later, many rhododendron species. Some of these were raised from seed brought back from the expeditions of Cox and Kingdon-Ward, to which he subscribed, whereas others came as gifts from subscribers to E. H. Wilson’s Chinese expeditions, including Sir Frederick Moore at the National Botanic Gardens in Dublin.

There are excellent records of the rhododendron species and hybrids that the 5th Marquess planted. Among the tallest in Ireland now are plants of R. sinogrande, R. delavayi, R. falconeri, R. niveum and the incomparable hybrid ‘Loderi King George’. Derreen can also boast some of the best specimens in the British Isles of R. arboreum, R. keysii, R. wardii, R. macabeanum, R. shilsonii and R. griffithianum. Rhododendron lovers will immediately recognise this list as proof of good cultivation in Derreen’s protected microclimate and damp, acid soil. A huge diversity of rhododendrons still dominates the evergreen underplantings, supplemented by a great number of camellias and, in the deepest shade, dense hedges of pernettya and gaultheria. Kalmias and leptospermums thrive, as do olearias, drimys and Chilean embothriums.

Lansdowne considered himself most fortunate to have inherited Derreen as a young man in 1866. In his old age, he reflected that ‘it became mine 56 years ago, and during that time the garden has become one of the most attractive in the United Kingdom and contains a collection of rare shrubs and plants to which every year has brought some addition’. It should also be said that every glade and path was made and almost every tree or shrub planted under his personal supervision. It is clear that he quickly became a most knowledgeable plantsman. His work at Derreen echoes the extensive arboretum and rhododendron collection that he made at Bowood, his better-known property in Wiltshire. Nevertheless, during the long periods of public service that he endured as Governor-General of Canada (1883–88) and Viceroy of India (1888–94), it was the thought of returning to Derreen that buoyed his spirits.

By 1906, the range of plants at Derreen was more than enough to impress the curator of Kew, William Watson, who wrote in the Gardeners’ Chronicle of ‘magnificent masses of Indian bamboos and gigantic coniferous trees’, adding that ‘I have never seen Abies nordmanniana so perfect and luxuriant as at Derreen’. Gaultheria shallon was 8ft high, Acacia dealbata 50ft and Veronica traversii at 5ft was considerably higher than in its native New Zealand. Watson was especially impressed by 15ft specimens of Fuchsia excorticata and a tree-like Griselinia littoralis near the house that is now a record-breaker at more than 50ft.

The house at Derreen is pleasant, but not at all grand, and was rebuilt immediately after the Irish civil war — a show of confidence in the future of the Irish Free State. A huge flat sandstone outcrop rises abruptly from the lawns in front of the house and a grassy corridor cut from the woodland runs down to the water’s edge. The only way to explore the riches of Derreen today, however, is to plunge straight into the exotic woods and follow the labyrinth of glades and views that lead the visitor ever onwards, up and down, through innumerable dells and combes. Wide grassy vistas give way to narrow mossy paths, weaving their way through groves of bamboo, towering eucalyptus, tree ferns and evergreen shrubs. Conifers are well represented. The original windbreaks were largely of Pinus radiata, Cupressus macrocarpa and Thuja plicata, but the heavy rainfall — 70in–80in a year — also suits the many forms of Chamaecyparis lawsoniana, Japanese C. pisifera and Cryptomeria japonica. Record-breakers include Tsuga heterophylla at 144ft and two plants of Thujopsis dolabrata from Japan, both of them well over 70ft high.

Lansdowne’s descendants continue to be active and enthusiastic improvers of Derreen. Storm Darwin on February 12, 2014, emphasised the need to reinforce the garden’s shelterbelts — gusts of wind up to 100mph, accompanied by heavy rain, made it the most damaging storm in the history of Ireland. Derreen lost 87 mature trees, many of great size, which was perhaps inevitable in a mature woodland garden where the elderly windbreaks were fraying at the edges and most of the plants throughout the estate grew in a shallow layer of acidic topsoil over bedrock. It was essential to tidy up, repair the damage and secure the garden’s survival with better defences against future gales. The owners needed to restore some of the historic plantings, too, and develop a policy for future management. One of the people they turned to for advice was the National Trust’s then head gardener at Stourhead in Wiltshire, Alan Power.

Some years later, Mr Power left Stourhead and spent two years working full time with the team at Derreen. Many of the trees and shrubs that are known to have flourished in the garden in the past, but had since been lost, have now been replanted. Mr Power also suggested and supervised the successful installation of a deer fence to minimise marauding damage to the new plantings. Paths and glades were re-established and sometimes reshaped to accommodate the rarest and most sensitive plants, in sheltered backwaters far from the open views. As Lansdowne would have expected, new plants have been added, but always in spirit with the original garden.

Gardeners know that gales will sweep up seaside vistas, so only wind-resistant species can be planted to edge them. Nevertheless, much has been learned from Mr Power’s stabilisation of the plantings at Derreen. Cordylines and phormiums stand up well to salt winds and a surprise discovery has been the ability of griselinias to flourish, seed and establish themselves right on the edge of the shelterbelts, just above sea level.

It is not only griselinias that seed in the mild conditions at Derreen, the rare large-leaved rhododendrons R. macabeanum and R. sinogrande do, too. The ground around the magnificent silver firs Abies alba — the tallest is 150ft high — is littered with fast-growing seedlings.

The setting, the wide range of plants and the careful plantings at Derreen are a remarkable combination, but the thousands of tree ferns raise the garden’s heritage value to international importance. ‘You can’t help falling in love with it’ is Mr Power’s verdict on the garden, but he also points out that the 5th Marquess had a designer’s eye for picturesque plantings and learned much from the natural landscapes he encountered in India and Canada. It is only proper to let Lansdowne have the last word: when serving in India, but pining for Derreen, he wrote to a friend back home that he would ‘willingly give a year of my life for a fortnight there’. That is a sentiment immediately understood by visitors today.

Derreen, Co Kerry, Ireland, is open all year round. Visit www.derreengarden.com

‘If anyone deserves the title of the plantsman’s plantsman it is Maurice Foster.’ That was the verdict of the horticultural luminary Hugh Johnson after a visit to White House Farm in 2017. Mr Foster’s wisdom, experience, energy and enthusiasm for plants are admired by everyone who meets him. His memory is phenomenal, too — he can tell you where every one of the 6,000 plants in his collection came from and whether he thinks it is correctly named.

In 1971, Mr Foster and his late wife, Rosemary, bought White House Farm in Kent specifically because they wanted to make a large garden and grow trees and shrubs, such as magnolias. It came with five acres of land, to which they added a seven-acre apple orchard that is now the site of their arboretum and, later, three acres of woodland. The garden is 500ft above sea level, at the top of a ridge, so that winter frosts roll down to the valleys below. It is also extremely thickly planted, so that a great number of tender plants that would not normally survive flourish in the sheltered woodland areas.

The soil is variable, but is mostly a light loam with a pH of 5.5 to 6.5. Parts are quite stony and there are occasional veins of clay. Throughout the holding are seams of Kentish ragstone, an impermeable limestone that was once widely used as a damp course in local buildings. Apart from a century-old Bramley apple tree near the house, every single tree and shrub in the garden at White House Farm was planted by the Fosters in ground that they had cleared by hand.

Mr Foster took early retirement from his job in publishing in 1992 to devote himself to the garden and embark on a series of plant-hunting trips to Western China. Further expeditions took him to other parts of China, Pakistan, Bhutan, Mongolia, Japan, Tasmania and New Zealand. Naturally, magnolias were among the many seeds he brought back from Eastern Asia, including a large number of species collected in the wild. Magnolia insignis and M. campbellii subsp. mollicomata came from China’s upper Salween valley — seed of the latter is difficult to find because trees are stripped for their medical uses.

Many other wild-collected species have arrived from gardens and gardeners all over the world — wild collections are of great scientific importance. Mr Foster noticed that M. campbellii in the wild is usually white flowered, but it was originally described by Sir Joseph Hooker from a very rare pink form that occurs around Darjeeling. Pink forms are, therefore, the ‘type’ of the species — and always popular — whereas the white form is less frequently seen in gardens. Magnolia petals are really sepals that botanists refer to as ‘tepals’.

Mr Foster had, however, been a committed lover of magnolias for many years and the bulk of his collection at White House Farm consists of garden hybrids — more than 220 of them. Some are now national champions for their height, girth or both. He is always thrilled when the first trees flower early in March — tall species such as Magnolia campbellii and hybrids, including M. x veitchii ‘Peter Veitch’, which can grow to 75ft. In most years, M. sargentiana var. robusta ‘Blood Moon’ is the earliest to flower. It grows near ‘Claret Cup’, another March flowerer that is a seedling of M. sprengeri var. diva and Mr Foster raised two frost-resistant seedlings that appear to be hybrids between the two. He named them ‘Premier Cru’ (he calls its colour ‘hot magenta’) and ‘Grand Cru’. The colours of all these tree magnolias are intensified when seen against the blue sky of early spring. Naturally, one needs space and patience for the very tall early-flowering magnolias, but Mr Foster says that garden owners should be more adventurous.

April brings Magnolia ‘Purple Globe’, bred by Os Blumhardt in New Zealand. The outside of its tepals are, indeed, dark purple, although the insides open out pink. Another of Blumhardt’s cultivars, M. ‘Star Wars’, is now 40ft at White House Farm. This is also the month when forms of ever-popular M. stellata and M. x soulangeana are in flower. Mr Foster greatly admires the hybrids bred by Todd Gresham at his Santa Cruz home in California, US. ‘Manchu Fan’ at 30ft is still growing. Mr Foster has noticed that when a magnolia reaches its ultimate height, it stops growing upwards and thickens up sideways instead.

Yellow magnolias come into flower in late April and into May and they are one of Mr Foster’s particular interests. He says that, over the past 50 years, some 100 selections and hybrids have been listed. ‘Too many have been named, many of not obvious garden value, not to say mediocre,’ he declares. ‘The search continues for the perfect yellow magnolia.’ He thinks highly of Honey Tulip, ‘Yellow Lantern’, ‘Butterbowl’ and ‘Elizabeth’, of which he has a 40ft specimen at White House Farm. Best of all is rain-resistant ‘Lois’: one of his plants, planted in 1990, was nearly 35ft high when it succumbed to verticillium or phytophthora. ‘The quality of its primrose-yellow flowers, vigour, hardiness and neat, symmetrical habit all commend it as an outstanding choice for any garden in the UK.’

Mr Foster is a great fan of the summer-flowering Oyama magnolias. The best-known species are Magnolia sieboldii from Japan and M. wilsonii from Sichuan. All have fragrant nodding or pendulous white flowers from late May onwards — and all are very beautiful. M. wilsonii flowers all at once, whereas M. sieboldii has fewer flowers in May, but then produces a long succession well into August.

Mr Foster has a systematic approach to gardening and likes to draw conclusions from his observations. Many of his magnolias come from dormant scions given to him by fellow enthusiasts. He grafts them, using seedlings of Magnolia kobus as rootstocks. In due course, he raises cuttings as an insurance policy and plants both out, side by side. At first, the grafted plants, with the benefit of an established root formation, grow faster, but, later on, the own-root plants outperform them. Mr Foster concludes that M. kobus has a dwarfing effect that means it could be used to adapt tree-like cultivars to small gardens.

The garden and arboretum at White House Farm are now a registered charity, established to conserve their plants for posterity. They are open to groups by prior arrangement and Mr Foster also hosts study days. The gardens are entirely maintained by the plantsman himself, with part-time paid help once a week and a growing number of volunteers. Readers should not think that magnolias are the only plants to be seen: there are extensive collections of deutzias, philadelphus, sorbus, hornbeams, maples, birches and roses. Two hydrangea walks with seedlings of H. serrata and H. aspera extend for some 400 yards. There are large collections of camellia and rhododendron species, too, and a rich woodland undergrowth of bluebells, snowdrops, daffodils, lilies, epimediums and anemones.

Wherever you walk at White House Farm, your attention is caught by individual plants. Mr Foster is indeed the plantsman’s plantsman — a prince among plantsmen and a whirlwind of charm and energy. And always smiling.

Eight glorious gardens have been shortlisted for the Historic Houses (HH) Garden of the Year Award 2025 and the public is now invited to vote. Showcasing independently owned gardens, parks and grounds, the awards is in its 41st year and is sponsored by Christie’s.

Among the shortlist is photogenic Hestercombe in Somerset (below), which boasts three centuries of landscape design, with its lakes, temples, combes and woodland, including Georgian and Victorian areas, plus Edwardian formal gardens created by Sir Edwin Lutyens and Gertrude Jekyll, with all the irises, pools and pergolas that entails.

Last year, Country Life featured Iford Manor Gardens in Wiltshire, home to the well-known landscape architect Harold Peto at the beginning of the 20th century, and it is highlighted again here. Exemplary restoration at Iford has been ongoing for 60 years by the Cartwright-Hignett family and visitors love its Mediterranean, Byzantine and Japanese influences, with statues, colonnades, rills and ponds on Georgian terraces.

Another imaginative restoration has taken place in the grounds of Gothic shell Lowther Castle in Cumbria, blending Neo-Gothic design with 17th-century formality, Victorian extravagance and one of the UK’s largest adventure playgrounds.

Raby Castle’s park and gardens, Co Durham, reopened last summer to much acclaim, after Lord and Lady Barnard commissioned award-winning designer Luciano Giubbilei to reimagine it; the result was ‘ingenious’, with historic brick walls and mature yews blending with mazes and a grass amphitheatre.

‘This year’s shortlist shows the variety on show across England’s finest gardens,’ says HH director general Ben Cowell. ‘They range from the historic grandeur of Arundel Castle, West Sussex, to the bluebells and wildflower meadows of Hole Park, Kent… while at Penshurst Place, East Sussex, visitors can enjoy 11 acres of Elizabethan gardens… [and] Wollerton Old Hall, Shropshire, delights with intimate garden rooms and exquisite planting.’ Visit the Historic Houses website for further information and to vote.

Meanwhile, voting for the RHS Partner Garden of the Year opens on April 17. This much younger competition is in its fifth year and there are 231 to choose from, 15 of which are new for 2025. There will be regional as well as overall winners; last year’s victor was Green Island Gardens in Essex, which was lovingly created within woodland destroyed during the 1987 hurricane.

Imagine if you combined the beauty of an old English wood, with its mixture of broad trees and skinny saplings, sudden clearings and dappled glades, with a garden where specimen trees, flowering shrubs and bulbous plants have been planted to give pleasure at different times of the year and you will have something of the hybrid that is Evenley Wood Garden near Brackley in Northamptonshire.

The 60-acre wood first came to the notice of a keen local plantsman, Timothy Whiteley, when he was out hunting in the late 1970s. The Rhododendron ponticum that was growing beside the rides indicated a seam of acid soil running through the typically alkaline Northamptonshire clay. With such variation in soil, the woodland — which was only 700 yards from Whiteley’s home — would enable him to plant a wide variety of trees and shrubs so, when, in 1980, the chance finally arose, he bought the 60 acres of beech, oak and ash for £10,000. Thus began a lifetime of collecting, growing and breeding. He brought back treasures from his travels and other specialist plants were frequently given to him by horticulturists who knew that he would ensure them a good home.

Timmy Whiteley, as he was known to family and friends, is fondly remembered as a charming and enthusiastic plantsman who loved to show visitors around his wood. It is extraordinary how much energy he had for his horticultural pursuits. These included oaks, magnolias, maples and euonymus (to mention only a few of the trees and shrubs by which he was fascinated), as well as bulbous plants, notably snowdrops and lilies. He added a stream of blue scilla and drifts of martagon lilies, as well as stands of the giant Himalayan lily Cardiocrinum giganteum. Erythroniums, trilliums and arum lilies also did well — with some, if not all, still being visible today. He made careful notes of their progress, or otherwise: the pretty little yellow native tulip, T. sylvestris, he noted sadly, came up year after year, but rarely flowered after the first season.

In 1986, he was invited to become a member of the RHS council. He also sat on the Lily Group and regularly reported on the lilies he was growing at Evenley, notably Lilium ‘Garden Society’, which he selected and named after writing to the Queen Mother, then patron of the Garden Society, who gave him her permission. He also found time to act as treasurer from 1987-93 of the International Dendrology Society (IDS), becoming its vice president from 2003 until his death, and travelled widely with the group.

On one trip to Philippe de Spoelberch’s arboretum at Wespelaar in Belgium, he collected some acorns. Other IDS members warned that he was wasting his time. ‘But,’ he wrote in an entry in the IDS year book 2014, ‘being middle-aged, ignorant and obstinate, I persisted. Six of the 10 seedlings which I germinated were gold. I have three in my garden, but only one is really good. For once, I planted it in the right place.’ This was Quercus rubra ‘Evenley Gold’, a hugely popular oak that, as he described it, ‘holds its golden colour into August and then, about eight weeks later, turns a splendid autumn red’. He also raised Acer campestre ‘Evenley Red’, which has notable red leaves in autumn.

According to Caroline Boisset (Lilies and Related Plants, 2011-12), writing on his being awarded the Lyttel Cup for ‘work leading to the encouragement of the cultivation of Lilium, Fritillaria and Nomocharis,’ he had flowered 45 species of lily at Evenley. The bulbous plants, he wrote in a previous issue of the same journal (1994-95), were, together with autumn berries, essential in providing colour throughout the year as he could not afford the time that would be needed to hand-weed herbaceous perennials. ‘The point I must emphasise is that I have not made a 60-acre garden. I have been making a garden spread over 60 acres.’

After Whiteley’s death in 2017, who would be able to take on Evenley Wood and ensure the health and survival of the 3,000 or so taxa listed in his catalogue of the collection? His daughter, Nicola Taylor, already had her hands more than full with horses — working with her daughter Izzy, an international eventer. ‘I came and walked around here one day and I realised that this was his dream, his legacy and thought “I can do this”. Ignorance was bliss! I really didn’t know a daffodil from a daisy.’

She was lucky. ‘One day, coming back from London, I dropped into Waterperry Gardens [in Oxfordshire] and asked to meet the head gardener, a man called Rob Jacobs. I told him I had inherited a wood and needed some help. Fortunately, he already knew and loved Evenley and commented on the wonderful snowdrops. To cut a long story short, he came to help once a week. That’s how we found our head gardener Dan Winter, who has been here since November 2020 and had been a trainee at Waterperry.. Rob still comes once a fortnight.’

Together, the three of them — assisted by 20 volunteers — have worked wonders. Today, Evenley Wood Garden is open to the public and a programme of maintenance of the original plantings — with monthly visits from a team of arborists — as well as careful observation, has revealed many, if not yet all, of Whiteley’s bulbous plants, which are spread throughout the rides and glades. ‘Dad didn’t draw a plan,’ says Mrs Taylor. ‘It was all in his head.’ Yet it was thought through: he deliberately planted interesting trees along the perimeter of the wood so that passers-by could enjoy them. Many trees and shrubs have outgrown their space and sensitive thinning and pruning is helping to open up vistas and allow important species room to develop.

Near Mrs Taylor’s favourite tree, a 35-year-old Fagus sylvatica ‘Quercifolia’, 1,500 ash trees have had to be cut down because of ash dieback. On the Broad Ride above the stream is the bulk of Whiteley’s euonymus collection and some of the climbing roses that were originally introduced to add mid-storey colour.

‘I realised that I didn’t have the money to pay for all this work and that I would have to open the wood to the wider paying public,’ says Mrs Taylor, who has overseen the conversion of a building constructed from felled timber to host an anniversary party into a simple, rustic café that stands near the mature Kentucky coffee tree, Gymnocladus dioica, and an impressive handkerchief tree, Davidia involucrata. Regular events and an area for weddings were introduced with the help of her manager, Alison O’Hare, who joined the team in late 2017. On a visit last October, local children were thoroughly enjoying looking for ingenious handmade ghosts, skeletons and witches and the café was humming with happy parents.

Although more people have necessitated the original turfed paths being protected by woodchip and matting, this is as low key as possible. In the same way, a couple of neat signs explain ‘Why plants have Latin names’ and the key species have discreet, yet clear labels. There is a nice balance here between providing for experts and the general public alike: galanthophiles can find all 80 named snowdrops within easy distance of the café. Other visitors will come across large drifts of Galanthus ‘S. Arnott’ along Top Walk and glorious carpets of Narcissus cyclamineus and Crocus tommasinianus.

As her father did, Mrs Taylor delights in showing visitors around. Her understanding of the site and its needs is growing exponentially. ‘There are 20 acres of greensand acid soil out of the 60 acres,’ she notes, ‘as well as heavy clay.’ She is already familiar with all the important species and has sought out advice from horticulturists, such as the woody-plant experts Maurice Foster, Tom Christian and Chris Sanders. Meanwhile, she has invited the botanical painter Veronica Ward to be artist-in-residence and paint the plants on vellum and paper.

‘The first year here,’ recalls Mr Winter, ‘was one of discovery, seeing all the bulbs for the first time.’ Since then, tens of thousands of bulbs have been planted to boost the existing collections, drifts have been extended or moved and new trees, such as Quercus rysophylla ‘Maya’ — a Mexican oak from Burn-coose Nurseries in Cornwall — and shrubs are being added. On the Rhododendron ride, the overgrown ponticum has been removed to allow more space for new additions, such as historic narcissus and lilies, as well as many primroses that have been moved here from elsewhere in the wood.

‘Presumably, I shall go on planting little bulbs in the wood to my dying day,’ wrote Whiteley. ‘After that perhaps someone else will pick up the spade and carry on.’ He would surely be proud — and a little surprised — to see how his 60-acre wood is looking today.

Evenley Wood Garden, Mixbury Road, Evenley, Northamptonshire — 07776 307849; www.evenleywoodgarden.co.uk

Great Comp, Kent

As featured on the Country Life website last week, this gem of a garden just outside the M25 is beautiful all year round, but all the more so in spring.

Leonardslee, West Sussex

The Loderi Garden — like Great Comp, also featured recently in Country Life — has the world’s most complete collection of Loderi hybrid rhododendrons, bred by Leonardslee’s former owner, Sir Edmund Loder, from 1901. Some plants in the collection are more than 100 years old.

Ramster Gardens, Surrey

Rhododendrons were a passion of the Hon Florence Priscilla McLaren, known as Lady Norman, who lived at Ramster from 1922. Many of the large rhododendrons were planted in the 1920s and 1930s, some with russet trunks now stretching to 20ft in height.

Sheringham Park, Norfolk

The 50-acre Wild Garden at Sheringham is home to a nationally important collection of rhododendrons. The ‘carpet of colour’ can be admired from two viewing platforms, but gargantuan lemon-coloured rhododendron macabeanum, tucked away from the path network, are well worth a diversion.

Trewithen Gardens, Cornwall

A traditional Cornish woodland garden with a strong bias toward spring flowering plants, many of plant hunter origin. Rhododendrons, interspersed with Asiatic magnolias, flank the huge serpentine lawn and signal the arrival of spring, best between February and July.

Scotney Castle, Kent

When spring arrives, the Main Lawns and Lime Walk are swamped by their mauve-pink blooms. A sea of rhododendrons flood the sloping valley, cascading from Dell Garden down to the moat, where ruins of the 14th-century castle emerge from below.

Glendoick Gardens, Scotland

The rhododendron nursery was established in 1953, filled with seeds of wild species collected on plant-hunting expeditions. Today, it is the site of a project to create hybrid species that will withstand rising temperatures.

Exbury Gardens, Hampshire

This rhododendron haven was begun by Lionel de Rothschild in 1919. Three generations, thousands of bulbs, and more than 1,000 hybrids later, the collection is world-famous, at its best in May.

Borde Hill, Haywards Heath

With a legacy that includes the first Chinese rhododendrons to be introduced to Britain, flowers from seeds collected by 19th-century plant hunters, and the place where Col. Stephenson Robert Clarke began his rhododendron collection in earnest, The Old Rhododendron Garden promises a bounty of history and blooms.

Bowood Garden, Wiltshire

The Woodland Garden, laid out by the 3rd Marquess of Lansdowne in 1854 and open for six weeks during the flowering season (mid-April to early June), is home to hundreds of rare and hybrid rhododendron species, with two miles of meandering paths to enjoy them.

RHS Garden Rosemoor, Devon

Good throughout the season, but head for the National Rhododendron Show (April 26-27) and you'll see exhibitors from all of the south and west of England gather for a special event, showcasing magnificent displays and a programme of classes, trade and advice stands, and competitions. Entry included in garden admission, from £14.50.

When Roderick and Joy Cameron were living in London in the 1950s, they started to look for a cottage in the country 'with a couple of acres'. One day Mr Cameron, a civil engineer who worked for the Ministry of Works, saw an advertisement in Country Life for a large 17^th-century farmhouse in Kent — Grade II*-listed. The land that came with it in 1957 was mainly open paddocks, with light woodland at the edges. The four acres were rather more than they wanted but later on, as their interest in gardening grew, they were able to acquire another three acres from their neighbour.

The house they had found was Great Comp. It's a home that lies in the rural hills of north Kent, roughly halfway between Sevenoaks and Maidstone, at some 360 ft above sea level. The garden is on the Lower Greensand — the gardener's favourite soil — but parts are on sand of great fertility. Great Comp is compulsory viewing in late spring, when hundreds of rhododendrons and azaleas fill the woodland garden with colour. Some of the best are 'Loder's White', the R. augustinii hybrids like 'Blue Diamond' and 'Blue Tit', and the dependable rich red Hardy Hybrid with an impossibly long name, 'The Honourable Jean-Marie de Montague'. The scent of Rhododendron luteum, too, is worth a long journey to inhale: the yellow species is for many people the best of all azaleas.

The 1950s were a very difficult time for garden-making — money was tight — so Roderick Cameron set out to make a garden without the need for employed gardeners or outside help. This meant extensive use of woody plants, sourced from local nurseries, because trees and shrubs require less maintenance than herbaceous plants. But the Camerons were in the vanguard of using ground cover to suppress weeds and make a large low-maintenance garden attainable. It was a very much a new discipline at the time — Graham Stuart Thomas did not write his classic book Plants for Ground Cover until 1977. All around the azaleas and woodland shrubs at Great Comp are ground cover plants, notably hardy geraniums like G. macrorrhizum and G. phaeum and, in many areas, thickets of bluebells that have squeezed out all competition from weeds.

The house faces more-or-less south and its garden was a largely open site, exposed to the winds. It took the Camerons a while to realise that intensive shelter-planting was essential. Old oaks would eventually supply the perfect woodland setting and quite a number of the seedlings that turned up in the garden — the result of squirrels hoarding them — were left to grow on and become trees. But conifers were the answer to the more immediate need for quick-growing shelter and privacy.

The collection of mature specimens today is excellent: blue, green or golden, fastigiate or prostrate, conifers provide the perfect context for deciduous trees and shrubs. Mr Cameron envisaged the garden as 'an enclosed ambience of peace and quiet'. It was first open to the public in 1968.

Plantsmanship was in the ascendant during the 1950s and 1960s and Mr Cameron would sometimes criticise the RHS for its concentration upon collecting plants rather than using them to ornamental effect. And he thought it an advantage that Great Comp's garden was all made by him and his wife, and not by a professional person. It meant that they could change their minds as they proceeded, which is difficult for designers and committees. He saw himself as a landscaper with plants, for whom it was the general effect that mattered — the contribution of plants to the overall vision, not their individual charms.

Nevertheless, the Camerons loved their plants, not just for their beauty in flower but also for their shapes and colours off-season. Conifers and massed plantings of heathers — all evergreen — are still the backbone of the garden in winter when Erica carnea comes into flower. Mr Cameron wrote that he wanted 'all parts to be of interest at all times of the year'. Many visitor attractions claim to be 'a garden for all seasons' but in the case of Great Comp it is true. Moreover, it is a garden made 60 years ago that still has a lesson for today's new gardeners — how to landscape a large area for maximum effect in return for minimum effort.

The Camerons laid out their garden with formal designs near the house and a more natural layout further away. Raised terraces and stone-edged borders near the house are given to plants that need more attention than the hardy trees and shrubs in the woodland.

Along one side of the formal square lawn is a border of modern salvias, forms and hybrids of S. greggii and S. microphylla, whose cultivation is a continuing interest for the garden's curator, William Dyson. Here, too, are borders devoted to late-summer displays of purple-leaved dahlias, cannas and kniphofias. Hidden and enclosed behind walls and hedges is the 'Italian' garden, whose paved enclosures provide shelter for rare and tender plants like cordylines. It was inspired partly by the architecture of the Roman Forum which Mr Cameron visited towards the end of World War II and partly by the self-contained formal gardens at Hidcote Manor and Sissinghurst Castle. Mr Cameron insisted that he sought 'profusion rather than perfection' everywhere in the garden.

Perhaps the most memorable element of the gardens' design is the central view from the house, which takes you across the square lawn, down some steps and along a broad grassy path that curves away towards the south with heathers and evergreen azaleas on either side. Woodland walks lead off to the sides where the plantings are carefully planned to appear informal.

The woodland garden was inspired by Exbury in Hampshire, where rhododendrons are planted in great numbers and define the scale of the whole garden. Great Comp's azaleas are not rare species from remote corners of the far east, but 'Exbury hybrids', seedlings and named cultivars bred by Lionel de Rothschild. It is their brilliance that astonishes the visitor and the way that their many different colours harmonise with each other. Combinations that would not work in a calm 'good-taste' herbaceous border are a delight to the visitor's eye.

The stonework at Great Comp is an unusual feature and one that should inspire more garden-makers. Mr Cameron found large deposits of sandstone and ironstone beneath the surface when making the garden. From 1973 to 2005, he used it to create a very convincing series of ruined buildings, with brick-edged doors and windows to suggest that the garden was made around a hamlet that had long since fallen into romantic decay. It is one of the garden's most unusual and successful features.

Another aspect that is unusually well done at Great Comp is the design of cross-views. Visitors follow the paths through wooded parts of the garden, admiring the individual trees and shrubs that line the paths, until suddenly a long view opens out to one side — a glade or clearing that leads the eye across a spacious area lushly planted with low shrubs, herbaceous plants and bulbs. There is much to be learned.

Joy Cameron died in 1992 and Roderick in 2009. They had no children, so they transferred Great Comp to a charitable trust. It is now a RHS Partner Garden. William Dyson arrived in 1993 and has maintained the garden very well for the last 30 years in accordance with the Camerons' ideas and intentions. He works alongside one-and-a-half gardeners, supported by a team of volunteers — five who work for at least one day a week all through the year and another ten who help when they can.

Where? Great Comp Garden on Comp Lane, St Mary's Platt, Sevenoaks, Kent TN15 8QS.

How? Phone 01732 885094 or visit www.greatcompgarden.co.uk

When? Open daily, 10 am — 5 pm (last entry 4 pm), March to October 31, plus some openings in winter months (nb. there are 100+ different snowdrops)

Few gardens have their own heliport, yet this is far from the most remarkable of the many extraordinary features of Tresco Abbey Garden, 28 miles off the coast of south-west Cornwall, which, for most people, can only be reached after travelling for the best part of a day.

Its history, of which more later, encompasses five generations of one determined and unusually focused family. Its geography — it sits on the southern end of Tresco Island, which itself is only two miles long and forms part of the archipelago of 200 islands, islets and rocks that form the Isles of Scilly — gives it a year-round temperate climate, enabling plants from South Africa, South America and the Mediterranean to thrive. (At the New Year’s Day count in 2024, 287 different species were in flower.) And what dramatic and rare species they are! To English eyes, more accustomed to the gentle softness of pinks and lilacs, the abbey garden delivers a knockout punch; like discovering Pucci after Laura Ashley.

From the moment you arrive on the island, you’ll spot escapees from the garden. The granite walls that thread across Tresco are alive with giant yellow-flowering aeoniums, little yellow oxalis and crimson and scarlet lampranthus. Brilliant-pink Gladiolus byzantinus pop up on field edges, 6ft-tall echiums rise up from cottage gardens and the sand dunes of Pentle Bay are fringed with great drifts of the purple daisy flowers of Senecio glastifolius, a South African native. In place of thorn and maple, many hedges on Tresco are planted with Olearia traversiorum, a fast-growing and salt-tolerant plant from the Chatham Islands in New Zealand. The gleaming rich-green leaves of Coprosma repens, commonly known as the looking-glass plant, also make hedges so shiny they stop one in one’s tracks. Even when the sun isn’t shining, it is impossible not to smile.

To the Abbey Garden itself, begun in 1834 by the indefatigable Augustus Smith, a gentleman from Hertfordshire with the means to take a 99-year lease on the Isles of Scilly from the Duchy of Cornwall for £40 per annum. The quid pro quo was that, as Lord Proprietor (the title he thus acquired), he would invest £20,000 in the islands’ development. As his many doings on the island to create jobs and provide schooling are not part of this story, suffice to say that, having decided to build himself a home on Tresco — the most sheltered and accessible island — he chose a spot beside the ruins of the 9th-century priory of St Nicholas, of which little remained except two stone archways, now encrusted with succulents. To counter the salty gales that blew in from the Atlantic, he had 12ft-high walls built and planted the hillside with a variety of trees, of which the Californian Monterey cypress, Cupressus macrocarpa, and Monterey pine, Pinus radiata, proved most resilient to the salt-laden winds.

The layout of the garden — which remains the same today — was of three walkways running east to west along a top, middle and lower terrace with paths leading up and down between them and a series of steps, from the bottom of the garden to the top, arriving at the statue of Neptune, a figurehead from one of the many ships wrecked in the treacherous Scillonian waters. (Smith’s original collection, since augmented, can be seen in the Valhalla Museum in the garden.)

The foundations established, there followed the great business of filling the garden, which Smith did by looking to Australia, South Africa and Mexico and making special areas in the garden for different countries. A photograph of him in the museum at the entrance to the garden reveals a stout figure tightly buttoned in a mariner’s coat and naval cap, appreciating a Puya chilensis that towers above him. The sepia image doesn’t convey the exoticism of this statuesque plant, which grows to 8ft high — some forms have surreal jade-coloured flowers with anthers coated in bright-orange pollen.

Many examples of this native Andean bromeliad grow in the garden today. Instead of hummingbirds, they are pollinated by blackbirds and starlings — and sometimes red squirrels, which have been successfully introduced to the garden with no greys on the island (nor, indeed, are there foxes, badgers, snakes, frogs or toads).

The plant collecting went up a gear when Maj A. A. Dorrien-Smith inherited Tresco in 1918 from his father Thomas Algernon (Smith’s nephew and heir). The major was already a keen plantsman and, during his time in the Boer War, had sent plants back to his father from the veldt. The appearance of Metrosideros lucida in the garden (another tree that proved able to withstand the salt), as well as the coprosma and olearia, date from this time.

For their honeymoon, Dorrien-Smith and his wife, Eleanor, went camping in the Stirling Mountains of Western Australia, where they were thrilled to see acacias (of which there is now a National Collection in the garden), kangaroo paw plants, Anigozanthos manglesii, eucalyptus, sisyrinchium and many, many others. Plants were shipped back in specially made cases — on one trip, the major was accompanied by 2,000 potted specimens, as well as thousands of seeds.

By the 1920s, there were 16 gardeners — today, there are eight — and entry to the thriving garden was free of charge. Disaster struck, however, in 1929, when storms brought down 600 trees, which crashed into and destroyed many other plants. Yet, thanks to Tresco’s climate, by 1935 a list of the plants in the garden numbered 3,500 species and cultivars. As now, they were planted with South African, Australian and Mexican species on the Top Terrace, with its poor shallow soil that sits only a few inches above the bedrock. Mediterranean and Canary Island plants enjoy the slightly deeper soil and better protection of the Middle Terrace, where the present inhabitants of the Abbey, Robert Dorrien-Smith and his wife, Lucy, have made a lovely terraced Mediterranean Garden with a shell house and fountain.

Among the most popular plants are the proteas, of which the first were brought back by Lt-Cmdr Dorrien-Smith on a trip to the Cape in 1969. (He also brought home aloes, galtonia, gladiolus, watsonias and the pincushion plant Leucospermum cordifolium, another favourite with its plasticky orange flowerheads and stemless leaves.) So big, bold and colourful are the plants in the garden and so alien in their forms from our native species that even those who think they aren’t interested in plants will be drawn to the monstrous succulents, such as dasylirion, with spiky-edged leaves that can grow to as much as 4ft and take almost spherical forms.

One old specimen on Tresco has grown as it would in the wild, forming thick trunks that snake across the ground in an almost animalistic way. Another favourite is Sonchus brassicifolius, also known as the Robinson Crusoe cabbage (with leaves that can reach 18in long), which is what Alexander Selkirk ate when stranded on the Juan Fernández Islands.

Keen plantsmen can lose themselves for days in admiration of the red-flowering Eucalyptus ficifolia; the Norfolk Island pine, Araucaria heterophylla; the New Zealand Christmas tree, Metrosideros excelsa; the banksias, palms and abutilons; 6ft-tall tree dandelions Sonchus arboreus from the Canaries; and still leave knowing that there is much more to see.

To be employed as a gardener here is surely to be in heaven, albeit with a lot of work to do. Head gardeners tend to stay for decades and Mike Nelhams, who first came on a student scholarship in 1976, returned as head gardener in 1983 and became curator in 1994 when his colleague Andrew Lawson — who began as propagator in 1985 — took over. Together, they witnessed the two greatest disasters in the garden’s history: the snow storm of 1987 that destroyed whole collections, turning much-loved specimens to foul smelling heaps of rotting material, and was followed, too painfully soon, in 1990 by a 127-mile-an-hour hurricane that dumped seawater on the garden and ripped through the shelter-belt, destroying 90% of the 130-year-old trees in only four hours.

The horticultural world is very generous in times such as these and, when it came to restocking the gardens in 1987, the great botanic gardens at Edinburgh and Port Logan, Dumfries & Galloway, offered many replacements for lost specimens, as did the garden at Inverewe in Wester Ross, where Peter Clough, former head gardener at Tresco for 12 years, was then based. Kew was invaluable in the garden’s renaissance, too, giving quantities of surplus stock and cuttings, as did several private gardens and other collections, many of them in Cornwall. Getting the plants to Tresco was a mammoth task, involving transportation via lorries to Penzance and then transfers to containers for shipping to St Mary’s, followed by smaller ships to Tresco, where tractors and trailers took the precious loads to the Abbey Garden. Thankfully, Mr Nelhams recalls in his book Tresco Abbey Garden, ‘our monthly temperatures mean that we were able to plant at almost any time of the year’.

Planting had only recently been completed when the hurricane struck, bringing new chaos as the mature trees fell, crushing other plants and destroying the outer walls (letting in rabbits). The hillside was ravaged with 20ft-high upended rootplates among the debris. To give an idea of the scale of fallen trees, Mr Nelhams recalls that the route along the hillside that usually took 10 minutes to traverse took two hours. Following the massive clear up, 10,000 new trees have been planted by the team with the support of the Dorrien-Smiths and, 30 years on, these have matured well, creating an effective new shelterbelt, although the handful of noble survivors of the hurricane still top them by 15 or so feet.

Last year, Adam Dorrien-Smith, representing the sixth generation, took over the management of Tresco and, although the garden is looking better than ever — with a new visitor centre featuring timelines and photographs of the garden’s story — no one is taking any risks. Spare seedlings are carefully collected and raised by the garden propagator Emma Lainchbury and the work of sharing surplus stock with other botanic gardens and Cornish gardens continues, ensuring that, should any plant die, there will always be a replacement.

Visit www.tresco.co.uk

The writer flew to Tresco courtesy of Penzance Helicopters (www.penzancehelicopters.co.uk)