'Oh, Adam was a gardener, and God who made him sees / That half a proper gardener’s work is done upon his knees.’ Rudyard Kipling wasn’t wrong, as I know to my cost over these past few months of planting beds and borders. The knees have definitely taken a battering, but I’ve come to love that position on the edge of a border, committing new charges to newly dug and newly enriched earth, not least as the planting is undertaken on sandy soil.

There is an intimacy to planting when it is carried out in a kneeling position (with a cushioned kneeler). It’s rather like tucking a small child into bed and I mutter at my botanical offspring from time to time and offer encouragement.

After the unsettling upheaval of moving house — and garden — in the hottest, driest summer on record, I seem to have found a kind of equilibrium and a new lease of gardening life. Caring for four acres of garden that took a quarter of a century to create and to cherish was quite some responsibility. ‘How could you bear to leave it?’ I am asked regularly. ‘With difficulty’ is the reply.

I have learned to move on, however, mentally as well as physically, and to relish the chance to start again from scratch on a more modest scale and on acid sand instead of chalk, clay and flint. At least that’s the right way round. I can only imagine what it’s like in one’s seventies moving from friable sand to intractable clay and flint: Goodbye speedy planting, hello osteopath.

I have always felt a surge of optimism when replanting any garden border — ripping out things that are past their best and creating new pictures with new plants — but in such a situation one can keep a nucleus of established trees and shrubs to act as a framework. Here, I am planting from scratch and, although that can be daunting, it is also liberating and exhilarating.

I have not sat down and drawn up a paper plan, but then I never have. I start by carving out borders and shaping them; eyeing them up from all angles, then adding trees, shrubs, perennials and bulbs in that order. I begin nearest the house — that way, when I come indoors I can look out on what I have achieved so far and the garden springs off the shape and character of the building. Start at the far end of your plot and a) the garden does not complement the dwelling and b) when you gaze out of the window you cannot see what you have achieved as it is too far away to have maximum impact. It’s dispiriting.

I add to my borders bit by bit. I have a list of plants I know I want, but I also like to be inspired by something I spot in a nursery or garden centre that I think I can find a home for. (I have vowed that this garden will not have a holding area — that expanding collection of container-grown plants that never diminishes.)

New loves? Chinese dogwoods and magnolias. A visit to Exbury in Hampshire last spring fuelled my passion for rhododendrons and those showy Kurume azaleas that I would once have thought far too garish. I have come to realise that spring on acid soil is legitimately far more colourful than the slowly unfurling spectacle on chalk downland. I am also less concerned about what others think of my taste.

Camellias are replacing some of the rampant laurel, which is the talismanic shrub in this part of Surrey. Ferns I have always valued for their ability to thrive in dry shade, but now, having a garden that is blessed with an acre of woodland, I am adding to my pteridological vocabulary. The crested forms of Dryopteris, and the finely cut, glossy-fronded Polystichum setiferum ‘Herrenhausen’ are especial favourites.

The borders next to the house feature a mixture of magenta-flowered Geranium ‘Patricia’, Nepeta ‘Walkers Low’ and Alchemilla mollis, perforated by sentinels of Thuja occidentalis ‘Smaragd’ — tall and slender, but less prone to falling open than the classic Mediterranean cypress. They have been a great success in their first year.

At the age of 15, I pleaded with my parents to let me leave school and become a gardener. They were concerned that it might be nothing more than a flash in the pan. I’m glad they said ‘yes’. My enthusiasm for growing things and creating gardens has only grown over the years. Lucky chap.

How many of us, on a warm autumn day, have shaken some seeds from the dry, ripe pod of a favourite garden plant or scooped out seeds from a much-loved tomato to sow the following season? In so doing, we become part of a continuum that began about 12,000 years ago, when our Neolithic hunter-gatherer ancestors gave up foraging for wild plants and settled to farm.

In collecting the seeds of wild plants that grew well for them to sow the following season, these accidental plant breeders kickstarted a journey that all the crops we grow and eat have taken — evolving from wild parent to cultivated offspring. This process of selection naturally focused on plants that flourished in the collector’s soil and climates, a system that continued unchanged until early in the 18th century, when a new generation of enthusiastic amateur breeders and entrepreneurial plantsmen and women started to take an interest.

Echoing our farmer forebears, their method for developing and improving flower, fruit and vegetable crops was through careful observation and the selection of perceived changes that were occurring naturally. The result was the development of a huge range of new varieties.

It wasn’t until 1837 that seeds were produced commercially, when Suttons Seeds and Carter’s Trusted Seeds started growing flowers and vegetables with the specific purpose of collecting their seeds, which were sold through catalogues published the same year. This marked the start, in this country, of commercial phenotype breeding; that is, the deliberate crossing of different varieties based on their morphology (observable characteristics) by the transfer of pollen from a male flower to a female, thus creating something entirely new.

Gardeners and estate owners could now buy packets of countless different varieties of favourite garden crops by mail order. Not surprisingly, breeding new cultivars became an obsession with the Victorians and seed producers sprang up across the country. Catalogues were often richly illustrated and their arrival through the letterbox was eagerly anticipated. Many home gardeners continued to save their seed and were instructed in doing so with ‘saving one’s own’ advice in gardening books.

Everything changed again with Gregor Mendel’s discovery of the laws of heredity towards the end of the 19th century. As a result, plant breeding became a science and, early in the 20th century, moved from the farm and garden into the laboratory. Genetics, a word invented by the biologist William Bateson in 1905 to describe the laws of inheritance has, since the Second World War, revolutionised our approach to plant breeding.

This often involves another traditional breeding technique known as mutagenesis — the forced mutation of a plant using chemicals and radiation to select for specific traits. This has enabled highly inbred types with the development of F1 hybrid cultivars. Most recent advances are in selective molecular plant breeding of genetically modified and engineered (GMO) crops, initially rice, wheat, maize and soya, with increasing numbers of fruits and vegetables being added to the list of GMOs every year.

Traditional open-pollinated varieties are very different from genetically narrow and homogenous modern hybrid cultivars. They are highly heterogenous with complex genomes and they are adaptive, meaning their traits can flex with changing biotic and abiotic stresses. Their seeds carry within their genomes the memories of their wild relatives: as growing conditions change, so underused genes ‘wake up’ and play their part in ensuring the survival of the whole organism.

Why did the tradition of home seed saving go out of fashion? It is thanks mostly to a misguided perception that home-saved seed is not as good and the belief that a greater choice, particularly of modern hybrid cultivars, promises greater yields and better disease resistance. However, with about 80% of all the seeds we buy now imported, mainly from the EU, but also from America, North Africa and the Far East, it is becoming ever more important to increase the amount of homegrown seed and so ensure we have the greatest diversity of well-adapted edible and ornamental plants in our gardens.

In the past 50 years, the vast majority of small, family-run businesses selling open-pollinated seed have either been bought out or gone bust, leaving only a handful of companies supplying most of the seed we buy mail order or from local garden centres. (Three of the biggest, Suttons, Dobies and Thompson & Morgan, are all owned by BVG Group, a multi-channel retailer.) There are still several independent seed companies with long and distinguished reputations; Kings Seeds, Marshalls, Mr Fothergill’s, Unwins and Chiltern Seeds to name but a few.

Most encouraging, however, is the emergence since the start of this century of a new generation of small-scale seed suppliers and breeders. Two of the oldest are Tamar Seeds in Cornwall and Real Seeds in Pembrokeshire. The smaller companies that champion cultivating open-pollinated varieties also provide guidance on how to save their seeds. Garden Organic’s Heritage Seed Library, which holds the national collection of more than 800 heritage and heirloom vegetables, actively encourages its members to save seeds of the varieties they share out every year. Not only does this make economic sense, but, by saving our own seeds, we become part of the solution to restoring genetic diversity, resilience and adaptability in our gardens. By selecting seeds, year after year, from the best flowers and crops we harvest, we are acting as evolutionary plant breeders, exactly like our Neolithic forebears.

Adam Alexander’s latest book ‘The Accidental Seed Heroes’ (Chelsea Green, £20) is out now. Look out for his seed-buying guide in a January issue of Country Life.

This article first appeared in the September 2, 2026 issue of Country Life. For more information on how to subscribe, click here.

The garden at Littlethorpe Manor in North Yorkshire is a splendid example of what can be achieved by an immensely gifted gardener who is trusted and given a free hand by his employers. John and Christin Thackray bought the Georgian Littlethorpe Manor in 1985, together with 11 neglected acres that ran down to the old Ripon Canal, where the loam over gravel soil gives way to alkaline clay.

John Thackray, who died in 2018, landscaped the wilder extremes of the land with clumps of trees — one of Norway maple (Christin is Norwegian) and one of lime, both thickly underplanted with daffodils. He planted a third copse of Himalayan birches, Betula utilis subsp. jacquemontii, the bright white trunks and branches of which have become a key part of a substantial winter garden. The Thackrays also wished to make those parts of the garden near the house into a series of outdoor areas, each with a distinct individual character.

This vision became a reality when they appointed Eddie Harland as their head gardener in 1998. Harland had trained at Askham Bryan, North Yorkshire’s county horticultural college, and at the Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh. He had also been head gardener at two major gardens in the south — Knebworth in Hertfordshire and Haseley Court in Oxfordshire.

Harland, who is helped by two other gardeners, one estate craftsman and volunteers, is a consummate plantsman, with a detailed understanding of what will flourish in combination with other plants. As well as having a discriminating eye for colour and shape, he is a fine draughtsman, able to draw up his designs. His first substantial improvement required him to take over the walled garden and turn it from food-growing to ornamental horticulture, planting the mellow brick enclosure as a four-season garden. The section representing autumn, for example, has plants of Cercis canadensis ‘Forest Pansy’, with pink flowers in spring and purple leaves in summer that extend its season of usefulness. Everywhere is a rich herbaceous underplanting with clever blends and contrasts of outline, texture and colour.

Harland’s next development was the Sunken Garden, which fills a critical space between the Four Seasons gardens and the house. Here, the shapes of plants are strictly controlled — formal elegance instead of romantic exuberance. Structure comes from clipped domes of Portugal laurel — such an underestimated beauty — and the silver-leaved pear tree Pyrus salicifolia. The gravel soil is extremely free draining, perfect for the irises, lavender, peonies and silver-leaved Convolvulus cneorum that give rise to the alternative name the Scented Mediterranean Garden. The garden is enclosed by trellising, handmade from iroko wood by the gifted estate craftsman Andrew Welford, who is responsible for the extensive woodwork and metalwork throughout the garden. At the centre is an armillary sphere by David Harber.

The house is the starting point of a long view across the main lawn and down towards a spacious pond that Thackray made as part of his landscaping before the arrival of Harland. Both the view and the pond needed upgrading. This was achieved by installing a small fountain in the middle of the lawn and blocking the wider view of the park by edging the far side of the lawn with a tall yew hedge. The line towards the pool was emphasised by rows of Irish yews, known for their upright habit of growth, on either side of the fountain. Handsome stone steps at the edge of the lawn lead down into the park, where the view towards the water is continued by an avenue of red-stemmed limes Tilia platyphyllos ‘Rubra’, brilliant in the winter sun, but also underplanted for spring display with 3,000 Triumph tulips in shades of pink, red and purple, including such cultivars as ‘Don Quichotte’, ‘Jan Reus’, ‘Havran’ and ‘Cassini’.

The focal point of this long axis is the Cranborne-stone Classical pavilion that Harland designed and Welford constructed on the far side of the pool. Its off-white Doric columns and beautifully proportioned pediment bring the whole garden together. The pool is a fair size — perhaps just over half an acre — and its banks have been lushly planted with damp-loving herbaceous plants, including gunneras, ferns, irises and hostas. A fine floating fountain from Otterbine takes centre place among the large clumps of waterlilies and a floating island from Biomatrix has been colonised by native plants and visited by nesting waterbirds.

A substantial double border planted with autumn-flowering herbaceous plants curves around one side of the pool and connects it with Thackray’s copse of white-stemmed Himalayan birches, which is now the focal point of an arcadian winter garden. The birches themselves are thickly underplanted with the semi-evergreen soft shield fern known as ‘Herrenhausen’ and then connected to the edge of the garden above the canal towpath with a light canopy of more birches and a wealth of beech topiary, hard-pruned dogwoods, Erica carnea and winter-flowering bulbs.

One might suppose that, with the establishment of the winter garden, there was little left to complete the garden at Littlethorpe, but, after Thackray’s death, the opportunity arose to convert the old tennis court into a physic garden that would commemorate not only his life, but also the achievements of his family company Chas. F. Thackray, a major manufacturer of orthopaedic implants and medical instruments. You will never see a finer display of herbal plants. There are hanging gardens, herb lawns, and collections planted in large Corten-steel boxes, each devoted to herbs that will treat a particular group of ailments.

The layout — still Harland’s — is as clinically modern as his earlier designs and plantings are lush and romantic. The focal point at one end is a painted frieze of surgical instruments and, at the other, a 6ft metal installation of an artificial hip joint, the manufacture of which was perhaps the family’s greatest contribution to the advancement of surgery. It sounds extraordinary — it is extraordinary — but every detail of the design and planting is well chosen and exciting. Many of the herbs are horticultural varieties, selected for their coloured leaves or handsome flowers. Even a collection of medical herbs cited by St Hildegard of Bingen in her 12th-century treatise Physica is both interesting and attractive.

There is much more to enjoy and learn from in other parts of Littlethorpe’s garden. Look at the cultivars of Magnolia grandiflora pruned hard against the house — the flowers are few, but the leaves make an arresting cover for the white-rendered wall. Note the blue-and-yellow colour schemes around a pergola of wisteria and honeysuckle. Study the garden of annuals where the seed proved so attractive to birds that the planting is now moving towards a succession of perennials emerging from a ground of ornamental grasses: dark-blue Salvia nemorosa ‘Caradonna’ with swathes of yellow Phlomis russeliana, followed in late summer by Digitalis ferruginea and purple orach (Atriplex hortensis var. rubra). Finally, ponder the electrical installations all over the garden and contemplate the theatrical effect of highlighting the beauty of the trees at night — a pleasure known only to the owners, their guests and their ever-competent gardener Harland.

Littlethorpe Manor, North Yorkshire, opens for the National Garden Scheme and groups by arrangement.

Gardeners are always more interested in tomorrow’s weather than yesterday’s. All through the summer — a sequence of heatwaves aggravated by drought — we longed for cooler temperatures and copious quantities of soft, refreshing rain. We had a long wait. By the beginning of August, gardening pundits were telling us that the Mediterranean climate would soon extend to the British Isles and convert our chalk downlands into Europe’s supreme winemaking region.

Buddlejas were a popular suggestion for the future, because they thrive in the driest and hottest of manmade environments, even pavement edges and cracks in masonry. Deep-rooted herbaceous plants were also promoted; eryngiums and echinaceas did particularly well. In my own garden, the only shafts of green in the lawns came from dandelions and plantains. The same logic applied to trees and shrubs: millions of surface-rooting birches turned yellow and, rather to my surprise, so did many small or medium-sized specimens of our native oaks. Are they dead or will they sprout into leaf again next spring? Wait and see.

Roses had the best season that I can remember. They flowered almost continuously and showed no sign of mildew or blackspot. Mind you, modern rose-breeders such as David Austin have been breeding out those fungal diseases. I have always insisted that roses fare best in a Mediterranean climate — Los Angeles or Adelaide in Australia — and pointed out that England’s national flower has traditionally been at the limit of its cultivability in our sodden isles. Not now, perhaps.

I say ‘perhaps’, because we should not assume that hot, dry summers and mild, wet winters are the new norm. There will always be variables. Our coming winter may be unusually cold — back to the freezes of the 1980s. In this case, the salvias, phormiums and cordylines that you thought would live forever in your garden may be killed by much lower temperatures than we have seen for several years.

What effect did the heat of summer have upon nurseries, plant centres and gardens that are open to the public? The RHS garden at Wisley in Surrey notched up a record 62 consecutive days without rain. When I went to the trials grounds in mid August, I found that the grass between the plant beds was not only brown, but worn away completely from being walked on — bare earth and compacted, too. The long double borders that lead up to Battleston Hill, almost the only part of the garden that was irrigated, were a dream of lush horticultural beauty. The gorgeous lagerstroemias and huge-flowered Hibiscus moscheutos responded to the heat by putting on the best show of late-summer colour I have ever seen. There weren’t many visitors, either, which meant that I could photograph the borders with no one to interrupt the fantasy.

It was difficult to find out what effect the weather had on visitor numbers. Press and PR people are sometimes rather protective of their employers’ reputations and prefer to tell a positive story. However, staff at one National Trust garden told me towards the end of June that its visitor numbers were down by 20,000 and they were worried about the effect on their budgets. The general feeling among popular gardens was a dip of about 12% from June to August.

Vicky Flynn at the National Garden Scheme told me that income was 3% down for the year to date — this was in mid August — but that it was ‘infinitely recoverable’. People still want to visit gardens and would start again when the heatwave finished. Yes, quite a number of gardens cancelled their summer openings, but ‘only 20% cited drought-related issues’. The visitors who did brave the heat didn’t mind brown lawns because they were all suffering from drought in their own gardens.

Plant centres fared better than you might suppose. In June, they reported that plant sales dropped by 5%, but then they recovered in July and jumped by 11% year on year. Customers rushed to replace the herbaceous and bedding plants that they had lost. Agapanthus and hemerocallis daylilies sold particularly well.

That speaks volumes for gardeners. We are not discouraged. If we lose a plant, we look for an even better one to replace it. Our love of plants — our commitment to gardening — is not affected by temporary setbacks. My grandmother always quoted Dr Johnson’s remark when hearing of a widow remarrying — gardening represents the triumph of hope over experience.

The gardens at Highnam Court, west of Gloucester, began to take shape when the estate was bought in 1838 by Thomas Gambier Parry, a rich young man with inherited wealth from his family’s East India Company connections. He found the grounds around the rare Commonwealth house in a desultory, part-formal, part-Capability Brown condition. The stew ponds and ‘Great Pool’ shown on an estate plan of 1757 had been reduced to a series of rectangular canals below the house, flanked by two slim lakes bordered by tree belts, with a serpentine plantation of trees cutting down and through an expanse of bare grassland.

Gambier Parry was a hyperactive artist, collector of early Italian paintings and philanthropist. He commissioned Henry Woodyer to design a new parish church as a memorial to Parry’s first wife, Isabella, its High Victorian interior enriched by frescos painted by Parry himself. He also added a rectory, a school and five lodges to the estate and re-routed the drive to make the blank, north side of the house its formal entrance. The old entrance front became the garden façade facing south, with a balustraded terrace added by the architect Lewis Vulliamy, who oversaw the alterations. A formal East Garden with a conservatory, a sunken South Garden, a Winter Garden Terrace and Winter Garden were added, this last one of the earliest and most engaging Pulhamite gardens in the country.

In 1992, however, a survey and report by Singleton Landscape found the house unused, the lakes silted and eroded and the gardens sadly neglected and overgrown. Highnam’s saviour was Roger Head, a local Gloucester businessman, who bought the estate in 1994 and set about a miraculous restoration of the house and the Pulhamite garden. Thirty years on, his transformation of Highnam is almost complete — although he keeps planning new garden extensions — and in sunshine the place almost dazzles by its colour and orderly perfection.

Driving in by the Chepstow Lodge off the A40, a visitor hears the cheerful sound of a picturesque waterfall, plunging down Pulhamite stone under the bridge that arches over the river that waters the grounds so generously. The drive then threads through a typical Victorian parkland of specimen trees — pines, sequoia, ash, oaks, liriodendron, cedar of Lebanon, one majestic plane — a restless muster of green silhouettes, interspersed with Dr Head’s favourite acers.

Entry to the grounds from the house is via a brick wall into the East Garden. Set into a niche, which was once within a demolished conservatory, is Oliver Cromwell, half-nude, half-Roman, posing as Hercules. The statue was originally in the niche over the south door, but political considerations banished him after the Restoration of 1660. He was brought here from exile in the stable court in 1920 and now looks out over a formal garden punctuated by Parry’s Irish yews. His place on the south façade was taken in 1962 by a statue of Flora, which formerly stood on the Winter Garden Terrace. The lawn down to the lake is now a circular blaze of roses, laid out in concentric box-edged beds.

Every path at Highnam is of golden gravel and their grass borders are shaved to perfection. Throughout, a wonderful neatness and cleanliness refreshes every view. The wisteria-clad arbour of the Broad Walk leads west towards the walled former kitchen garden and passes a new orangery, which Dr Head has added to the house to balance the former billiard room on the east side. Outside the orangery there is a knot garden, whereas inside are two survivors of the Pulhamite urns from the Winter Garden Terrace.

The firm of James Pulham and Son of Broxbourne in Hertfordshire was brought in by Parry in 1849 and worked here until 1862. James Pulham had devised an ingenious process for making lightweight, but natural-looking boulders by applying Portland cement to bricks and clinker, colouring it, spraying tiny pebbles to imitate sedimentary deposits and then laying out ‘rocks’ in imitation of natural stratification.

The firm would often mix its anthropic rockwork with real stone from the area; one of the pleasures of Highnam is trying to distinguish Pulhamite from Forest of Dean sandstone. It is not easy. Pulham was so proud of one of his arrangements at Madresfield Court in Worcestershire that he signed it as a work of art. There are further Pulhamite outcrops on the approach to Waddesdon Manor in Buckinghamshire. These artificial rockeries were not intended for planting with delicate flowery alpines, but with ivy, ferns, conifers, rhododendrons, brooms and even gorse.

The Winter Garden Terrace is bordered by the kitchen garden wall on one side, with more Irish yews, and on the other by a row of sentinel polycarbonate obelisks by Robert Bryant, which appear to change colour as you pass, backed by roses. Further out, there are more deep borders with more roses.

The gravel path leads to the Pulhamite Owl Cave and down into the Winter Garden, which is really a vast rockery of mazy paths licked by ferns and threaded by tiny streams crossed by a rockwork bridge. The paths skirt a central pool with an island on which is a secret grotto. Shrubs and flowers are present, but not intrusively so; there are swamp cypresses, bamboo, acers and eucalyptus. The charm of it all is to follow the steps and golden gravel to catch glimpses of the grounds outside. The excellence of the planning is that it draws a visitor in to lose their sense of direction and make sudden discoveries.

Beyond a rocky Pulhamite outcrop, where the brickwork armature of the artificial stone can be seen, a lake has been made from a withy bed, its graceful bridge a replica of Monet’s at Giverny. Dr Head is planning a new garden alongside and has already laid out a Spiral Mound Garden topped with a shell sculpture by Mat Chivers, carved from Kerry limestone. The mound itself is a beehive design by the late Carolyn, Lady Elwes, of nearby Colesbourne Park. It is encircled by beds planted with 12,000 plants, pastel shades in the inner beds and hot colours in the outer.

Walking back past the Winter Garden and the Rose Garden, the new Lower Lake comes into view. This was illustrated in Rudder’s 1778 History of Gloucestershire (Country Life, May 12, 1950), but had eroded beyond recognition by the time Dr Head arrived. He had a battle to get permission for its reinstatement, but Tewkesbury Borough Council overruled English Heritage, agreeing with Dr Head that it would complement, rather than disfigure, the Highnam landscape. It fits so perfectly into the grounds that, like the Pulhamite rockery, it could easily be mistaken for the genuine article.

One other leitmotif of this remarkable transformed landscape are the animal sculptures, carved by David Bytheway from dead trees, that enliven the views. The most impressive is one of leaping horses commemorating a visit made by the then Prince of Wales in November 2010. It also celebrates composer and musician Hubert Parry, Parry’s second son, famous for his setting of William Blake’s poem Jerusalem, who succeeded to the estate in 1896. A fitting tribute to Dr Head would be to quote that great choral anthem — he has achieved at Highnam a brilliant evocation of England’s ‘green and pleasant Land’.

Highnam Court is open on select days throughout the year for the National Garden Scheme — see their website for more details. The garden also

This feature originally appeared in the September 30, 2026, print edition of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

Everyone grows cyclamen. We start with a gorgeous pot of winter-flowering Cyclamen persicum, which we usually kill by over-watering (memo — no cyclamen tolerates waterlogged soils). Later on, when we get the gardening bug, we grow some of the hardy species that flower prolifically in dry and difficult corners of the garden. Nothing can match the sense of effortless achievement conveyed by an ever-expanding patch of C. hederifolium in autumn or C. coum in winter.

There are 23 species of cyclamen and some of them are very rare: pepper-scented Cyclamen libanoticum exists only on a couple of mountains north-east of Beirut in Lebanon, whereas C. somalense, discovered as recently as 1986, is native to the inaccessible Cal Miskaad mountains of Somalia and has not yet been introduced into Britain.

Cyclamen is a member of the primrose family — a fact not obvious to most of us — but it grows from tubers that can survive the heat and drought of a Mediterranean summer. Many species flower shortly after the arrival of rain in autumn, but others start by growing their leaves, which then form an attractive background for the flowers in spring. Some have a limited natural distribution: autumn-flowering C. cyprium in Cyprus, for example, and spring-flowering C. creticum in Crete. Endemism is the botanical word for the phenomenon.

The first species to be introduced to Britain in the late 16th century was Cyclamen hederifolium, which is widespread in Italy, the Balkans and Greece. It is now naturalised in much of southern England, wherever conditions suit its preference for dry shade. Cyclamen seeds are carried off by ants, which are attracted by the sticky covering. When they have licked off all the sweetness, (thereby rendering it ready for germination), the ants abandon the seed. Opportunist plants of C. hederifolium turn up as much as 300 yards from their parents. ‘Go to the ant,’ said Solomon, ‘consider its ways.’ What did Solomon know about the germination of cyclamen?

One of the surprises of growing cyclamen is that anything so small could be such an eye-catcher. The flowers are seldom more than 4in high, although always produced in great quantities; an established plant of C. hederifolium may bear as many as 100 flowers. The cheerful, nodding flowers have distinctively upright petals, sometimes with an elegant twist. After flowering, the stems of many species coil up like a spring — a curious development that draws the seedpods down to ripen on the tuber, beneath the leaves, where the ants find the seeds and spread them about.

Cyclamen have always been prized by plant collectors and, until recently, millions of wild-grown plants were dug up in Eastern Mediterranean countries and exported to Dutch wholesalers. In 1969, the super-rare Turkish species C. mirabile (its petals have pretty frilly tips) was mistaken for C. hederifolium and almost completely wiped out in the wild. Its fate precipitated the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) in 1975 and the eventual listing of all Cyclamen species as plants that may never be collected in the wild.

The leading grower of hardy cyclamen in England is John Massey, who saw the arrival of CITES as an opportunity to grow them professionally in England. He began to collect the plant 50 years ago and set to acquiring every species and distinct form that he could find. Research and experience taught him how to grow them well, although his Ashwood Nurseries near Kidderminster is perhaps even more famous for its hellebores and hepaticas.

A steady flow of gold medals from the RHS bears witness to his success. In 1994, at a Westminster show, Ashwood was awarded the first RHS ‘double gold’ for nearly a century — one for hellebores and the other for cyclamen. It is largely through Massey’s success in cultivating cyclamen that many of the species are available for cyclamen lovers today.

Massey knows the history of every plant in his collection — where its ancestors came from. A form of C. coum with a patch of green, shaped like a Christmas tree, in the centre of its silver leaves dates back to the RHS’s Bowles Scholarship Botanical Expedition to Iran in 1963, collected along the way in northern Turkey. Some of his original stock plants still flourish in the vast glasshouse and polytunnels that he dedicates to improving their range and growing them for sale.

Over the years, Massey has singled out his best cyclamen seedlings (no two are exactly the same) and used them to develop new strains. The day-to-day development of his collection has for the past 10 years been entrusted to his observant and discriminating colleague Hayden Worton. Most of his work focuses on C. hederifolium and C. coum because they are hardy all through the British Isles and the easiest to grow.

Both Cyclamen hederifolium and C. coum have pink flowers and dark green leaves, usually green for C. coum, but marbled with grey on C. hederifolium. Both have fine white forms, sometimes with a pink ‘nose’ to the flowers, as well as darker pink forms. Cyclamen leaves are also infinitely variable in both pattern and shape. C. coum usually has kidney-shaped leaves, but selected forms are almost round. C. hederifolium are normally heart-shaped, but some are much more slender, with arrow-shaped patterns. You have only to plant a couple in your garden to see immense variation among their seedlings.

Cross-pollination between chosen parents also leads to new flower shapes and dependable uniform colours when grown from seed. C. hederifolium ‘Ashwood SilverRose’ is a new strain with silver leaves and dark-pink flowers. Most seedlings will flower in their third year, but Massey will not release a plant until it has flowered and he can see that it is true to type. A vagrant bumblebee in his breeding house can undo a whole season’s work.

Cyclamen coum and C. hederifolium are hardy everywhere and C. cilicium and C. repandum survive outside in much of southern England. Massey also grows C. graecum, C. intaminatum, C. purpurascens and C. pseudibericum in snug corners of his West Midlands garden. Almost all the others prefer an unheated greenhouse, although the most spectacular require a frost-free glasshouse, including robust C. africanum from the coast of Algeria and rugged C. rolfsianum with angular leaves and large flowers from Libya’s Jebel Akhdar mountains.

Massey grows some of his Cyclamen hederifolium collection under a tree, interplanted with polypodium ferns, but cyclamen are quickly smothered by over-exuberant perennials. The usual advice is to grow them on their own, preferably under a deciduous tree where they will benefit from the annual mulch of fallen leaves. There is one exception to this: C. coum flowers in late winter at the same time as snowdrops and the two combine most beautifully.

Planting cyclamen tubers calls for a strong heart because, generally speaking, they should be placed only just beneath the surface of the soil or actually on top of it. Nevertheless, they quickly find their correct level and settle in. The tubers are small when young, but expand with age. A venerable old specimen of C. hederifolium can live up to 100 years and may have a tuber the size of a dinner plate.

Find out more about Ashwood Nurseries in Kingswinford.

This feature originally appeared in the October 7, 2026, print edition of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

Imagine you could go into an apothecary and, instead of seeing rows of jars with their cures, there was a display of all the plants from which they came. You’d be able to point down to a tiny snowdrop or up to a very large horse-chestnut tree. There would be an entire herbaceous border, sweet peas and roses, daisies and foxgloves.

On the shady bottom shelf, there would be an array of frogs and snails and even, possibly, puppy-dog tails. Many ailments or dilemmas are serious, others whimsical and then there are those that spring from the kind of lives we lead now.

Nature’s aspirin

The first published account of willow bark’s medical uses dates back to 1763 in Chipping Norton, Oxfordshire, when the Revd Edward Stone used it to treat malarial fever, common in England at the time. He nibbled on a willow twig and was impressed by its bitterness (he knew quinine, a malarial cure, was bitter), made a powder and was astonished by the results: ‘There is the bark of an English tree, which I have found by experience to be a powerful astringent, and very efficacious in curing aguish and intermitting disorders.’

It would take many more years, and scientists, to turn that discovery into what we know as aspirin. In 1828, scientists isolated what we now recognise as salicin, named after the botanical name of the willow, Salix alba. This was later converted in the laboratory to salicylic acid, which was more effective, and then a way was found to reduce its bitterness. It was sold for the first time as aspirin in 1899 by the German company Bayer.

Burn, baby, burn

Turmeric, ginger and white willow bark are all anti-inflammatory herbs that can reduce pain, but, in the greenhouse, there is something a little bit spicier. There are thousands of kinds of chilli pepper and, mostly, they are used to enliven food. When you bite into a chilli, you immediately feel the burn. That is caused by capsaicin, the active ingredient and, when applied to the skin in a cream or via patches, it can also produce a burning or stinging sensation.

However, it is also thought that the capsaicin is absorbed by the nerve cells, is transported to the spinal cord and then decreases the amount of pain-transmitting chemicals sent to the brain. The types of peppers used tend to be those with the most available, as in cayenne and serrano peppers (both Capsicum annuum), and those highest in capsaicin, which include the ghost pepper, also known as bhut jolokia, a cultivar of Capsicum chinense.

Short arms and deep pockets

There is nothing wrong with wanting to pay only your part of every bill, but it’s when you start to feel you may be tipping over into downright stinginess that you might seek help. There’s being careful, and then there’s being Scrooge. Fortunately, the garden has a cure for this — and it won’t cost much either.

Buy a packet of courgette seeds, sow about 10 and, of those, choose six to grow. Sow indoors in mid to late spring or directly outside from late spring. They will start to produce courgettes from midsummer at an average of three to four per week (more in a good year). From your six plants, you will have about 24 courgettes a week. Steam and sauté them. Make ratatouille until you can’t stand the sight of it. Grate them in salads. Use them in cakes, muffins, quick breads. Don’t forget soup. Give as many as possible to friends and when you run out (of friends) give them to everyone else. Leave them near your gate with a sign that reads: ‘Free to You’ or ‘Deliciously FREE’. You will be the king or queen of courgettes and experience the glow of being generous. You will be a giver, not a taker.

One final word: the following year, plant something else. No one wants a million courgettes two years in a row.

One too many

There is no official cure for a hangover, but the garden has some suggestions. First, coconut water — it’s full of electrolytes to recharge your body and can also help with a headache and nausea. Tomato juice (no vodka) can also be an effective remedy. Of course, tomato juice also includes a lot of water and tomatoes contain beta-carotene, vitamins A and C and the antioxidants lycopene and glutathione. In both these cases, you can pre-treat the problem by drinking a glass before you go out.

Other options are bananas (replenishing that potassium) and ginger (good for nausea). There’s also milk thistle (Silybum marianum), a herbal remedy aimed at protecting the liver. Finally, and this will make for a very interesting breakfast addition, there is the humble artichoke (Cynara cardunculus), which is also a type of thistle, said to improve liver health and digestion.

Pitter patter of tiny feet

If you have a dislike or fear of rodents, it’s important to find their weak spot and, in this case, it’s their noses or, to be more precise, their olfactory receptors. Mice have an acute sense of smell and they also have a secondary organ for detecting smells: the vomeronasal pathway. The garden cure for deterring mice is mint. The stronger the scent, the better, so use the good old-fashioned peppermint (Mentha x piperita) or spearmint (M. spicata).

The key to all of this is menthol. That mentholated aroma — clean and green, some would say bracing — can overwhelm the cold receptors in those tiny mice nasal passages. The battle begins with cotton-wool balls soaked in peppermint oil. Place these in spots (inside) where you think you’ve spotted a mouse: in the eaves, attic or skirting boards. When mopping the floors, add a drop of peppermint oil to the washing liquid.

Feeling bloated

Dandelions are one of those plants that appear indestructible. They grow everywhere and anywhere and, as Nicholas Culpeper noted in his The Complete Herbal of 1653: ‘It flowereth in one place or another almost all year long.’ Every part of it is edible and the toothed leaves are bursting with vitamins A, B, C and D. In Chinese medicine, the dandelion is seen as something of a cure-all, with the Chinese Pharmacopoeia in 2020 listing 40 patent medicines with the Taraxacum genus for use in treating more than 50 diseases.

In the West, it is famous for its diuretic capabilities — its more common name in France is pissenlit and in Britain it has always been known, as Culpeper puts it, ‘vulgarly’, as ‘piss-a-beds’. The leaves are an effective diuretic as they increase urine output without depleting potassium levels. The root has been used to support liver function and (also with leaves) for constipation. The roots and leaves contain inulin, a prebiotic fibre that helps beneficial gut bacteria.

There is no lack of ways to eat dandelions either. The flowers can be used to make tea or add to a salad, whereas the leaves (soak overnight to avoid bitterness) are used in salads or cooked as a vegetable (often with bacon). The roots can be grated into salads or roasted to use as a coffee substitute. A multi-tasking plant on every level.

Aloe there!

Aloe vera has quite the reputation. The ancient Egyptians called it the ‘plant of immortality’ and Cleopatra herself reportedly used it in her daily beauty routine. In ancient Greece, it is said that Alexander the Great was advised by his tutor Aristotle to conquer the island of Socotra in the Arabian Sea to secure supplies of the plant for his wounded soldiers. It was reputed to soothe rashes, heal wounds, settle stomachs and act as a laxative or ‘cleanser’.

The fleshy, pointy leaves have a layer of yellow latex that is responsible for the laxative effect, the use of which has been banned in some countries. They also contain a gel that is mostly water and includes a mix of amino acids, lipids, sterols and vitamins. It’s the gel that interests us here because if you have sunburn (or, indeed, frostbite), it will soothe your skin and, as the pain ebbs, your soul. It is rich in antioxidants and is a natural hydrating moisturiser, which may also help with peeling.

Forget-me-not

The common snowdrop (Galanthus nivalis) may look small and delicate, with its slender green leaves and nodding, white, pendant blooms, but it is anything but. All parts of the plant are toxic (no herbivore is going to nibble away at this little one) and it possesses a natural antifreeze that inhibits the ice crystals that kill so many other plants. Plus, its leaves have specially hardened tips that help break through frozen ground. That’s quite an armoury for a flower that looks entirely innocent in every way.

It’s a common churchyard plant and was grown in abbeys to treat mal de tête or ‘headache’. There are now thousands of varieties: it’s one of those plants that has a sophisticated fan base and galanthophiles are serious collectors who will pay large sums for unusual or rare bulbs. It is not known what inspired Russian scientists in the 1940s and 1950s to study Galanthus woronowii, a species with broad, bright green leaves that is native to the Caucasus, and break down its chemical structure. All parts of the plant were found to contain a chemical that they called galantamine, but it is particularly concentrated in the bulbs.

It wasn’t until the 1980s that it was discovered that the chemical can be used to manage Alzheimer’s disease, as it elevates the levels of the neurotransmitter acetylcholine in the brain. This improves memory and cognitive function and has been shown to be effective in managing early to moderate Alzheimer’s.

And so to sleep…

Many plants have reputations as sleep aids. Lavender (Lavandula), St John’s wort (Hypericum perforatum), red Korean ginseng (Panax ginseng), chamomile (Matricaria chamomilla) and kava-kava (Piper methysticum), to name a few.

One of the most prevalent is common valerian (Valeriana officinalis), which has tall stems and white flowerheads with many tiny blooms loved by bees. It is known as a herb with calming and sedative properties and has been studied many times for its effectiveness in treating insomnia and/or anxiety. The results of the studies seem to be conclusively inconclusive, as they are difficult to compare, involving different concentrations and settings. However, that has not stopped the European Medicines Agency approving valerian as a traditional herb to aid sleep and valerian dry-ethanol extract being recognised as a herbal remedy for improving sleep.

It is not fully understood how, or why, valerian works, but it is known that GABA (gamma-aminobutyric acid) is a major inhibitory neurotransmitter (think of it as an ‘off switch’) in the central nervous system. Its receptor GABA-A is the key player for many drugs that aim to help sleep (these include benzodiazepines, such as Xanax and Valium). Valerenic acid and valerenol, compounds found in the root, have been shown to bind to GABA-A receptors and could be behind its sleepy reputation.

This is a condensed extract from the author’s ‘RHS The Garden Cure: 100 Remarkable Remedies for the Curious Gardener’ (Mitchell Beazley, £20), which is out now.

The spectacular modern garden at Alnwick — 25 years this month — has proved an unqualified success. The scale of its layout is astonishing and its plantings are beautiful. Moreover, thanks to the vision and tenacity of its creator, Jane Percy, Duchess of Northumberland, it has transformed the economy of the North-East and given pleasure to visitors from all over the world.

The Duchess was brought up in a gardening family. Her mother was a keen plantswoman who spent as much time as possible in her garden at Kailzie, near Peebles. The then Jane Richard learnt about plants, especially their names and how to grow them, working alongside her mother. When she married Lord Ralph Percy, the younger son of the 10th Duke of Northumberland, he was 22 and she was 21. They had a relatively impecunious start to married life, so she learnt to do everything for herself.

The skills she acquired were invaluable when her bachelor brother-in-law, the 11th Duke, died unexpectedly and her husband had to take on all the responsibilities that went with being the 12th Duke, including managing Alnwick Castle, its collections and the substantial Percy estates.

Back then, in 1995, Alnwick Castle itself was open to the public, but its grand Italianate garden had long since disappeared. The Percys had ‘dug for Victory’ during the Second World War, but after 1950 all signs of cultivation disappeared and the walled garden was put to growing conifers.

When they took on the estate, the Duke said to his wife, in effect: ‘You know about gardens and gardening… what should we do with the old walled garden?’

The Duchess’s response was that it must be an attraction in its own right — and it must be of benefit not only to visitors, but to the people of Alnwick, too. This is the principle that has guided her at every stage of the garden’s development.

Friends who know the Duchess will tell you that she is, above all, an ‘ideas person’ and very soon she saw the potential of the steep hill that adjoins one side of the kitchen garden. Running water — perhaps some sort of waterfall — might be a feature, she thought, and she began to discuss her ideas with garden architects and designers.

None came up with a scheme that matched her vision for the hillside until a Scottish friend — the owner of a famous historic garden — suggested she should look for a European landscape architect. That explains how, after discussions and meetings with three of Europe’s best-known garden architects, she ended up asking the Belgian Jacques Wirtz to take on the design of the Alnwick Garden.

The most memorable feature of Wirtz’s design is the massive cascade that runs down the hillside opposite the entrance to the garden. Its surreal outline, its 21 steps and its squirting spouts and fountains were something of a puzzle to some observers at first, but water offers innumerable possibilities to gardens and gardeners and Alnwick’s Grand Cascade resonates strongly with visitors. Now, it rates alongside the Angel of the North as one of the region’s proudest modern icons.

The old walled garden, 3¾ acres at the top of the cascade, now the Ornamental Garden, is where the horticultural interest lies.The design is formal and the plantings are opulent. Some of the hedges are composed of unusual plants such as dogwoods and crab apples — Malus ‘Red Sentinel’ takes to hard pruning surprisingly well, whether as a hedge or when pleached. Soft fruit, including raspberries, currants and gooseberries, are interplanted with standard roses. Large pots are filled with spring bulbs or summer-flowering agapanthus. Clematis, roses and honeysuckles clamber up elegant pergolas and trellises. Delphiniums and peonies lead the list of handsome herbaceous plants, all displayed in harmonious colour combinations.

The beautiful Rose Garden was another of the original features when the Alnwick Garden opened in 2001. David Austin planted it and it is regularly replenished with improved varieties. The emphasis is upon roses as good garden plants and includes many of Austin’s own latest introductions. A substantial replanting is planned for this winter.

The Garden was a winner right from the start when the Prince of Wales, now The King, offered to become its patron. What few people realised then was the extent to which it would become a major tourist attraction, the new Versailles of the North. In 2002, Country Life pinpointed Alnwick as the best place to live in Britain, but the Duchess remembers that there was high unemployment and economic depression — and that foot-and-mouth disease had pummelled the local farmers in 2001.

The garden, however, became a force for regeneration. In one year alone, the Duchess remembers, 100 farmers and other locals applied for planning permission to turn their houses and outbuildings into B&Bs. Today, more than 200 people work full time for the garden and almost every business in Alnwick itself has benefited directly or indirectly. Local people support the garden enthusiastically, including some 100 volunteers who consider it their garden.

Shortly after its opening, the Percys realised that the garden must develop as an educational charity for the benefit of visitors. Consequently, the entire garden was transferred to a charitable trust in 2003. This means that not a penny passes to the Percys and the Duchess is free to raise funds for further expansion. Much of her work today focuses on fundraising for social and educational activities.

The Poison Garden was a significant addition early in 2005. More than 100 different poisonous plants are grown and displayed behind black gates adorned with skull and crossbones. A sign by the firmly locked entrance warns visitors that ‘These Plants Can Kill’. They include everything from Atropa belladonna (deadly nightshade) and foxgloves to laburnum trees, hemlock and the handsome evergreen tree Strychnos nuxvomica, the attractive orange-like fruits of which are the main source of strychnine. The garden has a licence to grow cannabis, coca and opium poppies. All visits are accompanied and children — who are told about the medical uses of plants and the dangers of misuse — love its allure.

Much more followed: the Treehouse — one of the largest in the world — opened in 2004, supported by a copse of mature lime trees. It is an extraordinary eyrie, with suspended walkways and rope bridges with a restaurant at the centre. The Serpent Garden came the following year — eight fascinating stainless-steel water sculptures by William Pye surround a snaking hedge of holly. These are both beautiful and educational, just as grottos and shell houses were in the 18th century.

The Cherry Orchard, which opened in 2008, is a feature of supreme beauty for two or three fleeting weeks in late spring. It occupies an entire hillside and is planted with only one cultivar — 329 trees of ‘Tai-Haku’, the Great White Cherry. It’s the sort of feature that many gardeners dream of creating, but lack the means or the confidence to do so.

In the Roots-and-Shoots Garden (2011), children are taught to sow seeds, plant vegetables and herbs, nurture their crops and harvest their produce. Elderly people with health worries, often the result of loneliness, maintain parts of the garden and are encouraged to join other activities.

The Alnwick Garden is an extraordinary achievement, but the Duchess is not a person who rests on her laurels. Indeed, she is now looking forward to completing the garden. New plantings, better buildings and improved waterworks are all part of the plan. ‘It’s not who you are that matters,’ she says, ‘but what you do for people.’

Find out more at the Alnwick Garden website.

This feature originally appeared in the September 30, 2026, print edition of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

Hydrangeas are very useful late-summer shrubs. The typical mopheads, however, are not so easy to grow in the colder parts of our island. That is when and where the white-flowered species Hydrangea paniculata comes into its own.

The wild species comes from Japan and parts of south-eastern China and its flowers are invariably white, but with a tendency to turn pink as they age. They are happy in shady woodland or in open sunny positions, but all hydrangeas give of their best if they are grown in soil that does not dry out. The great value of H. paniculata is that it remains in flower for a very long time, sometimes through to the end of October.

One unusual feature of Hydrangea paniculata is its flower buds, which are completely round, like oversized green drums. The flowers, however, open out as long, conical panicles, which may hang from the branches or grow more upright, according to the strength and thickness of their stems. These panicles have large, sterile florets that attract pollinating insects towards the pollen and nectar of the insignificant fertile flowers.

They are usually scentless, but butterflies, wasps and honey bees nip busily in and out of them. The flower spikes of the wild species are fairly open, but almost all garden varieties are a mass of overlapping sterile florets, presenting a solid cone, slightly reminiscent of a very large lilac, but always white, and opening from green buds.

A stream of new cultivars has been arriving in garden centres on these shores in recent years, from breeders in Japan, France, the Netherlands and the USA. There isn’t a single dud among them — all will grow well in our conditions, flower for many months and give great pleasure.

There are nearly 200 cultivars now in the National Collection of Hydrangea paniculata at Darley Park in Derby. Almost all have massive flower spikes, but some have been developed for their ability to turn unusual shades of pink or crimson with age. Others have been chosen because they remain white right to the end or because the florets are green and slow to turn to white.

Small cultivars are also emerging — Pinky-Winky, now overtaken by newer varieties, is a July-flowering favourite that combines moderate growth with a rich pink colour as it matures. These shorter varieties reach about 3ft in height, whereas some of the larger ones, useful for landscaping, may end up closer to 8ft or 10ft, with vigorous upright and spreading branches if left unpruned.

The RHS four-year trial, organised by Debbie Roe, RHS trials officer, at Bridgewater Garden near Manchester of Hydrangea paniculata cultivars ended last autumn and the great number of Awards of Garden Merit the judges conferred reflects the excitement it generated.

It was an important exercise because it was linked to similar trials in eight European countries, including Belgium, Germany and France, run by the Royal Dutch Horticultural Society under the auspices of the Euro-Trial organisation. Exactly the same 83 cultivars were simultaneously propagated by the Dutch and circulated to all eight nations, so that the trials would have the same starting point and the RHS’s results, together with those from all the other trials, will be published in the Netherlands in a final overall report.

Each of the 83 varieties was represented by three plants: one was hard-pruned to ground level each year in spring, one lightly pruned and one left unpruned. All performed very well.

The results confirmed every gardener’s experience: pruning delays flowering, but the flowers are larger. Unpruned plants bloom sooner and have more flowers, but they are smaller.

The RHS recommends cutting them to the ground every year — some nurserymen do this with a chainsaw — but, whatever régime you adopt, you will not be disappointed: all Hydrangea paniculata varieties are reliable garden plants. The fact that they bloom only on this year’s new growth means that they will flower perfectly even if they are caught by a late frost, too.

The trial judges were told to mark the plants for their vigour and health, the colour of their stems and the size, shape, colour and season of their flowers. They also considered a number of characteristics that many of us would not have considered. For example, the judges looked for plants with strong, sturdy stems, because the large panicles fill up with water in rainy weather and may flop down and be spoiled by contact with the soil.

One very effective way to grow varieties such as Pinky-Winky, the stems of which cannot always bear the weight of its beautiful flowers, is to graft them onto the upright stem of a vigorous variety and grow it as a standard.

With many cultivars of Hydrangea paniculata now available and so many excellent new ones launched every year, it is increasingly difficult to choose between them, but you can be certain that all will be healthy, tough, easy to grow — and beautiful.

This feature originally appeared in the September 9, 2026, print edition of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

Cornwall: glorious beaches, good surf, divine countryside and tree-shaded lanes. Afternoons eating ice cream and fish and chips overlooking the fishing boats that rock gently in the harbour. This is what visitors experience, but, for the people who live there all the time, it can be quite a tough existence. It was not always so: in the 19th century, the county was booming with tin mines and china clay pits that funded the construction of thriving towns and big churches. However, by 1990, things had changed: the last working mine closed in 1998 and the county was one of the most impoverished parts of western Europe.

Thirty years ago, Tim Smit, who had recently uncovered the extraordinary Lost Gardens of Heligan, was looking for another challenge. At Heligan, Sir Tim, as he later became, had unearthed the infrastructure, the trees and the stories behind the once great garden that had lain hidden beneath undergrowth since the First World War and opened it up to the visiting public, as well as the television cameras. Driving to Heligan, he often passed Bodelva, where there was a huge hole in the ground left by an old clay pit.

Some 196 feet deep, steep-sided and devoid of much in the way of soil, it was not the obvious place for a garden, but Sir Tim has never been afraid of a challenge and his justification for choosing this site for his new garden was suitably feisty. ‘We put it in a hole deliberately because it was exciting. People didn’t see anything until they came right up close and all of a sudden — bang! It’s a very theatrical approach.’

Plans were laid for a series of biomes (massive geodesic domes made from an especially robust layered plastic), in which all manner of tender and exotic plants would thrive. They would provide not only a diversion for visitors, but also a valuable resource for science. This is why the Eden Project is so very different from the average open garden: part tourist attraction — an excellent refuge for holidaying families driven from the beaches by weather — and part educational facility. Its aim was to show people ‘that, without plants, there’s no life on earth’, all in a muddy and inhospitable disused mine.

Somehow, money was raised, architects persuaded and councils cajoled. There were many tight deadlines and seat-of-the-pants moments, but, in the end, the team created not only a great garden and a scientific resource, but an employment opportunity for the local area.

If that was the past 25 years, what will happen in the next quarter century? The first answer is that the message will be spread to different corners of the world — there is already an Eden Project in China, with plans for others in Costa Rica, Australia and Scotland. This spring saw an excellent show garden at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show, created by Harry Holding, together with architect Alex Michaelis. This gave us a glimpse of the next Eden Project, set to open in 2028, looking out over the expanse of Morecambe Bay in Lancashire.

Work continues in Cornwall. A year ago, Peter Jones was taken on as the new head of horticulture. Jones made his name at the RHS’s flagship garden in Wisley, Surrey, where he helped transform many of the dustier parts of the garden into vibrant, alluring and almost revolutionary spaces through courageous plant choices and an unerring sense of the spectacular. He is carrying on that work as the Eden Project moves ever onwards and outwards. Less-visited corners in Bodelva are being transformed and paths are being re-routed so the focus is not only on the biomes, but also on the many acres of superlative horticulture that surround them. ‘I love the wonderful bone structure of the original Dominic Cole landscape,’ says Jones, ‘but, 25 years on, gardening is in a different place. There are always things that need changing, tweaking and updating.’

He has plans for bold and novel solutions to some of the tired planting, such as exchanging a teucrium hedge — which was part of the original scheme, but has become woody and infested with brambles — for a sweep of Toona sinensis ‘Flamingo’, the Chinese cedar. For those of you unfamiliar with this tree, it is the arboricultural equivalent of Barbie diving into a pool full of Pepto-Bismol: very pink indeed.

Jones also discovered that there were no Magnolia campbellii anywhere in the garden: ‘So I ordered 50! And 50 cherries for the slope opposite the visitor centre. More is more has always been my mantra — and the garden is so big that you need to make a splash to be noticed. People love colour, it is what draws them to gardens initially. Then, when they are here, we can teach them new things that will affect their world and, more importantly, the world their grandchildren will inherit.’

There has always been an individual vision to impart. ‘One of our core principles is to show people how we connect with the natural world: visitors need to understand that we cannot survive without plants,’ is how Jones puts it. Yet it does this without lecturing, partly perhaps because the Eden Project has always been an exciting place to work: the difficulties of gardening on a 40-degree slope and keeping biomes under control mean gardeners can often be seen swinging around on ropes. It is one of the few gardens that is weeded by abseilers.

To get it built at all was an extraordinary feat of perseverance. To watch the place revving up for another 25 years of innovation and excitement promises to be equally as thrilling.

Visit The Eden Project website for details about visiting.

This feature originally appeared in the September 23, 2026, print edition of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

There have been times during this last summer when a tropical lifestyle has looked the best way to conduct ourselves, with outdoor garden activity restricted to the morning and the late afternoon. But let us not be deceived: this is not a tropical country, and it is not about to become one. Anyone dreaming of generating an exotic atmosphere at home should first remember the three cooler seasons and take it from there.

Those who live in most of the south of England, and much of the west coast of Scotland, will have the best chance of succeeding with this form of horticultural theatre. Others will have to do their homework more thoroughly, and rely on those prime considerations of shelter, aspect and drainage.

A piece of ground which faces west or south-west will be the ideal, safe from the fear of morning frost. Free drainage is essential, as sitting wet through the winter will soon sort the sheep from the goats. And when it comes to the choice of plants, fret less about the things you saw along the prom in a far distant land and more about those good doers which create a tall, rich and luscious effect. There’s no shortage of candidates.

A piece of ground which faces west or south-west will be the ideal, safe from the fear of morning frost. Free drainage is essential, as sitting wet through the winter will soon sort the sheep from the goats. And when it comes to the choice of plants, fret less about the things you saw along the prom in a far distant land and more about those good doers which create a tall, rich and luscious effect. According to Guy Watts, owner of Architectural Plants, who has given these matters much thought over the years, there’s no shortage of candidates.

Think evergreen, tall and shiny, and you have your first theme. A second one is that the leaves should be big and distinctively shapely. And for a third, plant richly and densely. This needs to be a little world of its own, removed from the run of the mill.

For the bones of this private paradise, choose reliable evergreens with dramatic leaves. A good start would be the Chusan palm, Trachycarpus fortunei. It likes this country, and it grows a foot a year, so it soon looks the part. Fatsia japonica has travelled in my lifetime from the kitchen windowsill to the garden, and it projects just the right combination of visual drama for our purpose: big, shapely, shiny evergreen leaves, exotic flowers and fruits, and a willingness to grow in apparently unpromising situations. And to push the boat out somewhat, you may wish to try the loquat, Eriobotrya japonica, a vigorous evergreen with a certain theatrical quality. In its native climate it produces delicious fruits, but you can forget that. There are limits.

Since you’re feeling adventurous, you won’t be able to resist a banana tree in your exotic garden. An easy choice, and widely available, is Musa basjoo. It is true that those splendid leaves get shredded in stormy weather, but that happens in its native clime too, so such an appearance lends a whiff of authenticity to the scene.

There are other evergreen shrubs which will fill in the spaces of our new regime, and they need not be tropical at all. We are, after all, creating stage effects and not actually living a life of fly-whisk and flip-flops. Our old and valued friend the bay tree, Laurus nobilis, is one of the best doers of all, and will stand unmoved after a severe winter has clobbered those around it.

Once this enclosing screen is complete, there are plenty of suitable choices for smaller plants of suitable character to decorate the space. Some of them are half-hardy, and will enjoy their annual excursion from the glasshouse to the open air from May to October. These include our old friends Canna and Dahlia, and their fellow refugee from the British seafront, Cordyline indivisa, the definitive tropical plant in the mind of the most cautious British gardener.

And don’t leave it there: the Amaryllis (Hippeastrum) of your Christmas windowsill enjoys its summers in my garden, and its cousin the Nerine will flourish and brighten up your autumn in a favourable spot, quite happily left in the ground. The otherworldly fleshy pleasures of the Aeonium can always be found in a summer plot in your private paradise, but do keep it in its pot ready for retrieval. This isn’t the French Riviera.

As you can see, the possibilities are not endless, but with plenty of forethought, judicious planting choices and a willingness to be simultaneously adventurous and realistic (we are British, after all), wonderful possibilities form in the mind and on the ground. This style of gardening isn’t for everyone, but it has become familiar enough for a number of nurseries to specialise on a large scale in the making and planting of exotic gardens, and not least in the supply of specimen plants to speed the desired image of instant maturity.

Among these is the long-established Architectural Plants of Pulborough, West Sussex, whose owner, Guy Watts, sums up the whole process as ‘understanding risk, and creating something extraordinary that works for that specific garden.’ It is just that combination of reason, romance and practicality that leads to the making of great gardens. Time to open your notebook.

Visit the Architectural Plants website for more information and expert advice.

'When people say “there was no garden here when we arrived”, usually you still find a philadelphus, a lilac, apple trees, roses lurking about. Here, there was nothing.’

All Matthew Rice discovered among the scattered 1960s and 1970s agricultural buildings and concrete working yards surrounding his home, Ham Court in Oxfordshire, was a lonely orange hybrid tea, a limp wisteria still tied to its bamboo cane and about 30 lily of the valley by the front door. Rice, whose architectural illustrations appear regularly in Country Life, has been rectifying matters ever since.

For someone who loves buildings, it had been impossible to turn down the chance of living in the remains of a partially moated late-medieval castle. It was also a bold move that he and his then wife, the potter Emma Bridgewater, nearly regretted. Bampton Castle, as it was originally called, had been built for Aymer de Valance, Earl of Pembroke, from 1315, when he was granted a licence to crenellate and, although only ‘a short stretch of curtain wall, about 24ft high and 6ft thick, crowned with battlements’ remains, the whole place was thick with history — as explained in Country Life in May 2021.

It was also ‘a wreck’, with all the brutish elements of a working farm plonked among the historic buildings, and the romantic-sounding moat had almost entirely disappeared.

‘The agents had photographed the depressing Victorian wing,’ recalls Rice of when he first saw the sales particulars. ‘It put people off, but we saw its potential.’ That was why, in 2011, he and his wife took the plunge and bought the house with two acres of yards and outbuildings, together with another 30 acres of land.

They had their work cut out. ‘There were barns built right up to the kitchen, endless concrete yards, builders’ waste, rubble, slurry lagoons — nothing nice,’ remembers Rice. In those early days, they worried they would never have the means to do all the hard work needed to turn it into a home with its garden, but time and energy, much of it supplied by Rice’s then brother-in-law, Toti Gifford, of Giffords Circus fame, have overcome the many obstacles.

There is now a gravelled courtyard with places to sit against the buff-coloured limestone walls of the house and look out towards the castle yard (the former cattle yard) with its fine 17th- and 19th-century barns now cleared of rubble and fully restored. Raised beds run around and a collection of terracotta pots is filled with cheerful pelargoniums, vermilion flowers of Fuchsia ‘Thalia’ and the orange-red foliage of coleus and plectranthus.

Rice almost apologises for such jollity. Such plants are banished from some gardens for being too popular and too colourful, but here, massed in a large collection, they deliver a focal point close by the front door exactly where it’s needed. In any case, rejecting plants purely on the grounds of taste is not in his nature.

‘I’ve tended to go for bright, cheerful, annual-heavy planting,’ he says. ‘Lots of colour, lots of energy. I’m not precious. Because nothing here was ancient, I feel free to remove or change things.’ That said, he is adding some more refined plants alongside the bright ones. ‘I admire people such as Mary Keen, who have beautifully subtle planting. Still, I enjoy the freedom of experimenting — whether it’s with unusual geraniums from Tangiers or coleus varieties from nurseries.’

Rice’s early training in theatre design helped to make sense of the two acres in front of the house by drawing attention to the important areas and downplaying the rest. The removal of the ugly outbuildings highlights the historic barns, in the larger of which he holds annual Tulip Days for the local Bampton Gardening Club of which he is president. Instead of a slurry pit, there’s now a green mound — best of all, the house itself can breathe, freed from encumbrances. ‘Sightlines,’ as he writes in his forthcoming book A Year in the Garden, ‘are all important.’

At Ham Court, he drew out the key axes and laid them down in gravel. The first runs from the old gatehouse to the village and is the road by which the visitor arrives. A second lane cuts across this, linking the main road to the new farmyard and all is bordered by the moat. Most of the latter had become silted up by the 17th century, but archaeological investigations revealed that it had described a square around the castle site, its width varying from 16ft to an impressive 50ft in parts. Now cleared of silt and planted with willows and rushes, its watery arms hold the garden in a tranquil embrace.

Clearing the moat was one of the early tasks, although the very first was planting 10 acres of trees to shelter the grounds from the road and its noise, as well as from the wind. Help with the heavy machinery came from Gifford, who had ‘a fearless approach’ to moving earth and reshaping the land. ‘We built hills, dug moats, planted hedges and moved tons of soil.’ Mistakes were made, such as not putting in proper drainage (now rectified), but the garden is, as Rice puts it, turning into a proper garden. The design for all the new garden areas within the moat is based on his early-morning walk. Like sheep that make permanent tracks through fields, he defined a path that links the whole together; house, courtyard, kitchen garden, orchard, greenhouse and moat.

Late summer and early autumn feel like Ham Court’s rightful seasons, ripe with pickings and swelling gourds, contented pigs and sun-blistered barrows heaped with dahlias. Generous and golden-tinged, this is a garden for living in, rather than one to be viewed from a tidy distance. A place that reflects its owner. ‘Because I’m a painter and designer, I always think about how it looks — what it feels like to walk through, what the perspective is, what happens when you turn a corner. Some gardeners think only about plants, but I think in terms of composition and experience.’

Here, the experience is one of endless surprise and delight. At every turn, there is a new treat, pigs nosing happily in their pens overlooked by stands of colourful sunflowers, fairy-tale-red apples hanging in the orchard with hens scratching around below. The planting is strong. Beds against the west wall of the house are filled with nothing but dahlias in yellows and oranges and pinks of every shade and shape that stop you in your tracks — first because of the sheer glorious mass of colour, then to look for your favourites. This is planting for painting.

‘I love plants that are good for cutting. Things such as cosmos, antirrhinums and bedding chrysanthemums. I enjoy having vases full of colour indoors. The pink chrysanthemums, for example, light up the garden into November.’ He takes many cuttings each year rather than keeping old stock, which are housed in his enviable greenhouse. ‘I grow for cutting, for eating, for beauty, for scent. The doing is the thing. Painting, building, planting — all of it is creative. I want this place to be generous, to give pleasure, to feel alive.

‘I don’t mind the incompleteness — it gives me energy. I’m not after perfection; I’m after feeling. If people walk through here and feel joy, or surprise, or peace, then I’ve succeeded.’

‘A Year in the Garden’ by Matthew Rice was published on September 24 (Frances Lincoln, £25).

Ham Court gardens are open via the National Garden Scheme on selected dates — see more details.

This feature originally appeared in the September 16, 2026, print edition of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

First Impressions was the title Jane Austen gave to Pride and Prejudice when she penned the first draft in 1796. I am reminded of it every time I struggle with a wooden gate that forms the entrance to our new garden. It is really nothing more than a wavey- edge fence panel equipped with hinges and our garden — or the garden that will be — deserves better.

Garden gates are more than mere portals. They are a fanfare, an introduction, a dramatic or sympathetic indication of the glories to come — or they should be. Mine, which sticks and then has to be lifted a bit to open or close it, inspires nothing more than irritation.

How different would be my mood if the gate itself was handsome and in keeping with the style of the garden to which it allows ingress. (Always loved that word…) How refreshing it would be if it opened smoothly and silently on robust, well-oiled hinges and shut with a pleasing click or clang against a sturdy pillar, be it of oak, stone or mellow brickwork.

All this will come to pass and I am eager to make sure that it happens sooner rather than later, instead of leaving it until everything else has been designed, constructed and planted. By then I will have been irritated beyond belief and my knuckles skinned for the umpteenth time as I fight to open or close it.

It is a mistake to overlook the significance of a garden entrance. The white painted wicket gate of a cottage garden; the curlicues of the wrought-iron version that appears behind the rhubarb under which Jemima Puddle-Duck unwisely lays her eggs in Beatrix Potter’s cautionary tale; the sturdy door-in-the-wall that is hidden under a waterfall of ivy in Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden. They are all images that stay with us for life, as if to underline their importance as a portent of things to come. You may think that I am overstating the case. I would argue the reverse.

I can also suffer from gate envy. Reading Mary Berry’s newest book My Gardening Life I am struck by the elegant beauty of her white-painted wooden gate, set in a sturdy brick wall and garlanded with Virginia creeper. There is more than a hint of Holman Hunt’s The Light of the World about the image — yet another reminder of the significance of gateways in our collective psyche.

My wife and I share the same initials and so, rather indulgently, in our last garden I had made by our local blacksmith a pair of wrought-iron entrance gates with the initials AT entwined at their centre — handsome rather than overly showy, I hope, and they made us smile.

We inherited at that farmhouse, which had at one time been occupied by the kennel huntsman, a small metal gate that incorporated into its construction a pair of spurs, various bits, a small hunting horn, a metal version of a whip and several stirrups. They were all picked out in silver paint against the dark green of the framework. It made it clear to any visitor exactly who lived beyond it. I am tempted to do the same with garden tools.

The difficulty in all this is the abundance of variety. When I settle on my new gate, will it be a solid door, an elegant metallic tracery or a robust no-nonsense oaken contraption? If it is painted, what colour should I choose — a heavenly blue, a crisp white or a startling red? Perhaps not red…

In The King’s garden at Highgrove in Gloucestershire, the gates around the walled kitchen garden are painted pale pink. It is a brave choice of colour and reminiscent of that shade of ‘primer’ with which timber is coated before the final gloss coat is applied. Bearing in mind the old saw that suggested that the late Queen thought the world smelled of new paint, it occurs to me that sovereigns are unlikely ever to have seen the colour of undercoat.

With so many choices of material and colour available, it may be some time before I can make my decision. One thing is for certain: whether it be wood or metal, blue, green, red or yellow, it will frame the entrance, set the mood and entice and propel the visitor into my garden on a wave of expectation and goodwill. I only hope the new garden can live up to its promise.

'Chatsworth: The gardens and the people who made them' by Alan Titchmarsh is out now (Ebury, £35).

This feature originally appeared in the September 16, 2026, print edition of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

North Yorkshire retains a good number of former monasteries around its hills and, at Mount St John, near Felixkirk, the outlines of a preceptory of the Knights Hospitaller can be seen in the park just below the garden, with York Minster a smudge on the far horizon. The present house, which dates from 1720, was built on the site of the 12th-century ‘Commandery on Mount Hill’ and overlooks the Vale of York.

The site’s many blessings (including protective woodland behind the house) had, sadly, not resulted in a joyous garden when Yorkshire businessman and former trustee of the RHS Chris Blundell and his wife, Jill, moved here 26 years ago. Old photographs show acres of steeply sloping lawns that made little use of the south-facing position and the walled garden lay unkempt and uncared for. This last did not remain derelict for long. Kitchen and cutting gardens now operate at full throttle, supplying the pubs and inns, including the local in Felixkirk, that form part of Blundell’s portfolio. The remainder of the 20-acre garden and the parkland, he knew, would need some outside help. The answer came in 2001, when the landscape designer Tom Stuart-Smith was awarded his first Gold medal at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show. Blundell looked no further.

Stuart-Smith’s contribution has been to develop Mount St John’s garden (including a ravine on the west side) into a contemporary pleasure ground. He has fulfilled his brief and more, with a client who is a highly energetic plant enthusiast and clearly embraces the idea that a garden is never finished. Part of the plan was to leave space for at least one marquee, to which end a series of formal flower gardens with expansive lawns unfold as they descend in two generous terraces from the Palladian house, culminating in a curved ha-ha. The lowest level, edged by immaculate stone walls, resembles an infinity pool, hanging over the paddocks and fields that spread out below. Extensive earthworks were carried out to balance the garden with the surroundings including the striking outline of Sutton Bank, looming over the nearby Hambleton Hills. It’s a monumental size, at about three acres on this south side. ‘Mount St John had to be big because the view is so awe-inspiring,’ explains Stuart-Smith. ‘It would be easy for a garden to feel very feeble in the face of those views.’

Whereas the flower garden creates a sense of occasion, a different kind of formality is at play over the hedge. Precision-cut yew is fringed with a wide canal of Miscanthus sinensis, an introduction to the broad strokes of prairie perennials, grasses and domed topiaries that are repeated on the grand scale, from a gravel garden at the top to a parterre sliced with lawn paths at the bottom. It is carried out with the kind of panache one expects from Stuart-Smith, making an unlikely, but seamless connection between the recently built house extension and the miles of farmland below.

Generally called the Meadow Garden, the design here reflects Stuart-Smith’s interest, at the time of making, in using landscape pattern in a garden’s layout. This one was partly inspired by an Ordnance Survey map from the 1870s. ‘I was very interested in the garden being a condensation of landscape pattern,’ he recalls. Beyond the park’s edge, the old field pattern was used to form lines of planting within the garden, starting with the ribbons of miscanthus that run through the parterre on the bottom terrace. It hardly matters that, after 20 years, this pattern is barely traceable; it created ‘a nice constraint’ and a guide in how to plant it.

The prospect from the meadow garden is more wooded than it is from the lawned terraces, which overlook parkland. On this eastern side, a series of domed beech topiaries make a graphic connection between the garden and the trees below. The clipped beech tumps effectively mimic distant tree canopies and their slowly changing autumn foliage adds richness to the developing scenery. Likewise, the colours and textures playing out in the perennials on the descending terraces interact with the farming seasons in the fields below.

On looking back to the house, the tumps also mark the beginning of a planting diagonal, continued in domes of box and repeats of hawthorn, Crataegus x lavalleei ‘Carrierei’, cutting across the axial pattern made by the terraces. Contrast is key at Mount St John and the meadow garden also takes time to pause with a large and narrowly rectangular pool with a plain wooden deck, its stillness enhanced by the slightest smattering of water lilies across its surface.

Stuart-Smith’s way with hard materials adds extra refinement to the landscape of giant perennials, as well as fitting seamlessly among more conventional lawns and flowers. Holding walls have flat tops for walking on, creating changing perspectives across the garden. Next to the great arms of yew that are the site’s partitions, simple lines of sandstone make a beguiling tracery, leading sometimes to dead ends and at others to viewpoints: the flower garden offers a tantalising glimpse down a steep bank to the valley garden, which is the continually evolving counterpart to Stuart-Smith’s original 2004 design.

The remains of three stew ponds, where fish were kept for the tables of the Knights Hospitaller, had lapsed into giant puddles that Blundell and a team of gardeners sealed using clay from the surrounding ravine, which is well supplied with springs. Brambles and weed trees were removed from the edges of the reinvigorated and restocked ponds, and planting began. Although Stuart-Smith has been involved in the development of the valley garden, the area has been mainly in the hands of Blundell and his head gardener, until recently Tim Marshall.

An experienced plantsman, who had worked with the Dutch landscape designer Piet Oudolf as well as on previous occasions with Stuart-Smith, Marshall was as delighted as his employer by the possibilities of the site. The valley garden is sheltered by old sycamores — eventually to be replaced by beech and oak — creating a microclimate that has opened up opportunities for rarer species. Sourcing plants from Bleddyn and Sue Wynn-Jones at Crûg Farm Plants near Caernarfon has been part of the pleasure in steering this area of the garden. Discussions are in progress about planting a middle storey to balance the existing Scots pines.

The valley garden is traced with paths and the ponds are crossed with stepping stones, creating more viewpoints in this garden of views. From certain angles, the magnificent Sutton Bank hoves into view, but this is mostly an inward-looking garden, a place apart, where the enjoyable discussion of plants and ideas continues to engage Blundell, his family and the gardeners.

The garden at Mount St John is private, but does hold occasional open days — follow them on Instagram for the latest details and dates.

This feature originally appeared in the September 9, 2026, print edition of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

Alan Titchmarsh

I love what I call the ‘stained tulips’ — those with contrasting venations and stripes that smack of the old Dutch flower paintings. I plant up 10in terracotta pots with 10 bulbs of each: varieties such as ‘Gavota’ (plum purple and yellow), ‘Rem’s Favourite’ (purple and white) and ‘Princess Irene’ (dusky pink and salmon). My wife adores red tulips, so in the rectangular beds on either side of the house we planted two different varieties: ‘Ile de France’ and ‘Kingsblood’. At the risk of being unpatriotic, I have to say that ‘Ile de France’ (a really deep, rich red) was far better and much longer lasting than ‘Kingsblood’. I’d recommend it heartily.

‘Chatsworth: the gardens and the people who made them’ by Alan Titchmarsh is out now.

Charlotte Harris

When it comes to tulips (as with many things), I’m drawn to the extremes. At one end are the species tulips that speak to where they’re from such as Tulipa acuminata, an elegantly wiry Turkish heirloom tulip with unusual twisted petals, or Tulipa sprengeri, native to Turkey’s rocky, scrub-covered slopes; scarlet, delicate, happy in dappled shade, with gorgeous senesced seed heads (as seen in our Chelsea September 2021 garden).

At the other far end is the bold flamboyance of two-tone Rembrandt tulips, named after the painter. These look best combined with solid, single-colour tulips for high contrast. My personal favourite: ‘Rem’s Favourite,’ purple flames streaking across ivory petals.

Harris Bugg Studio will begin work next year on designing the Centenary Garden at Newhailes House and Gardens in Musselburgh for the National Trust for Scotland.

Arne Maynard

Although I love all kinds of tulip — especially historic tulips with their flamed and feathered markings — my absolute favourites are the species. These perennial bulbs naturalise well in meadows, lawn edges or beneath trees and, provided the ground is well drained, don’t require lifting over winter. I’ve been experimenting with Tulipa clusiana varieties and am fascinated by the difference in their habits. T. clusiana opens and closes without a change in petal structure, whereas T. clusiana ‘Lady Jane’ opens, then gradually curls its petals back reminiscent of Elizabethan hair curls, completely spiralling before fading. I am introducing them into the borders at home at Allt y bela in Monmouthshire, Wales, to give contrast to the larger flowering Rembrandts, adding a delicacy to be discovered close-up.

Other lovely varieties to try are T. clusiana ‘Honky Tonk’, T. cretica ‘Hilde’ and T. clusiana ‘Peppermintstick’, which complement each other beautifully.

Garden designer Arne Maynard has several projects in progress in America, together with his British and European work.

Isabel Bannerman

Squirrels have made it impossible to plant tulips except in highly fortified pots and my conscience has stopped me growing mass-produced bulbs. That means it’s only delicate, long-lived, species tulips grown in grass or gravel for me now. Pheasants ate my Tulipa sylvestris, but both they — and the squirrels — seem to abhor T. humilis ‘Persian Pearl’ and ‘Odalisque’. They were both here already, so they must be tough. T. clusiana ‘Lady Jane’ and ‘Cynthia’ are miniature pink-and-white striped sweeties. T. batalinii ‘Bronze Charm’, is the colour of evening primroses with buff reveals. Formerly sold for rock gardens, it is just the scented thing for fashionable gravel gardens. The clue to longevity is to plant deep, even in sustainably sourced crushed concrete.

Garden designer Isabel Bannerman is making a wildflower meadow with species tulip bulbs at her home in Somerset.

Fergus Garrett

This year, we are trying perhaps 30 new varieties and will test these out in pots to see how we like them, looking for distinctive flowers held above the foliage, a long season and an elegant habit. In the garden, elegant species Tulipa orphanidea Whittallii, with pointed petals of burnished orange with flashes of yellow and a hypnotic smoky centre, will sit in the cracks on Christo’s terrace — and we’re hoping that it will self-sow and naturalise. T. sylvestris, with long, elegant, fluted flowers of rich yellow on awry stems, will be planted in the grass under the mulberry tree. T. ‘Apricot Impression’, with bold, large, apricot and pink flowers, will float among self-sown blue forget-me-nots, mauve sweet rocket (Hesperis matronalis) and acid lime-green Smyrnium perfoliatum. Finally, jazzy T. ‘Banja Luka’, yellow with dramatic flames of fiery red, will run through a sea of blue forget-me-nots.

Fergus Garrett is head gardener at Great Dixter, East Sussex (former home of the late Country Life columnist Christopher Lloyd), and CEO of the Great Dixter Charitable Trust.

Jo Thompson

I’ll be going for masses of Tulipa orphanidea (Whittallii Group) ‘Major’ among pale narcissi to follow the oxlips. This tulip is invariably described in terms of its main colour — copper orange — but it’s the deep golden-flushed blood-red-to-black base that makes the impact. Appearing a deeper red in the shadows, this rare, yet easy little tulip becomes more coppery depending on the amount of light upon it. The lightest scattering of red and yellow against green is all it takes to create an atmosphere that is simultaneously gentle and uplifting. The calmness of a backdrop of green grass is perfect, so dry patches of grass under the yet-to-emerge canopies of orchard trees is where I’ll be putting these little jewels.

Jo Thompson is currently designing gardens in the Cotswolds, Sussex and the south of France. Her next book, ‘Small Garden Design’, will be published in March 2027.

Tom Stuart-Smith

I use tulips in three different ways in the garden here. Firstly, we plant a mêlee of brightly coloured tulips to give a real intensity of oranges, purples, rusts and cerise. (No yellows other than as a stripe in ‘Helmar’, an all time favourite.) We use them to edge the vegetable beds and in the courtyard, which is full of brick and tiles and corten steel, so the colours here are very powerful. I always order ‘Havran’, ‘Dolls Minuet’, ‘Ballerina’, ‘Princess Irene’ and ‘Paul Scherer’. We use lots of Tulipa saxatilis in the prairie, mixed up with cowslips and anemone blanda — the yellow at the base of the petals is rather wonderful with the cowslips.

Last of all, we use some more polite tulips in loose drifts through planting in the garden. Things such as ‘Maureen’, ‘Attila’, ‘Merlot’ and ‘Spring Green’ — single-coloured and/or a bit quieter, in among herbaceous plants. These never get lifted, whereas many of the others do. We replant a lot of tulips, but they do fade of course… I’m thinking of veering towards using more long-lived tulips only. The things they do to tulips to store are pretty terrible and the organic ones are very expensive, so a wake up is on its way, I feel.

Tom Stuart-Smith’s design for the Clore Garden at Tate Britain opens next year.

Angel Collins

I prefer to plant tulips in either pots or long grass. In many gardens, I’ve created what I call a ‘parterre meadow’ and tulips are the perfect bulb to complement this design. Their glorious heads bobbing above the fresh green grass of spring create a wonderful sight.

When choosing tulips, I consider several factors: height, colour, bulb size (preferably 5in), and the bonus of flowering for a second or third year. ‘Rem’s Favourite’ is now with me for its fourth year, together with the lovely pink tulip ‘Discovery’. The viridifloras are also excellent at longevity (including ‘Spring Green’, ‘Artist’ and ‘Virichic’), as are, of course, the reliable Darwins.

However, my favourite tulip of all time — no, not the beautiful ‘Belle Époque’ — is actually ‘Mystic van Eijk.’ It has huge flowers of soft apricot pink and it seems to get taller and its flowers grow bigger as every day passes.

Garden designer Angel Collins is working on a number of projects, including Bruern Abbey, Oxfordshire.

Tilly Ware

A freshly gravelled perimeter bed in the kitchen garden is my new playground for all things Mediterranean. I’ll be planting Tulipa orphanidea Whittalli Group in the impeccably drained soil, aiming for vigorous colonies that spread. The form is beautiful: neat, sharp buds with pointed petals that glow with the dusky smokiness of a fire’s ember, the burnt caramel and rich orange irresistible against silver foliage. At 1ft high, they will bob up among artemisia and euphorbia in late April; by summer, Eschscholzia ‘Milkmaid’ and Nigella papillosa ‘African Bride’ cover the gaps. Until now, my species tulips lived year on year in terracotta pots as treasures; now, it is time to set them free.

Tilly Ware is a garden writer and Country Life contributor.

Charles Quest-Ritson

I always plant some Greigii forms to brighten the garden in early spring, with red-and-yellow ‘Stresa’ being a particular favourite. Likewise, ‘Carnaval de Nice’, double-flowered with red-and-white stripes and variegated leaves — the last of all to flower. Both look best in pots near the main door of the house. This year’s RHS trial had some promising novelties to try, too: ‘Apricot Pride’ will make a fine border plant, exceptionally large in height and flower, but I also fancy the spectacularly vulgar ‘New Santa’ — bright-red petals rimmed with a hoar-frost edging of white — and the ruffled parrot-tulip ‘Flaming Memory’, rather rudely described as rhubarb and custard in colour. Yum yum!

Charles Quest-Ritson wrote the ‘RHS Encyclopedia of Roses’.

Mary Keen

I was once a tulipaholic, ordering them in thousands to be composted at the end of spring. This is far from sustainable, so I have changed my ways. I always want ‘Ballerina’ for its scent and its graceful habit, so those go in pots and, when the leaves have withered, the bulbs are saved. In the beds, multi-headed ‘Antoinette’ and ‘Queen of Night’ are so far perennial, but the best bet for lasting tulips are the species ones planted in grass. My favourite is ‘Honky Tonk’. The name is ghastly, but the flower is pale yellow, scented and lovely with cowslips.

‘Diary of a Keen Gardener’ by Mary Keen is out now.

Rupert Golby

Lily-flowered tulips have a very appealing elegance in stature and form that extends their value far beyond their flowering period — for some weeks before flowering, their elongated necks have a swan-like quality. The flower buds are presented as refined spears, developing into pinched and waisted Cham-pagne flutes that fill and evolve into flamboyant explosions of petals, all over two to three weeks. ‘West Point’ has clear acid-yellow colouring initially of a green hue, ripening to a sharp and powerful citrus yellow. Flowering in late April, it can be strikingly partnered with a carpet of forget-me-nots. Planted in large verdigris copper containers, the contrast-ing colour combination offers a strong sense of spring. Where ‘West Point’ cannot be found, ‘Flashback’ offers a worthy alternative.

Rupert Golby designs and consults upon gardens across the country. His work at Ferne Park in Dorset was featured in Country Life (May 13).

Polly Nicholson

I will be ordering a handful of Tulipa ‘Absalon’ to supplement the National Collection of Tulipa (historical) that I hold with Plant Heritage. ‘Absalon’ is a true Rembrandt (Division 9) tulip dating from 1780, with flames and feathers of the richest mahogany red over a base of primrose yellow. With a real aura of antiquity, it stands apart from modern cultivars, but is surprisingly robust and produces good-sized offsets. It should be lifted once the foliage has died back in July and stored carefully before being planted back in a pot again in the depths of winter. The investment and effort are well worth it.

Polly Nicholson is curating an exhibition on tulips at the Garden Museum, London, opening March 2027.

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This feature originally appeared in the September 9, 2026, print edition of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

The Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew have been in the forefront of planning for our future and an interesting experiment has now been running for several years at Wakehurst, Kew’s country cousin in West Sussex. It starts from the premise that many herbaceous plants, both annual and perennial, will frizzle away if higher temperatures and long periods without water become more frequent. Their roots cannot get down to the depth at which they find the water they need to grow, flower and seed. Such plants are important because they absorb carbon dioxide and contribute to soil improvement. From a study of climate maps of the world to identify the plants that thrive in hotter, drier conditions, the scientists concluded that North America — especially the US — has many plants that have evolved for just such conditions. Some of them are already popular with English gardeners.

In 2019, a team of scientists and gardeners from Kew Wakehurst travelled to North America to collect seeds from wild prairies. Due to the growth of efficient American farming, these prairies are among the world’s most endangered plant communities; only 1% of their diverse ecosystems survive today. The team returned with millions of seeds, some from botanical institutes and some collected in the wild, which they deposited in the Millennium Seed Bank. The following year, a selection was scatter-sown in a new six-acre area now known as the American Prairie.

Some seeds were held back — sown, germinated and pricked out by Wakehurst’s expert propagators — so that 50,000 plugs could be planted in 2021. That year also saw the flowering of the first seeds sown in 2020 — short-lived, pioneering perennials such as Coreopsis and Rudbeckia — although not all the scattered species had fared well. More plugs are prepared every year and the number of different plants is steadily increasing. By 2024, a total of more than 50 different species were established — or, at least, establishing themselves — and 11 new ones flowered for the first time, including wild indigo (Baptisia alba) and American bergamot (Monarda fistulosa). More joined them last year, when prairie plantain (Arnoglossum plantagineum) and fork-toothed ookow (Dichelostemma congestum) were among the species that started to flower.

The wildflower species native to North America differ enormously from one area to the next. Rather than mixing up all the seeds, Wakehurst’s gardeners have been developing a series of different combinations, such as occur in Nature. Their South-Central Prairie, for example, includes purple Allium cernuum and a prairie grass that looks like a fine head of hair called Sporobolus heterolepis — both quite well known already in English gardens — as well as a seldom-seen feverfew Parthenium integrifolium and another grass (Andropogon gerardii) that grows every year to at least 7ft high.

More familiar to English eyes are the prairie plants of the Atlantic Coastal zone, with a mixture of asters that we generally call Michaelmas daisies, plus golden rod (Solidago nemoralis), sunflowers (Helianthus occidentalis) and white-flowered Eupatorium hyssopfolium, best known as an attractor of pollinating insects.

Some species still need a bit of cosseting to get established in the growing conditions at Wakehurst and some will probably fail to do so because they cannot hold their own in the struggle for dominance. The experts are constantly adding new species and creating new mixes. They have also begun to trial end-of-season methods of tidying up — not burning, which is common in the wild, but mowing and raking to discover whether removing dead vegetation will encourage or dampen diversity. Meanwhile, the gardeners are struggling to exclude our native weeds; even our common spotted orchid Dactylorhiza fuchsii seeded itself quite widely among the American plants in the early years of the experiment. As this is a prairie garden, there can be no mulching and no watering. Low maintenance is crucial — ideally, they will create self-sustaining communities. Also, they must be good ornamental plants.

Only a few of the prairie species have been developed and improved by horticulturists. One of the great successes at Wakehurst has been Eryngium yuccifolium, a handsome and vigorous perennial that grows to 5ft or 6ft and flowers reliably from the end of June onwards. The plant has survived our recent summers and thrived because its roots drive deep into the soil in search of moisture. It is, however, a slightly disappointing member of the new prairie because the whole plant is invariably green and white in colour; it would be more desirable if the flowers adopted a shade of blue, as do so many other species of Eryngium.

The best scientific trials have more than one purpose. Many American prairie plants are valuable to pollinators, nectar-feeders and other creatures. Wakehurst is using its new landscapes to investigate the potential of different bees, wasps and hoverflies — the species that visit these non-native plants — as pollinators for plants of economic importance. However, bringing non-native species into the UK always comes with risks and an early study looked at the potential invasiveness of prairie species, by measuring their ‘seed rain’.

Much remains to be put to the test. Is it possible to incorporate short-lived species under English conditions? Will they survive in a mixture that is supposed to be perennial, self-sufficient and balanced? To what extent can one achieve the same balance between species that exists in America itself?

Although conceived as a horticultural study, Wakehurst’s American Prairie is, above all, a scientific exercise. Its plants co-exist in communities that will be the object of long-term study, both environmental and horticultural. It contributes to worldwide research and reminds us of the importance of biodiversity. That is how we will avoid horticultural armageddon or, at least, postpone it.

Find more about Wakehurst and Kew at the Kew website.

This feature originally appeared in the September 2, 2026, print edition of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

Europom is coming to England. Every year, it choreographs a spectacular show of autumn fruits in a different European country. This year’s event will be held at RHS Rosemoor in Devon on October 3–4. Try to get there—you will learn a lot and enjoy yourself enormously.

Europom was founded in Switzerland in 1989 as a Europe-wide association of fruit-lovers determined to preserve ancient and local varieties. Its members are the fruit societies of Europe's nations, but, as we do not have a national society in Britain, we are represented by the Royal Horticultural Society — hence the choice of Rosemoor, in Devon's cider country.

Exhibitors bring mainly apples, pears and quinces from about a dozen countries across all Europe for a feast of learning, talking and tasting. You will be encouraged to admire, taste and talk about the fruits — it is a revelation. Why do we not have apples as aromatic as ‘Ananas Reinette’, introduced in 1820 and which, despite its name, is a denizen of the Rheinland? Why do we not grow ‘Münsterbirne’ and ‘Gelbe Wadelbirne’ pears? Answer, because English nurserymen do not sell them and since Brexit we have been unable to import them directly.

In 2018, I went to a Europom in France. One apple of every variety at the show — there must have been about 2,000 different cultivars — was taken and laid out on long trestle tables, graded as closely as possible by colour so that visitors could try to identify those whose names had been lost or never known. They were encouraged to handle and smell the apples. Some exhibitors brought other fruits — you will probably see feijoas, persimmons and figs, too. I remember a splendid exhibition of walnuts from an Austrian enthusiast, including the red Danube variety known as Juglans regia ‘Rote Donaunuss’. The skin of the kernel was red or purplish-red, but the other major difference was the taste — very mild, with no hint of bitterness, and with a delicate smell. I admired hazelnuts, too, such as the giant ‘Hallesche Riesennuss’ from central Germany and the historic Piedmontese ‘Tonda Gentile delle Langhe’, the best, I was assured, for making gianduja.

It was the apples that I went to see in 2018. Apples may be our national fruit, but it is fair to say that the heartland of modern apple history is Continental Europe, from Russia to Spain, and especially in Germany, France, Scandinavia, Benelux and the Alpine countries where social and economic conditions in the 19th and 20th centuries made possible the development of a very large number of different varieties. Nevertheless, I was surprised to discover that the French did not know our best English apples, from ‘Discovery’ to ‘Egremont Russet’, ‘Pitmaston Pine’ and ‘Ashmead's Kernel’. Mind you, the French invented the word chauvinisme: the only English apple you will ever see in a French market is ‘Cox’s Orange Pippin’.

I asked the exhibitors about their favourite apple varieties. The Danes recommended ‘Filippa’ and the Swedes suggested ‘Bodil Neergaard’. The Italians spoke up for ‘Annurca’ and claimed that the Ancient Romans brought the variety now known as ‘Court Pendu Plat’ to France 2,000 years ago. The Germans had dozens of delicious cultivars — richly aromatic ‘Freiherr von Berlepsch’, for example, and pineapple-tasting ‘Prinz Albrecht von Preussen’.

Did you know that the biggest producer of apples in the world is China? Or that there are more than 100 Welsh pear varieties, most of them selected for making perry? That Ireland's National Heritage Apple Tree Collection in Co Clare conserves over 200 apple cultivars of Irish origin? That German nurseries list more than 50 quince varieties?

Europom always lays on a series of lectures and the RHS has excelled itself in asking experts to speak at Rosemoor. Dr Matt Ordidge is one of them — he is the scientific curator of our National Fruit Collection at Brogdale Farm in Kent. The promising young horticulturist Lawrence Weston, who trained at Rosemoor, will be talking about the wild fruit forests of Central Asia. Among the visitors, Hans-Thomas Bosch will be lecturing about Heritage Pear Trees of Southern Germany. Bosch is one of Germany’s experts in apple identification (as well as grapes); there are thought to be about 1,500 apple varieties cultivated in Germany.

Go and discover Europom for yourself. Alas, it clashes with Brogdale Collections's annual Apple Fair in Kent — wonderful Brogdale has 150 acres and nearly 3,500 varieties of apples, pears, quinces and more. What a pity one can't be in two places at once.

Europom at RHS Rosemoor takes place on October 3-4 — see more details.

The Brogdale Collections's annual Apple Fair in Kent also takes place on Octotber 3-4 — see more details.

This feature originally appeared in the September 9, 2026, print edition of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

David and Sandra Burbidge have lived at Cedar House since 1975, but their garden has only begun to expand during the past few years as David plunges ever more deeply into enjoying his remarkable creation.

Cedar House was Wasperton’s vicarage, sold off by the Diocese of Coventry in the 1930s and renamed in honour of the immense cedar of Lebanon that is still a fine feature of the woodland garden. The church itself was substantially rebuilt in the 1840s by Sir George Gilbert Scott, with some input also from Augustus Pugin, and is so close to Cedar House that the Burbidges made the little spire on its west end an eye-catcher when laying out their garden.

In their early years at Wasperton, it was Sandra Burbidge who ran the garden — well enough for the county organiser of the National Garden Scheme to suggest that she should take on the job as his successor. She did so, and headed up ‘the Yellow Book’ in Warwickshire for some eight years, during which time the Burbidges felt that they should open their own garden as part of the scheme. Looking back, they say that the garden wasn’t really good enough at that time, although it has been much praised since it reopened in 2023.

David has always been a keen gardener, but, until 2018 — when he reached the age of 75 and felt the time had come for a change — this had to play second string to his career as a manufacturer of upmarket furniture and to his many public and charitable undertakings. Plants, designs and new features are now his constant companions in the major overhaul of his six acres, turning them from a pleasant, conventional garden with many underdeveloped areas into a major showpiece that fizzes with excitements.

The site is flat and the soil sandy gravel, but surprisingly fertile, with a pH that allows for acid-loving plants to flourish. Within those six acres, there is now a great number of distinct gardens and habitats all maintained by one full-time gardener and three part timers who, together, equate to a second full timer.

Some 1,500 tulips are planted every year, mainly along the driveway and around the house. They are followed by a huge planting of dahlias. Such bursts of colour are also delivered by his more permanent plantings. The cultivars of Acer palmatum — he has some 40 plants — are a particular favourite, but he has also collected many other trees and shrubs that have caught his imagination. He is particularly pleased with his unusual forms of Ginkgo biloba, the ‘living-fossil tree’ with ancestors that date back to the Middle Jurassic period. They include ‘Fastigiata’ and ‘Obelisk’, both of them neatly columnar, even pencil-shaped.

Many of the great number of young trees and shrubs now happily growing at Cedar House are the fruits of advice from experts and mentors such as John Massey of Ashwood Nurseries in the West Midlands and Robert Vernon of Bluebell Arboretum and Nursery on the Derbyshire/Leicestershire border. These join many of the original trees that were in the garden, such as native oaks whose shade has provided for extensive under-plantings.

Hellebores, ferns and snowdrops are among the genera that the Burbidges have been collecting. Many magnolias and camellias enjoy the light shade and there is a fine double border almost entirely composed of rhododendrons and azaleas. The garden’s development has also been aided by visits to other gardens and getting to know the owners of famous private gardens such as Anne Chambers of Kiftsgate near Chipping Camden in Gloucestershire, Nicola Taylor of Evenley Wood in Northamptonshire and Neil Lucas of the Knoll Gardens near Wimborne, Dorset.

The Cedar House garden is watered via a borehole, 138ft deep. This has enabled the Burbidges to add a substantial new feature — an expanse of water too small to be called a lake, but too large to be merely a pond. The spoil from excavating the site was piled up to one side, where a sheltered viewing platform now overlooks the new aquatic plantings.

Water lilies break the surface of the water — our native yellow-flowered Nymphoides peltata has flourished — and a great number of marginal plants frame the water from every viewpoint. Gunnera manicata (the ‘giant rhubarb’), Lysichiton americanus (‘skunk cabbage’) and Eutrochium maculatum (Atro-purpureum Group) ‘Purple Bush’ (the form of Joe Pye plant with dark flowers and purple leaves) all look as if they have been growing for many years, as do our native bulrushes Typha latifolia. Ornamental grasses surround much of the lake and the mound around the viewing platform is thick with Verbena bonariensis all summer long.

There is a good sprinkling of sculptures from around the world all giving character to the views within the garden. The Burbidges have also made a stumpery in the woodland garden, which is not the usual pile of excavated tree stumps, but a collection of specimens laid on the surface around the fat trunk of a large beech tree that fell in 2018 and created a space for lots of new plantings.

The woodland gardens are best in spring. More than 20 witch hazels, cultivars of Hamamelis, are first in the year to make a big impact, not least because they are planted together as one substantial grouping in a well-chosen glade. They are followed by several forms of Cercis canadensis, the American redbud or Judas tree, many cultivars of flowering dogwoods and rare selections of Styrax japonica, the Japanese snowbell tree, including ‘Pink Snowbell’ and ‘Purple Dress’. Hydrangeas are another interest, as are ornamental crab apples — the Malus Walk has been extended several times. David champions Malus ‘Evereste’ as one of the best, for its abundance of deep-pink buds and white flowers, fine autumn colour and a crop of yellow, orange and red crabapples that last through to the new year and are excellent for making jelly.

David's favourite season is late autumn. The first of the trees and shrubs to colour up are his groves of Betula utilis subsp. jacquemontii and Betula utilis subsp. jacquemontii ‘Doorenbos’, both of which follow through with beautiful bark in winter. For autumn colour, he recommends the Canadian maple Acer x freemanii ‘Autumn Blaze’ and Chinese Cercidiphyllum japonicum ‘Boyd’s Dwarf’, which, despite its name, grows to 12ft and remains in scale with the rest of the garden.

What of the future? A new gravel garden, inspired by Beth Chatto, is under way and there are plans to make a feature of the area around a vintage sycamore, perhaps 200 years old, which is listed as ‘notable’ by the Woodland Trust. Its trunk is squat and thick, with a gnarled and knobbly surface.

David admits to being a man in a hurry. It will be fascinating to see how every part of the garden — already so beautiful, impressive and mature — continues to develop and intensify.

Cedar House Gardens and Arboretum, Wasperton, Warwickshire, opens for the National Garden Scheme and for groups by prior arrangement — see their website for more details.

This feature originally appeared in the August 26, 2026, print edition of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

Galloway, that part of south-west Scotland that leans out into the Irish Sea and the warming currents of the gulf stream, defies expectations. A landscape of forests and farmland, moors and mountains, coupled with a coastline harbouring artists’ colonies in villages that would not look out of place in Cornwall, makes for the sort of location that invites creative spirits, not least those with horticultural ambitions. 

However, Mary Gladstone, the hand behind the spectacular gardens at Craichlaw House, just outside the small village of Kirkcowan, declares a surprising lack of horticultural ambition; colour and design on the other hand, come very naturally. ‘This is not a specialist’s garden,’ she emphasises. ‘I choose plants that do well here in Galloway, which will offer maximum drama for minimum input.’ Some 30 years of experience have refined and adapted her choice of plants and the way she grows them — and the garden has evolved accordingly.

Her first sighting of Craichlaw was in 1991, on the arm of Andrew Gladstone, the man she was about to marry, who had inherited the Victorian pile and its wooded estate some 14 years earlier. A teenager at the time, Mr Gladstone waited until he was 24 before moving into the house, which his grandmother had last occupied several decades earlier. ‘It was like stepping back into the 1950s,’ she recalls. ‘The house was still untouched, because Andrew had thrown himself into rescuing the woodland, which then was a shambolic mess of collapsed beech trees and laurels and completely overrun with Rhododendron ponticum.’ 

Grey granite walls completed a picture of rather dour austerity, leavened, perhaps, by the approach: the drive follows a tree-fringed loch, complete with its own island and stone-built curling huts. (The loch, created by Mr Gladstone’s great-great-grandfather to provide water to power a sawmill in the valley below, occasionally freezes in winter and is still used by the Kirkcowan Curling Club.) However, there was no garden, only empty lawn to the south of the house that incorporated formal yew hedging, planted by Mr Gladstone’s grandmother in the 1930s. Beyond that lay a ha-ha, meadows and a wooded horizon. However, Mrs Gladstone, who had met her future husband when studying Landscape Architecture at Edinburgh University and is possessed of extraordinary creative energy, was excited rather than deterred by the somewhat bleak surroundings. By 1994, married and pregnant with triplets (‘I found I had a great urge to be creative when pregnant’), she had drawn up a plan for the gardens and found contractors to execute the design. 

The 16th-century Peel Tower, rebuilt when the house was remodelled in Scottish Baronial style by Mr Gladstone’s great-grandfather during the 1860s, proved an excellent spot from which to map out the new design. From this vantage point, she quickly conceived a broad gravel terrace with steps dropping to the yew-hedged lawn. This would be formally divided into four parts, crossed by wide grass paths, with places for sitting and eating and ‘quirky views’ to challenge any notion of formal sobriety. 

Today, each quarter of the garden erupts with colour from late spring until autumn. It peaks from late July until mid August when the massed perennials are matched by a supporting cast of agapanthus, roses, clematis and hydrangeas. Three decades of critical appraisal, soil improvement and experimentation has delivered a gloriously immersive experience. The vibrant colours and sheer enthusiasm of the herbaceous planting is arresting in the boldness of its execution. 

This continues to the east of the house, which once presented a particularly austere face to the world. Now, it is clothed in a gorgeous assembly of pink and purple clematis, golden hop and scarlet roses, fronted with an eruption of golden heleniums and tawny heliopsis. Below lie generously filled beds of perennials, repeating the colours and themes of the south borders — a dramatic spectacle invisibly held together by horizontal netting, stretched 2½ft above the soil. 

The drama takes an unexpected turn on entering the cloistered and almost monotone stillness in the gravelled enclosure of Sophie’s Garden. (The design was conceived during an especially strong urge to create when pregnant with her fourth child.) This is populated with granite standing stones and perfectly topiarised cones of hornbeam, inspired by similar ones she had seen at Waterperry in Oxfordshire. Mrs Gladstone is currently considering adding skirts of Geranium Rozanne around the exposed trunks of the cones, to soften the almost shocking austerity. This, she acknowledges, would make it difficult to trim the topiary. However, her part-time gardener, Peter Smith, is equal to the challenge and the construction of a special platform for the purpose of pruning is envisaged. 

Mr Smith, who has known the Craichlaw garden since working with the original contractors on a Youth Training Scheme, is also a dab hand at propagation and together they make a formidable team. Almost every plant in the garden has been raised at Craichlaw, either from cuttings, division or seed. Together too, they have conquered a fungal attack that threatened the yew hedge, by trimming it in the spring instead of giving it the traditional autumn cut and are working on ways to increase the single swag of Tropaeolum that garlands the hedge with scarlet — ‘it’s fiendishly difficult to grow from seed’.

The same curiosity and desire to experiment — matched with an unflinching critical eye — have brought much acclaim to the pieces Mrs Gladstone has created as a self-taught ceramicist. The twin disciplines of gardening and pottery are naturally complementary. Both begin with understanding the earthy medium from which plants and pots might one day emerge and both are hands-on. Restraint and repetition of texture, form and colour create the drama on display on the shelves of the small gallery next to her studio and alongside the wide gravelled terrace. 

‘There was too much colour in the garden, especially yellow, to begin with,’ she reflects, ‘and miscanthus turned out to be too much of a solid blob blocking the view, whereas Stipa gigantea is much more transparent.’ Repetition of a limited palette of plants that do well in the Galloway climate provided the answer. Pennisetum alopecuroides works well, but has proved too much of a handful to keep under control and will also be removed. However, the Stipa tenuissima — although it self-seeds all over the place and is pulled out by the bucket-load — will stay.

The cotton lavender (Santolina chamaecyparissus) and Sedum spectabile remain superb late into the season. Erigeron karvinskianus needs management, too, but clearly enjoys itself on the sunny stone steps. None of these plants is particularly special or difficult to grow, but as Mrs Gladstone explains: ‘It’s the effect they produce together, and how they complement the house, that I’m after.’ Her success in this ambition is nothing short of magnificent.

Craichlaw, Dumfries & Galloway, is open by appointment through Scotland’s Gardens Scheme.

This feature originally appeared in the August 19, 2026, print edition of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

You'd be forgiven for associating the Derbyshire Dales with purple heather, a stalwart flower for this most romantic, beloved, yet hardy part of the British Isles. When I was a child, however, it was in Derbyshire that I used to marvel at tropical passionflowers, cannas and spiked lobelias, all thanks to the green fingers of plantswoman Julie Soghomonian.

I remember her stand of plants, quite casually, but commandingly, arranged like a floral sweet shop. Rich, firework colours jostled together on a little cart parked outside the campsite check-in desk at Birchwood Farm near Matlock, where my family used to stay each summer on our holidays from nearby Nottingham.

The farm, a seven-mile walk from Matlock, was run by her late parents, Nora and Frank Smith. I have memories of the dirt track that ran between the fields of campers where Julie lived on one side in a bungalow with her children, Emily and Jordan, with her polytunnel on the other side. Around its doorways were stacked piles of variously sized pots and it was surrounded by a simple fence beefed up with nettles, where you would occasionally spot a laced Wyandotte hen mischievously pecking about.

Throughout this little homemade nursery, Julie’s talent and taste for largely glamorous perennials could be seen growing at large. It was a passion she discovered as a child — both sets of grandparents had cottage gardens brimming with flowers, vegetables and soft fruit. It would be her mother’s successionally planted flower-beds, however, that were most inspiring. These brimmed with perennials chosen to provide a never-ending succession of colour throughout the growing season. As Julie started propagating plants herself she showed the same skill, now developed with her own style and flair.

At first, she sold her plants to campers, but she also attended many local country fairs and markets, most regularly the Tansley car boot sale. This was quite the early-morning task for a mother with two small children. The car piled with plants, off they would go. Emily remembers how she and her brother would cradle the hanging baskets as their mum drove them off for a day of selling her precious propagated cargo.

Today, Julie is to be found growing plants on a larger, but still very personal scale just down the road from Birchwood Farm in the town of Wirksworth, on a patch of land that she inherited from her mother.

Entering the busy Georgian walled garden, home to Secret Orchard Nursery, is like stepping into a Rousseau painting. The nursery cat, Harper, slinks through the brimming carnival of flowers — penstemons, scabious, dahlias and rudbeckias of both the annual ‘Sahara’ and the towering, often short-lived perennial that is ‘Prairie Glow’. Everything has been grown and propagated from seeds and cuttings. Potting away in her greenhouse with the radio on is her kind of heaven: ‘The stress just lifts off you and the satisfaction of seeing everything potted and growing away is golden.’ She is often out at midnight, torch in hand, looking for slugs.

Emily now works at the nursery, too, where she is particularly helpful with social media. ‘When she was three, she was a potting wizard, then she stopped and didn’t start gardening again until she turned 20.’

Walking through the nursery, I am reminded of Julie’s beautiful handwriting, which can be seen on her plant labels with wondrous, chocolate selection-box-like descriptions as the air — particularly above the echinacea and eryngium — buzzes with both wild and honey bees feasting on the early-autumn nectar and pollen.

Back in 2014, however, when the nursery arrived, the land within the four walls was a Sleeping Beauty forest of brambles hiding old tarmac that required hard work to erase. Today, the battle has been won and paths have been laid of old brick and sandstone — easily found in this limestone valley. Indeed, the foreground of colourful plants contrasts magically with the magnificent hillsides dotted with sycamores. The main hill is known locally as the Gilkin and Wirksworth itself is known as ‘the gem of the Peak’.

Space has been carved out for two constantly full greenhouses, painstakingly built by Julie, pane by pane. There is also a plant-sale area. In summer, punnets of damsons — the nursery contains mature fruit trees, some of which were planted back in the 1960s — are especially sought after.

The plants have gained a reputation for their superior quality and range. In an age of online buying, many gardeners are now seeking out local nurseries such as this and realising the benefits of buying from the grower as they used to. However much time they save, a mobile-phone screen can never capture the atmosphere of such places.

Best of all — and a testament to Julie’s efforts in taking cuttings — is that the nursery has not had to diversify away from plants and become more of a tea room, as have so many commercial garden centres. Come October, the walled garden’s door will shut for the winter, when she will be heading to sell her homegrown, handmade wreaths of hydrangeas and berries at the Wirksworth Christmas market.

This feature originally appeared in the August 12, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

The Palace of Bishop Auckland was built for the Prince Bishops of Durham. From the Middle Ages until 1836, these powerful men were much more than church leaders, acting as representatives of the Crown over all the land that lay between the rivers Tyne and Tees. With the power to raise an army, impose taxes and mint coins came ownership of a grand building that sits high above the picturesque valley where the rivers Wear and Gaunless run.

Although an ecclesiastical office still occupies a few rooms in the palace, by the start of this century the grandeur had long faded and the closure of the Durham coal mine in 1968 had robbed all sense of community and purpose from the town of Bishop Auckland. In 2012, in an unprecedented act of philanthropy, the investment banker Jonathan Ruffer and his wife, Jane, founded the Auckland Project, with the aim of restoring the castle and its extensive grounds to attract visitors to the area and, by doing so, bring life and employment back to the town.

An integral part of this imaginative rescue has been the landscaping of the ground around the palace. Cars have been banished and new enclosures created by Pip Morrison, the retained landscape architect for the project. The most dramatic of these spaces is the steeply sloping walled garden, which, since 2024, has been returned to full productive cultivation. In the days of the Prince Bishops, the estate would, as did most large country houses, have supplied all the vegetables, fruit and flowers needed for its owners, but large traditional kitchen gardens are now rare. Of about 600 former walled gardens in England, only about 25 of these in the care of the National Trust are still partially dedicated to productive crops. In private gardens these sheltered places are more likely to contain a swimming pool, a tennis court or some orchard trees, rather than enough vegetables, fruit and flowers to sustain a household.

Some walled gardens open to visitors, such as that at neighbouring Raby Castle, have been elaborately redesigned as ornamental spaces, which include some token crops. Others have ended up being used for grazing or cars. The last time I counted, there were perhaps 20 that might be said to be working gardens dedicated to productive crops left in the whole country. If you want to see fruit, vegetables and flowers grown in an old-fashioned way, the newest and most exciting example of this lost tradition is flourishing at Bishop Auckland in Co Durham. All the produce is used to cater for visitors and any surplus is sent to the local food bank.

Mr Morrison knew that allotments and flower shows had always been a feature of local life, so he wanted the two-acre walled garden to be a straightforward unfussy design that would reflect those ways of gardening, as well as the princely heritage of the place. Remarkably, he took the decision not to terrace the slope, where gradients vary between 1 in 5 and 1 in 3. Instead, curved level paths between steep beds planted with a mix of vegetables and flowers have been created to follow the contours of the hill, linked by short flights of stone steps. The detailing of stone, iron and trellis work, of copper water troughs and terracotta pots on stone plinths, is immaculate. The same materials are repeated everywhere for cohesion. The simplicity of the design is powerful and a walk between the cultivated plants feels timeless.

Perched above the garden is the tower house, home to the Ruffers as they continue to inspire and steer the project. Below the tower lies a narrow wedge-shaped upper garden containing an iron-framed glasshouse designed by the architects Mawson Kerr of Newcastle and built by Serres d’Antan in France. This upper level is more ornamental than the lower garden. Here, there are seats tucked into borders overlooking the slope. The lower garden is difficult to access because of the steps that link the contoured paths, but the view over the whole space with a backdrop of Deer Park behind is matchless.

If the design of the garden is restrained, the ornamental borders banked below the greenhouse are ebullient. Punctuated by figs in pots, the flowers include richly coloured dahlias, nasturtiums, agapanthus, Michaelmas daisies, alstroemerias, sunflowers and gladioli. All the beds in the garden are edged with Euonymus microphyllus, which has proved the perfect substitute for box and, because the beds are raked, the flowers can be enjoyed at eye level. In the lower garden, there are the leeks, gooseberries and dahlias, which were traditional features at northern shows, with rows of bright flowers for picking and plenty of edibles to supply the palace tearooms. The needs of the five gardeners under Andy Nesbitt are as well thought out as the design. Not every garden boasts purpose-built rooms where vegetables can be prepped and wet clothes dried.

Around the palace itself there are several new gardens. Where cars once parked there are lawns flanked by buildings, with trees for shade and seats to admire the view and the remodelled medieval palace with James Wyatt’s Gothic architecture. To the west of the palace, behind the Faith Museum, is the Quiet, or Faith, Garden. This is a cloistered space with a path layout that records the footprint of a medieval chapel destroyed in the Civil War. A grove of gleditsias makes a moving pattern of shadows on the gravel below. Sun, wind, space, greenery, silence, nothing more, except in a corner on a raised terrace, where there is a lavender hedge and seats to sit in contemplation.

In another small area, a pond with fountain is surrounded by formal beds of Geranium Rozanne. The newest of the spaces to be designed and planted is the Paradise Garden, only completed last summer. Here, a wide bed under the south-facing wall is packed with a mix of fruit and flowers grown between yew buttresses.

The aim, Morrison says, was for it to be ‘bountiful, blowsy and scented’. The walls are planted with apples, quince and vines, trained on the same strong trellis that is used everywhere. The borders are abundantly planted with roses, phlox, delphiniums, dahlias and many other favourite summer flowers. Instead of grass, the centre of the garden is sown with an annual cereal crop. This summer, it will be barley and field poppies.

The next phase of work will concentrate on the 150-acre deer park, where several 18th-century features will be restored. Researching the park was transformed when Mr Ruffer received a letter from Dr Dianne Barre alerting him to an account of a visit to Bishop Auckland in 1799 by Elizabeth Hervey, as well as drawings by Harriet Green, an amateur artist who accompanied her. In its heyday, the Picturesque landscape included a moss seat, a root house and a deer shelter, the latter of which can still be seen.

There are ancient hawthorns and stately trees, as well as a tumbling cascade that visitors can walk to see all year long, free of charge. The restoration of the park will, as with the rest of the gardens, be years in the making. The admirable Auckland Project shows how a long and careful process can produce not only changes to a place, but to people’s lives.

Visit the Auckland Project website to find out more.

This feature originally appeared in the August 5, 2026, print edition of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

It has been a summer of prickles and rashes, splinters, scrapes and scratches, a season of bites and stings: so let me take you to the kitchen, after dark. A soft batting at the window, against the glass. The shutters are closed, but not fixed, allowing a small column of light from the room to filter out into the night.

The tapping goes on, until I pull back the shutters to reveal a dozen hornets, grinning at me through the glass and crawling up the glazing bars. Gently, I shut the shutters again.

Personally, I am soft on hornets, who munch up caterpillars to feed to their young, and thereby help spare the cabbages, and perhaps the box. Now, however, they are nesting in the outshut roof, members of a class of scratching, stinging, spiky things that has been pursuing me all through the summer and has left me itchy and sore.

For the first time in years, I have been wearing shorts. Nettles plunge at my legs. Brambles reach out from hedges and verges (and even garden borders) to scratch and prick. Thorns sprout from unexpected places, such as plum trees. Gooseberry bushes give a sudden snap. The tip of my thumb, which has been sensitive and sore for a few days, calls for more pricking and poking, with a needle, until the thorn can be squeezed and winkled out.

Yet how lovely are the long dry grasses, susurrating in the summer heat. Into them I plunge with the dogs and on the tip of every waving frond there is a miniscule tick, no larger than the full stop at the end of this sentence, poised to leap as I swish by. Invisible, it scrambles upwards and every day or so a persistent itch reveals its author: the monster insect fattening on my blood.

It isn’t only intractable nature. Inanimate things are out to get me, too. A snapping pair of shears pinched the side of my finger and raised a blood blister. On the beach, as a friend stopped to chat up some lounging girls, I waited with him for so long that my feet got burnt on the flaming pebbles and all my toes blistered. Nature and mechanics conspire.

Riding on the new mower, I feel the horseflies rise indignant from the fallen grass to settle on my neck, arms and legs (we even have a particular local stinger, the Blandford Fly, which does its work silently and discreetly: you aren’t aware of it until it is too late).

This mower has an accelerator where the old one had a brake, so I have driven it hard — and then harder — into a holly hedge, grazing my shins on a hidden branch. I snag long brambles under the front wheels, which then unexpectedly draw tight and lacerate my calves or trail a bunch of nettles across my ankles.

I have been driving splinters under my nails and nails through my shoes. I have been bitten by ants as I lay peaceably on the grass. I have been pricked by holly and mahonia, brambles and briars, wild roses, nettles and echinops. I’ve been all but goosed by Miss Willmott’s ghost.

After I took my Niwaki trowel to the Niwaki emporium and had it sharpened, I immediately slashed my finger and spent an evening at Minor Injuries, next to the VD clinic. Of course, you might say it’s all my fault for being careless and gung-ho, wearing shorts in the heat and not thick gloves. I think it’s nature, tugging at my sleeve; biting back.

This feature originally appeared in the August 5, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

Lovers of Margery Fish’s famous garden at East Lambrook, Somerset, will be glad to know that it is once again in safe hands. It has passed through many owners since the great gardening writer died in 1969 and the new custodians Andrew and Alison Johnson moved in last May after fears that the house might be sold and the garden lost. The excellent news is that they are not only experienced and knowledgeable gardeners, but thrilled to be taking on such an important and historic masterpiece.

Andrew and Alison are originally from Cheshire, but lived for 30 years in Seattle, where they prospered. The garden they made there was one of 10 chosen for a recent book about modern American gardens and has been the subject of many articles and blogs. On their return to England, they sought a house where they could develop their gardening skills further. They have already made immense inroads into clearing and restoring what they found on their arrival at East Lambrook. They give heartfelt thanks to all the previous owners who strove to keep alive the memory of Fish, her garden and her plants.

It is sometimes said that Fish’s first and best-known gardening book, We Made a Garden (1956), is an account of her battles with her husband, Walter, a retired journalist, about the design and planting of their garden. That rather misses the point. The book is exactly what it set out to be — an account of how they made their garden at East Lambrook and it was written, rather reflectively, during her years of widowhood. She explains what they did and why they did it, their successes and their failures and how they retrieved the garden from their many mistakes, learning all the time.

The tone is intimate and personal; her conversational style is one of the book’s great strengths and accounts for much of its popularity. There is no trace of grandiloquence or even of immaculate grammar. It reads as if she is sitting opposite you at the kitchen table, drinking tea and telling you of all the ups and downs of how she and Walter made and maintained the garden. The success of We Made a Garden led to another seven books, all eagerly studied and enjoyed by her disciples.

Walter and Margery Fish moved to Somerset in 1937. The modest manor house was built of beautiful Ham stone and dates back to the 15th century. As for the garden, Fish always said that they bought a wilderness — ‘friends were really sorry for us’.

However, she was so smitten by the variegated sycamore Acer pseudoplatanus f. variegatum ‘Leopoldii’ on the main lawn that she said she would have bought the house just for the joy of owning it. It flourishes still today.

Walter insisted on four priorities: perfect lawns, paths, hedges and walls. Margery was more interested in plants, but came to agree with her husband because he saw the garden as a whole, whereas she adored the details. Nevertheless, structure mattered: she is remembered for declaring ‘if I ever hear of a good garden, I visit it in winter and, if I like it, return in the summer’. Elsewhere, she wrote: ‘No matter how beautiful they are, if the surroundings are unkempt, the flowers would give no pleasure whereas one could have a perfectly good and satisfying garden without any flowers at all.’

Fish loved the traditional plants with which cottage gardens in Britain were once so densely planted and encouraged her readers to ‘cherish the simple flowers that brightened [them] for so many years’. She sought a superabundance of flowers at every season. Evergreens included her own signature spurge Euphorbia characias subsp. wulfenii ‘Lambrook Gold.’ Bulbs naturalised everywhere, especially snowdrops, daffodils and Tulipa sprengeri. Cyclamen are also very much at home and she adored violets and primroses. It was mainly due to her love of plants that she developed the garden in the old cottage-gardening style.

Fish also described her informal planting style as ‘jungle gardening’ and the exuberant tangled growth of plants in much of her garden, especially in late summer, was a quality that she valued highly. Her garden was designed to offer an infinity of habitats — each of them an opportunity. There was no place for herbaceous borders or the grand style of previous generations. Nor did she hanker for the formal gradation of colours that Gertrude Jekyll had popularised for 50 years. What she created was a middle-class interpretation of an English cottage garden, perfectly in keeping with the house.

All the owners since Fish have sought to conserve the garden’s structure and cherish her plants. First was her nephew Henry Boyd-Carpenter, followed by his parents, until his father died in 1984. Andrew Norton bought the house in 1985 and did much to restore the garden, as well as developing a National Collection of Geranium species and cultivars. Then it passed to Robert and Marianne Williams, who sold it in turn to Gail and Mike Werkmeister in 2008. Few gardens are so well documented — what grew best and where it flourished, although many of the original plants are no longer available, which means that substitutes must be found that Fish would have endorsed if she were alive today.

The Werkmeisters were excellent custodians. An example of their thoughtful management was the planting of a young handkerchief tree in the centre of the white garden — the form called Davidia involucrata ‘Sonoma’, which flowers as a young plant. They also began a tradition of opening the garden in February for a Snowdrop Festival.

Fish liked flowers in winter, especially green-marked snowdrops and double forms, notably Galanthus ‘Ophelia’, that open even in dim light. She also loved G. ‘Magnet’, with its long pedicels and dancing flowers. The varieties that she planted have cross-pollinated and seeded around so that good new cultivars turn up all the time. Examples with Lambrook names include G. plicatus ‘Lambrook Greensleeves’, G. ‘Sir Henry B-C’, G. plicatus ‘Walter Fish’ and, above all, G. nivalis ‘Margery Fish’. Some 10 or 12 further plant cultivars are named after her or her garden. Perhaps the best known and remembered today are Artemisia absinthium ‘Lambrook Silver’ and Polemonium ‘Lambrook Mauve’, although Penstemon ‘Margery Fish’ still has an AGM from the RHS.

When Gail died in 2022, her husband decided to downsize and, after many months without a sale, rather gave up hope of finding a buyer to whom he could confidently pass on the baton of responsibility for this super-important garden, until the arrival of Andrew and Alison, who set to work on the gardens as soon as they moved in — their furniture had yet to arrive from Seattle. They are acutely aware of the importance of the garden and its status both nationally and internationally. Intending to restore it as faithfully as possible, they have spoken to many old friends of the garden and read everything they can about it.

The original structure — the walls, the paving and the paths (now nicely re-gravelled) — is intact, but much of the garden is overgrown. The evergreen lonicera hedge (now known as Lonicera ligustrina var. yunnanensis) has, for example, been allowed to grow and thicken until it completely obliterated Fish’s herb garden, which the Johnsons are restoring. The Green Garden was so overgrown that the new owners have left a brown cut-off bramble stem high overhead to remind themselves of the task that faced them on arrival. Here, as throughout the garden, much emphasis is placed on the value of evergreen trees and shrubs for young-round structure.

The Johnsons have added interesting new plants to fill the recovered space, including a variegated form of Phormium tenax and a handsome young loquat Eriobotrya japonica. They are also planting new fruit trees in the orchard, now only a lawn; first to be added were a greengage and the yellow damson known as ‘Shepherd’s Bullace’.

The Johnsons have been greatly encouraged by past owners and by people who have continued to grow plants that have been lost to the garden. Their greatest help has been Mark Stainer, who started as a gardener at East Lambrook at the age of 15 in 1974 and has worked there ever since — and they are propagating as many ‘original’ Margery Fish plants as possible for sale to visitors.

East Lambrook is open to visitors. See the East Lambrook website for more details.

This feature originally appeared in the July 29, 2026, print edition of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

On a recent trip to Schloss Dyck in Germany’s Rhineland, south-west of Düsseldorf, I had been expecting Thomas Blaikie to be the main protagonist in a story that had piqued my interest. He didn’t disappoint — not in the least — but I was happy to discover that, like all good stories about fairy-tale castles, it helps if there is a princess involved.

The princess in question was one Constance de Salm who, through her second marriage in 1803, became first a countess and then a princess when her husband Count Joseph zu Salm-Reifferscheidt-Dyck was bumped up a notch by the Prussian king. De Salm, however, as a highly educated Frenchwoman, had many more strings to her bow than a mere title and, by the time of her marriage, was well established in Parisian literary circles as a published poet, essayist, composer, playwright and ardent advocate of women’s rights.

At a time of immense political upheaval in France, she was waging her own intellectual revolution. De Salm must have been quite a catch for Salm-Reifferscheidt-Dyck, six years her junior, but, as he was an academic in his own right, their union was a good one.

His specialism was botany and, during his long life, he wrote prolifically about plants and horticulture — cacti, in particular, were his thing — all the while developing a spectacular garden at Schloss Dyck. This is where Blaikie, Scottish landscape gardener, comes in, who was commissioned by the Count in 1819 to create a rolling, English parkland garden of winding paths, tantalising vistas, trees and harmonious planting to blend with the surroundings.

An unlikely scenario, if ever there was one, for a German schloss. For this, however, we have de Salm, in part, to thank. The princess, so the story goes, decided that if she was to divide her time between Paris and Germany and if she was to encourage the great and the good of her Paris salons to join her at Schloss Dyck, then she wanted the castle to have interesting garden views.

Salm-Reifferscheidt-Dyck liked the minutiae of planting and cultivating, she liked gardens with a broader vision, and Blaikie, established in pre-Revolution days as something of a Capability Brown to the French nobility, was almost certainly on her radar. His naturalistic English-garden style, which contrasted sharply with the formal geometric layouts traditionally favoured in France, was all the rage and, being a distinguished botanist, too, Blaikie’s skill set would have been right up Salm-Reifferscheidt-Dyck’s street.

Blaikie’s garden today, 200 years on, is as good as ever. Of the 2,000 trees in the park, only 30 or so date back to his planting scheme, but subsequent generations of Schloss Dyck’s owners have continued to plant and replace. Sweeping vistas of the moated, mustard-yellow castle with its four turrets remain largely unobscured; banks of rhododendrons burst into colour in spring; and, on lazy summer days, visitors to the garden can picnic on the grass or snooze in hammocks slung beneath the trees.

In 1999, Schloss Dyck passed from 900 years of private family ownership to a public, charitable foundation as a ‘centre for garden art and landscape culture’. The family, although non-resident, is still involved.

As part of the castle’s new, publicly accessible incarnation, a nine-bedroom hotel was opened in the former coach house, from which a few fortunate guests may roam the grounds after the gates have closed. Thus, I find myself on a hot midsummer’s evening alone in a deckchair beneath the giant tulip tree — perhaps Blaikie’s most magnificent survivor — imagining Schloss Dyck in the days of Constance and Joseph when this became one of Europe’s most cosmopolitan and cultured addresses. Reassuringly, the spirit of all three lives on.

Visit the Schloss Dyck for more information on how to visit.

The article originally appeared in the August 5, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

The High Weald, an area stretching across much of Kent and Sussex, is an interesting place, distinctive enough to have earned the status of National Landscape. Characteristically composed of wooded, rolling hills, patchwork small fields and a network of narrow, tree-canopied lanes, it is quite easy to get lost between timeless, scattered farmsteads.

The heavy, iron-rich Wealden clay ground that characterises much of the area reveals itself in the brickwork of those old farmsteads and in their steeply pitched, brown roofs of handmade Kent peg tiles. These local materials also provide the picturesqueness of famous Wealden locations such as Great Dixter and Sissinghurst Castle, places that long ago exploited the potential richness of the clay soil to make world-renowned gardens.

Indeed, the region is peppered with great gardens and many more modest ones, lovingly tended by their owners and with much to interest the visitor. One of the latter, recently created, is at The Copper House, a confident, Modernist villa, crouching long and low in its agrarian landscape. Tucked away down a narrow lane, The Copper House was built in 2015, to replace a 1960s bungalow. It is clearly a departure from the local vernacular, but surprisingly in sympathy with it.

‘The brief we gave to the architect was that the house was to be a viewing box in the landscape and it was to be discreet,’ says owner Eleanor Cochrane. ‘We were going to clad the house in wood, but the architect showed us something different — it’s a copper alloy, so it won’t rust and it won’t go green. It will stay this colour and it exactly matches the Kent peg tiles in the area; the same patina, the same colour, everything.’ Its subtle, earthy tone is certainly complementary to the surroundings, providing a calm, unobtrusive background to the lively greens and vibrant flowers that Cochrane has planted intensively for year-round effect.

Within a plot of some seven acres of sloping meadow and woodland, the planted garden occupies only one-third of an acre, organised around the house in a series of contiguous rectangles that enable different views from behind mostly glass walls.

Such a disciplined layout recalls an Arts-and-Crafts approach, with central paths through the flower gardens, a contrastingly open lawned area, a rectangular pond and two terraces for seating and entertaining. Separations are made with hedging and a green-and-white-themed long walk north of the house provides further planting opportunities beyond the garage. A white border sits at the front entrance and Cochrane points out a nuttery of Kentish cobnuts, ‘really at its best in spring, it’s our homage to Sissinghurst’.

This new garden, which lies equidistant between Sissinghurst Castle (to the north) and Great Dixter (to the south, over the border in East Sussex), draws upon and successfully reinterprets influences from both of those great places, albeit scaled down and with a contemporary twist that complements the modern home.

Cochrane concentrates on the flower garden and adjacent productive beds and nursery area, leaving Mr Cochrane, when not at work, in charge of everything else, including the grass, wildflower meadows, orchard, woodland and composting. It is great teamwork.

The flower garden itself is exceptionally hard working. ‘Since my children were tiny, I have always volunteered at Great Dixter, so I had the opportunity of learning from the people in the garden for a few years, although later I ended up working in the office,’ says Cochrane. ‘At Dixter, I learnt how to plant successionally and that’s been my overriding interest in planting the garden here.’

In its ornamental sense, the succession planting in any given area is often to do with bulb or annual planting among seasonal shrubs or emerging perennials, whereby the bulbs can be left in the ground as another show of flowers (or foliage) takes over. The layered effect achieves a continuous show of new things coming through as earlier performers retreat.

Cochrane points to the white border, with its thematic mixture of shrubs, grasses, perennials, herbs and bulbs. ‘I’m a big fan of the white comfrey, Symphytum orientale, which runs all through the border, where we also have lots of ‘Thalia’ narcissi and tulips, including ‘White Triumphator’ and ‘Spring Green’.’ Later effects are achieved with dainty white Geranium sanguineum ‘Album’ peeping through the ground-covering foliage of Houttuynia cordata and again with white-themed hydrangeas joining vertical eruptions from perennials such as the ferny-leaved milk parsley Ligusticopsis wallichiana (formerly Selinum wallichianum) with its purple-washed stems.

Succession planting is at its best in colour-themed and tonal arrangements, of which there are several examples here — Cochrane has a remarkable eye for both colour and form. In less discerning hands, the results can lead to discordant jumbles, all hugger-mugger, with plants far from comfortable together. ‘The more you study and visit places, the bigger the plant palette. If you garden like this, it is almost impossible to get anyone to help you because it’s more akin to doing a painting or an embroidery. If you were creating a painting, you couldn’t say to somebody else, could you do that painting for me? That’s how I feel about the garden.’

The Copper House Garden, Kent, opens for talks by appointment and for the National Garden Scheme.

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

Has Chelsea outlived its purpose? The fact that the RHS has arranged to have more shows out in the country this year may indicate that the greatest flower show in the world is no longer the greatest pleasure to visit. I loved the old RHS shows at Vincent Square, where there was a chance to talk to nursery owners and buy plants. At Chelsea, it’s very hard to get near a stand, let alone talk to the person running it and the nurseries say they don’t make enough in sales to make it worth the effort and cost of showing.

At RHS Badminton in Gloucestershire, even in the hottest week on record, the main flower tent felt shady and there was room to inspect everything, to talk to exhibitors and to wheel plants back to the car. Badminton is a beautiful place, where parkland stretches for miles and a lake lies in front of the astonishing house built for the Dukes of Beaufort by a roll call of famous architects. William Kent, James Gibbs, Charles Bridgeman and Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown, as well as Thomas Wright, the astronomer, were all involved in the making of one of England’s most dazzling estates. Several Beaufort duchesses, including the present Duchess Georgia, have been gardeners, starting with the 17th-century pre-Linnaean botanist Mary, who wrote: ‘When I get into storys of plants, I know not how to get out.’

For visitors who are as plant obsessed as the first duchess, this was the perfect outing. The park is scattered with trees, offering shade for picnickers, with plenty of tables and chairs near a bandstand playing jazz. It all felt very leisurely and summery and not at all crowded. I spoke to one group of five straw-hatted elderly sisters who had been there from 10am until 6pm — I doubt that a trip to Chelsea could offer such a wonderful day-long experience.

There were fewer show gardens at Badminton than at Chelsea. Obviously popular was The Archers garden, designed by Jo Thompson with a tractor and a jolly collection of cottage flowers, but most of the designs were more naturalistic. The RHS is on a laudable mission to encourage young designers and those with small plots, so there was a new award for Young Designer of the Year, which was won by Sophie Leo from Bristol. Called ‘Where grief grows quiet’, it was made in memory of her late mother.

Another memorial, but much larger, garden was the stand-out exhibit at the show for me. This was the enormous plot — the largest RHS show garden ever made — designed by Tom Stuart-Smith for Sir Hans Rausing, to celebrate his late wife, Julia. Shallow yew domes, like upturned saucers, punctuated beds for shade and sun. A meadow of drought-resistant plants stretched round the garden and at the centre was a great cast-iron bowl of water with a quiet, mesmerising fountain. It offered a masterclass in restrained modern planting and an inspiration for the kind of choices all of us might adopt in the difficult conditions that now look like becoming the norm.

The most remarkable thing about this design was the speed with which it was assembled. Crocus installed the hard landscape and trees in May and planting was accomplished in eight broiling days before the show by a team of six to eight skilled gardeners headed by Jonny Bruce of the Field Nursery. Stuart-Smith, with a slipped disc, took to pruning trees on a ladder. Most Chelsea show designers have at least a year to prepare.

In the tent, there were some terrific stands. Hoyland nurseries, usually associated with Agapanthus, also showed South African Watsonias and Dieramas, as well as a giant tulbaghia. Daisy Roots, which regularly shows at Chelsea, had a lovely array of drought-resistant plants. Alchemy Ferns, Gold medallists at Chelsea, had a beautiful display and, elsewhere, there were elegant begonias and fuchsias, as well as a strong showing of Pelargoniums.

Badminton has a historic connection with zonals, because the first duchess introduced them in the 17th century. Cath Kidston’s Perfume Pavilion, where visitors could rub different scented leaves and then buy beauty products made from geraniums, as well as plants from Fibrex Nurseries, was a real hit. Apparently, there were traffic jams getting to RHS Badminton on a few days, but perhaps I was lucky going on Saturday.

RHS Sandringham in Norfolk, last week, was an expansion of the regular summer flower show held there every year. At time of writing, I look forward to seeing how it compared with other shows. If RHS Badminton is anything to go by, however, the signs seem to be that the future is stately, spacious and much more enjoyable than grand old Chelsea.

'Diary of a Keen Gardener' by Mary Keen is out now.

This feature originally appeared in the July 29, 2026, print edition of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

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.

Flower borders should be as deep as possible for maximum floral impact. That’s the received wisdom and, generally speaking, I would agree, not least because plants do have a habit of growing sideways, as well as upwards, and the stronger brutes will swamp their less-robust bedfellows unless all are given plenty of elbow room.

Yet, over the years, I have had great delight from what I have come to call ‘ribbon borders’: long, narrow ‘rivers’ of plants between 2ft and 3ft wide, often running alongside a path. They have a delicacy that larger beds and borders can never possess, but they also have charm and elegance when planted up thoughtfully.

In larger borders, we are exhorted to plant in generous drifts — fives, sevens, 11s and so on. (The odd numbers are quoted by nothing more than habit — there is nothing wrong in planting in fours, sixes, 10s and 12s, as the eye is not nearly so irritated by even numbers in the garden as is popularly supposed.)

In my ribbon borders, I find the most pleasing effect is to plant single specimens of a smaller number of species or varieties and mix them all up. The effect may sound too ‘cottagey’ for formal gardens, yet the effect — due to repetition — is anything but spotty. Too many plants of a single variety will make the border look like a trial ground rather than a feature in itself and the delicacy of the creation is lost.

Such borders can be straight — running either side of a walk that leads to a greenhouse or garden building — or they can snake their way across the garden alongside a winding path of gravel, paving or cobbles.

Siting them alongside a pathway is, perhaps, the secret, for then they do not look mean, but appear as embellishments. Keeping to a smaller number of varieties, so that the pattern is, in effect, repeated, gives the whole creation a kind of cohesiveness that would be lost if too many varieties were present.

A favourite at the moment is a narrow border that runs alongside the terrace of our new house where I have used only three different plants, the combination of which I enjoyed in the garden we’ve left behind: Geranium Patricia (no more than 2ft high with magenta flowers), Nepeta racemosa ‘Walker’s Low’ (a catmint of lavender blue just slightly taller) and along the edges, it being lower growing, Alchemilla mollis, lady’s mantle, with its froth of lime-green flowers. Having found this combination that worked for me a couple of years ago, I was reluctant to forgo the pleasure it gave.

The joy of this sort of planting is that if one tires of it there is no need to rip the whole thing out. Change only one plant in the combination and the effect is totally altered: a new colour can be introduced or a plant of a different stature added into the mix for greater height, bold foliage or a different flowering season. That said, the greatest impact is achieved if all the plants flower at the same time.

The narrow border alongside part of the house that runs at right angles to the main block is planted up with two varieties: the pale-pink, cluster-flowered shrub rose Bonica, mixed with ‘Hidcote’ lavender.

There is nothing novel about the tried-and-tested combination of roses and lavender, but the mixture of pale pink and deep lavender blue is hugely pleasing to the eye and Bonica — a variety bred by Meilland in France in 1985 that has the RHS Award of Garden Merit — is a rose recommended as being a good ‘doer’ on my sandy soil.

Most roses relish heavier ground and are prone to mildew and blackspot on impoverished earth. I have beefed up my free-draining acid sand with masses of well-rotted manure and will continue to mulch it each year with more of the same. Bonica repeat flowers, but also produces attractive hips if not dead-headed. If it has one drawback, that is its ‘delicate’ scent (a euphemism for ‘hardly there’), but I forgive it such a shortcoming for the other attributes, including large clusters of flower and healthy foliage, that it brings to this particular party.

The great advantage with these narrow borders is ease of cultivation — they can be worked from both sides — and the ability to change them quite dramatically by adjusting their make-up. Slender they may be, but the amount of joy they bring this particular gardener is out of all proportion to their stature.

Chatsworth: The gardens and the people who made them by Alan Titchmarsh is out now (Ebury, £35).

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.

I am a child of the post-war years of make do and mend. We grew our own fruit and vegetables and gave away our surpluses. Some ended up in the village greengrocer. There were no deep freezes, so we bottled our soft fruit, cherries and plums, and salted away our beans. Potatoes were kept in wooden boxes in a dark shed and root vegetables, such as coarse old carrots and parsnips (which I loathed), were stored in clamps.

My grandfather was Dean of the Royal School of Mines, which had been damaged by bombing in the war. The contractors who repaired it overestimated the quantity of glass they would need and he was able to acquire the leftovers — all building materials were hard to come by — from which he made a small greenhouse. I remember calceolarias in spring (query — why does no one grow them today?), tomatoes in summer, chrysanthemums in autumn and the smell of paraffin stoves to keep out the frost.

We had two gardeners who netted the fruit, mounded up the potatoes, tied in the sweet peas and mowed the lawns with an elderly push-me mower, which (when it wasn’t in need of repair) left beautiful stripes in the grass. They also chopped wood and felled large trees with a huge two-man saw, 10ft long with formidable teeth, which my father eventually gave to a museum of garden tools in Cornwall.

Those two men (Mr Bond the head gardener and his assistant Smith, as we called them) were village men, able and intelligent, but poorly educated. When Smith chalked the names of potatoes on the wooden boxes he reversed the S in 'Majestic', which always made me wonder how he spelt his own name. Both were hard-working, dependable and always willing to talk to Master Charles about the annuals and bulbs that I grew in ‘my’ garden — all for a wage of £6 or £7 a week.

Fast forward to 2026. Today’s gardeners could not be more different. They are well educated and well qualified. They have followed courses and passed exams. They take initiatives, come with good ideas and spend their holidays visiting other people’s gardens. They know their own worth — and they are still underpaid.

Last year, I wrote a piece for Country Life about three young gardeners who were beginning to make a mark in their world. One worked for the National Trust, one for the RHS and the third was already second-in-command at Great Dixter in East Sussex. They were grateful for the privilege of working in beautiful and fascinating gardens with the freedom to help them develop. They all gave thanks for the encouragement they received when training and working within a large organisation. They were happy employees who expected their careers to develop within the structures of their current employers.

Twelve months later, two of them have already left in search of better prospects.

The internal promotion for which they hoped did not materialise soon enough. They were ready for greater responsibility and the opportunity to learn new skills, but it became clear that the only way they would achieve this would be in new jobs.

In this, they resemble the journeymen gardeners of late-Victorian and Edwardian times, who used to move on to gain experience in different gardens, pushing their way up the hierachy in the hope eventually of becoming head gardeners in charge of a large estate or, perhaps, of owning their own nursery. The fact is that the HR department of almost any organisation today cannot cope with ambitious employees who want to better themselves, but feel held back.

Six weeks ago, I attended a study day in Maurice Foster’s famous plantsman’s garden at White House Farm in Kent. There were about 30 of us, including three of the garden’s trustees, extremely knowledgeable and experienced horticulturists. Apart from a few old buffers like me, almost all the participants were young, well-educated and ambitious millennials and zoomers, including some who work for none other than the National Trust, the RHS and Great Dixter. All were happy to fork out for the experience and spend all Sunday talking to Foster, exploring his 15 acres and meeting new plants — and all went away loaded not only with new knowledge, but also with pots and cuttings of plants to propagate for themselves.

The future of horticulture is safe in the hands of these energetic and committed 20-somethings, but what about the old-style gardeners? I have lost contact with Smith, but Mr Bond’s children had an education and job opportunities that their parents lacked. Some of his grandchildren went to university. None of them will ever pursue a career in horticulture, but one of them loves his own garden and told me he remembers that his grandfather showed him how to mound up potatoes and tie in sweet peas.

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.

I'm not much of a winter kitchen gardener. I’ll clear up some untidy areas, rake fallen tree leaves onto beds to mulch and enrich and prune where pruning is needed, but I’m rarely looking for excuses to compact wet soil, acquire damp knees or feel the wind exploring any gaps in the completeness of my clothing. March to November is the time I am naturally drawn to the garden and that means there is rarely a day when I don’t have borage (Borago officinalis) for company; it is one of the few constants of my favoured months and its lifting presence stops just this side of jolly to ensure I never tire of it.

Having intentionally grown borage once, it seems to have moved in for good, popping up as and where it fancies, the earliest self-seeders announcing that spring really is upon us.

For those new to it, borage is easy to grow, germinating readily when sown direct from April until around midsummer. You can even sow earlier, mimicking Nature by scattering a handful of seed directly into the soil in autumn for early flowers in spring. Being native to the Mediterranean region, a sunny, well-drained spot is where borage is happiest, although in my experience it will grow just about anywhere with reasonable light levels that’s not waterlogged. Allow 20in or so between plants and expect it to reach 23in–30in tall. If you have an as-yet-unused corner or a medium pot (multi-purpose peat-free compost is best) at your disposal, borage is just about the perfect low-maintenance plant to bring a little life to it as you decide on your longer-term plans.

Borage grows to a medium-sized plant, with soft, fleshy leaves and flowers that are most commonly blue, although it is also available with white flowers (‘Alba’), and you might find ‘Bill Archer’ with its cream variegated leaves. The star-shaped flowers of each are a delight, having five petals arranged in pointed triangles. Whichever variety you go for will offer a precious destination for bees and other beneficial insects that starts early and carries on through spring, summer and much of autumn. Grow them for a while and you might find some distinctly purple/pink flowers appear among the self-seeders.

Borage is an excellent companion plant, with its ability to draw in pollinators making it especially good next to fruit such as tomatoes, which it also apparently serves to protect from tomato hornworm by confusing it with its scent.

As much as I love borage’s optimistic visual punctuation, I equally look forward to its flavour. The young leaves and flowers carry a gentle, cool, fresh cucumber flavour that is wonderful added to leafy salads and cocktails (in Pimm’s it's a must) or with fruit, especially strawberries. I particularly like the texture and flavour added when serving fish and seafood, too. In Italy, borage leaves are most often cooked and used to fill ravioli and other stuffed pastas.

When the flowers are at their most abundant, I freeze them in ice cubes to add to cocktails and other drinks when the sun appears: to keep the flower in the centre of the cube, add a fresh flower to each compartment of the ice tray, half fill with water, freeze and then top up and freeze again. Don’t worry about picking too many flowers, as their productivity is hard to exhaust even if you love them as much as I do and the more you pick, the more the plant produces. If you are looking to maximise your harvest, it helps to remove any tired flowers to encourage more to follow.

Borage couldn’t be easier to live with. In a couple of decades of growing, I’ve found it entirely pest and disease free, resistant to all but a serious frost and it needs staking only when plants are at their tallest and planted in a particularly windy spot. As I’ve implied, borage is a friend who likes to stay once invited into your garden; you are likely to find it springing up randomly, bringing life and colour unexpectedly, lifting the early season in just the way I’m grateful for. Equally, any plants that appear where I’d rather they didn’t are easily pulled up and cast onto the compost heap.

Mark Diacono grows edibles, both usual and unusual, at Otter Farm in Devon. His book 'Abundance: eating and living with the seasons' (Quadrille, £30) is out now.

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's not only beauty that is in the eye of the beholder. It is, we are assured, also the answer to that perennial query: ‘What’s the difference ’twixt a wildflower and a weed?’ The Oxford English Dictionary is definitive, defining a weed as a ‘wild plant growing where it is not wanted and is in competition with cultivated plants’.

The common dandelion (Taraxacum officinale), with its lovely golden head, will serve as an example. On the verge, we see it positively as prettifying, but growing on the grassy village cricket pitch, in front of the stumps, it is an obstruction that requires ‘weeding’. That’s that, then. The answer to ‘weed or wildflower?’ done and dusted.

Whether a wild plant is a weed or wildflower is a matter of its location — plus human perception. The moseying dog-walker admires the dandelion on the lane, the groundsman mowing the cricket pitch’s infield regards it as a problem. Ah, the dear old dandelion, put on Earth to rebut the wisdom of lexicographers and to weed out ontological glibness.

To itself, of course, Taraxacum officinale’s status as ‘wildflower’ or ‘weed’ is immaterial. It exists unto itself, what the German philosopher Immanuel Kant — who rather early got the hang of this being and perception stuff in The Critique of Pure Reason (1781) — posited as the state of ‘noumena’. Humans can only know things as they appear to us or as ‘phenomena’.

Neither do the 50 or so insects the dandelion supports care a fig about its classification, Kantian or otherwise. The bees of early spring are glad to visit it wherever it appears. They need the dandelion’s sweet pollen, which is as energy-giving as the primaveral sun.

In France, the dandelion, far from being in competition with cultivated plants, is a cultivated plant, a salad. Take note, too, of dandelion’s Latin tag, the officinale meaning that herbalists of the past granted it purpose as a medicinal herb — not a weed, or a wildflower mind you — and would have picked it wherever it popped up. Dandelion, among its medicinal attributes, is a powerful diuretic, hence its French name of pissenlit. Edible plants are plants. The end. Dig into history and the people of the past were clearly crop/weed/wildflower fluid.

Tollund Man, the bog-preserved corpse from the Danish Iron Age, consumed porridge containing cultivated barley and fat-hen (Chenopodium album) for his breakfast before being hanged. If the barley of his last meal was cultivated, the fat-hen may equally have been farmed or foraged.

Highly nutritious, the Iron Agers grew it or allowed it to grow — an eminently sensible approach to food provision: let the edible plant that flourishes flourish, whether wild and sown by breeze or planted by a horny-handed human with a digging stick. Fat-hen was sold by hawkers as a leafy vegetable in Britain as recently as the 18th century, yet today? It is a bane ‘weed’ of agriculture.

What did the Romans ever do for us? We may gawp in awe at Hadrian’s Wall and Bath’s baths, but the empire’s legacy also includes ground elder (Aegopodium podagraria), which was introduced to the isles as a pot herb. The perennial jumped the villa wall to take root elsewhere. As John Gerard noted of ground elder in his Herball (1597), ‘where it hath once taken roote, it will hardly be gotten out again’. Centuries of gardeners wail their woeful accord.

Those gardeners, together with small children, will doubtless be bemused to find that the plants once cultivated but now damned as weeds include the stinging nettle (Urtica dioica). Fairservice, the gardener in Walter Scott’s Rob Roy (1817), raised it under glass as an early spring green. Oh, the irony. What we regard as the ‘weeds’ of farm and garden were made more prolific by… farming and gardening.

The turning of soil favoured poppies and the midden — the farm muck heap — was a source of nitrogen beloved by the nettle. There was, however, in the past many a virtuous link between ‘weeds’ and farming, as recorded by the plants’ common names, which are often floral memorials of their ancient utility. Galium aparine, that sticky climber of the hedge, was known as ‘goose-grass’, as it was fed to goslings and Heracleum sphondylium, the airy white umbels of which liven the lane in June, was ‘common hogweed’, as it was free fodder for porcines.

Time has hardened the distinction between wildflower and weed. As agriculture rose and rose, the plants that competed with crops took on the negative nomenclature of ‘weed’, the word itself entering the English language in the 9th century. The division was more than botanical, agricultural, it was political.

Cultivated crops, especially cereals, became regarded as signs of orthodoxy and order, whereas weeds became symbols of anarchy and wildness. It’s there in Shakespeare, always the mirror to the age, when Cordelia says of her father in King Lear, Act IV, Scene 4: 'He was met even now/ As mad as the vex’d sea — singing aloud;/ Crown’d with rank fumiter and furrow weeds,/ With burdocks, hemlock, nettles, cuckoo- flowers,/ Darnel, and all the idle weeds that grow In our sustaining corn.' Or put plainly, Lear is an insane regent wearing a parodic crown composed of the parasitic weeds choking the grain that feeds his subjects.

By the opposite token, when Gerard Manley Hopkins railed against the Victorian taming of the countryside, his chosen emblem of poetic protest was weed, not ‘wildflower’: 'What would the world be, once bereft/ Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left,/ O let them be left, wildness and wet;/ Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.'

When Hopkins wrote Inversnaid (1881), the industrialisation of agriculture was in full march and the weed became more than an issue, it became an enemy. The widespread use of chemical herbicides post-1950 allowed a Final Fix to the problem of ‘weeds’. One contemporary agrichemical company boasts its herbicides ‘fight weeds with a vengeance’. You and I might ponder whether or not flora is wildflower or weed, but ‘weedkillers’ rarely make such distinction.

Weed and wildflower alike are to be suppressed. Hence all those monotone cereal fields across the land. The poppy (Papaver rhoeas) is the blood-red wildflower of Remembrance, yet for the maker of broad-leaved herbicide it is merely a menace to the sustaining corn. Thus is the cornflower (Centaurea cyanus), which is the blue of sky, condemned; so, too, the little scarlet pimpernel (Lysimachia arvensis), whose name is its description, pink and shyly peeking, and corn chamomile (Anthemis arvensis), elegantly limbed and sweetly daisy-headed.

Weeds gave colour to the countryside, as well as food and habitat for our native creatures. When the weeds went, so did the wildlife. The grey partridge (Perdix perdix) declined by 92% between 1970 and 2013. The bird’s chicks are crucially dependent on insects whose hosts are arable ‘weeds’.

I am a serial re-creator of early Victorian wheatfields with their riotous wildflower/weed chromatics. I admit, my cereal yield has been a smidgeon less than conventional agriculture, but my arable wild plants have succoured the buzzing, flitting pollinators on which farming depends. The cattle have loved and thrived on the wild flora baled in the straw. I have gained, not lost. It helps to be pretty. Is that not part of the wildflower versus weed division?

I’ve deliberately sown corn chamomile, yet I have never sown broad-leaved dock (Rumex obtusifolius), a plant so plain Jane that Mrs Bennet would struggle to find it a suitor. My mistake. Although classified as ‘injurious’ in the 1959 Weeds Act, meaning that the government may enforce its removal due to toxicity/destructiveness, recent research from the Biological Husbandry Unit in New Zealand suggests that small populations of docks in pasture help prevent bloat in livestock, as well as providing mineral-rich nutrition.

The American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson was more right than he knew when he defined a weed as ‘a plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered’ — or have been forgotten.

This feature originally appeared in the June 24, 2026, print edition of Country Life. 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.

We have been mired in the building of a glasshouse from gymnasium windows and a random door, thinking it would be cheaper than a greenhouse. True, but for a while we referred to it as ‘the Shell garage’, owing to its resemblance to a petrol station thrown up in the 1930s when motoring was a thrill. Now, it’s the Café de Pellée, a winter palace for our pelargoniums.

We hope conditions are right for the clientele — a white ceiling with roof lights and vents, glazed on three sides, because pelargoniums, as does anything under glass, need copious ventilation. If you start to find whitefly, open windows and doors and spread the pots out or get them outside. Space and shade are paramount. Ed Boers and Laura Whiley, the new proprietors of Fibrex Nurseries in Worcestershire, advocate 40% shade as optimum: this is surprising, but perhaps not when you think of them in the back porch or a Chinese takeaway. Although they seem to thrive on nonchalance, pelargoniums must be kept frost free, and dry in winter. Mr B sometimes simply de-pots and throws them in a heap under the bench until spring.

Yet come spring, pelargoniums are conversely responsive to restless grooming: manicuring of spent flowers and leaves. Luckily, keeping them kempt is both meditative and aromatherapeutic. Mr B loves to tend to the needs of a Jilly Cooper-esque cultivar such as P. ‘Clorinda’, louche and puce, yet abhors my grandmother’s zonal pelargoniums, calling them the ‘Clarice Cliff’ of the greenhouse.

My grandmother’s geraniums were guardsman-scarlet and had leaves that smelled of hot Draylon. They were planted out each summer in a military row, but were, correctly speaking, pelargoniums. Cranesbills and stork’s bills; that is the old confusion.

The geranium or cranesbill is a low northern, hardy, herbaceous perennial: the ubiquitous G. ‘Rozanne’. The pelargonium is different, being tender, generally from South Africa and known as stork’s bills owing to the fruit’s resemblance to a bird’s beak, which is part of their charm. Pelargonium species come, like liquorice, in all sorts, including zonal, ivy and, best of all, scented-leaved species and varieties.

Not being a botanist, the definition of ‘species’ has long perplexed me, but, put simply, species are the original wild forms and generally more robust, particularly when indigenous. Cultivars have been selected (and often transported across oceans) by generations of humanity, and hybrids are the result of both naturally occurring and deliberate crossbreeding.

Pelargoniums are not indigenous, but they offer extended flowering and scent from their numerous cultivars. Yet species pelargoniums are where it all began, combining subtle beauty with leaves and sometimes flowers that smell of the veldt. ‘Bonjour!’ to Pelargonium triste, the first species to reach Europe from the Cape; part of the plant library of John Tradescant by 1632.

The specific epithet derived from the Latin for sad or gloomy. It is pale, shy, scented, dormant in summer, but, on February evenings, Pelargonium triste unfolds five petals of tallow dashed with darkest plum; uncooked spiced pastries in look and smell. These damson splashes are more intense on her near cousin P. lobatum, whose evening perfume is sherbet fountains. P. lobatum’s offspring (after a coupling with P. fulgidum, which has lipstick scarlet flowers) is P. ‘Ardens’, my favourite winter flower fairy. She wears a Fortuny hat of velutinous madder smudged darkest crimson, but she has no scent.

All the above are tuberous — known colloquially as ‘gouty’ — pelargoniums, on account of their swollen basal nodes, and are difficult to propagate. This makes them all the more desirable. The garden designer Helen Dillon suggests cutting up the tuber with a bit of stem and burying the whole thing completely in light compost, praying for a plant in three months: ‘At no stage disturb the pots to see what’s happening.’

However, regular pelargoniums strike from the smallest cutting, providing presents for friends. You might like to give them P. sidoides, whose beaky purple flowers emerge from grey cashmere stems, felty, but sticky with a gum that smells sour from April until December.

They all deplore the stagnant and the damp, but P. sidoides likes Martini-dry conditions. P. odoratissimum, on the other hand, a prostrate shrublet whose candied apple scent emanates from small white flowers, revels in shaded places in the Cape woodland.

My great love of the moment — but this will change — likes just such an umbrageous corner. P. tomentosum, meaning downy, not tormented, has mossy peppermint-coloured and peppermint-scented leaves, as soft as mouse fur; tactile heaven for small children and obsessive adults. These species are worth all the attention they seek.

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

Throughout his years of working in Germany and North America, Sir Crispin Davis dreamed of buying a country house in southern England and cultivating a garden. In fact, he has done much more than that. In addition to modernising and replanting almost every feature that he inherited at Dummer House, which he bought in 2014, he has created an important new rose garden, large and utterly delightful.

The house is a fine example of homely Georgian architecture and the estate, near Basingstoke, belonged for many years to the Terry family, who built the present house around a much older core. They were friends of the Austen family of Steventon and Chawton, and Jane, the novelist, danced with the sons of the house, of which there were seven, as well as knowing the six daughters. It was to accommodate so many children that the building grew to its present extent.

Dummer House came with 27 acres on a level site, which included a remarkably spacious main lawn stretching south towards parkland, sheep pastures and arable land beyond. A see-through group of metal deer, fashioned and shaped in outline, gives scale to the view of the parkland. Previous owners had planted a fine avenue, focused on the drawing room, of weeping silver pears Pyrus salicifolia ‘Pendula’. This popular small tree has a tendency to look shaggy, but Sir Crispin has trimmed and trained his as neat hemispheres on short trunks; the effect is dynamic and charming at every season, but especially in spring, when thousands of daffodils flower underneath. Nearby is a smaller lawn surrounded by mixed borders, as well as well-established trees and shrubs. A tree-like cotoneaster with many low branches makes a favourite den for grandchildren to climb up inside until they can no longer be seen.

Dummer’s structure of open spaces, hedges and specimen trees remains as Sir Crispin found it, although the herbaceous plants in the borders, bold and lavish, are almost all his introductions. Delphiniums, phloxes, salvias and peonies — some of his favourite genera — are here in plenty and he has a remarkable eye for contrasts and harmonies of plant shapes and colours. Repetition and succession planting maximise the effects. The planting of evergreens against the north wall of the house — ferns, phormiums, elaeagnus and elegantly trained yews — is superb. Throughout the garden, Sir Crispin’s plantings offer a masterclass in horticultural artistry.

Sir Crispin’s favourite plants, by far, are roses. A rose garden sums up for him the best that an English country house can offer in early summer. Dummer came with a run-down, walled kitchen garden, rather closer to the house than usual, which he decided to convert into a rose garden; it now contains some 1,000 roses. It adjoins the parish churchyard and has, as a backdrop, the south side of the 13th-century church — ‘delightfully modest,’ according to Pevsner — with a pre-Reformation tiled roof and a remarkable white-painted clapboard belfry.

There were no half-measures in creating this horticultural heaven. Sir Crispin employed the Portugal-based landscape architect Richard Westcott to help with the structural work. Roses respond to good soil, so Mr Westcott brought over a team of Portuguese workers to replace the tired earth of the entire kitchen garden, digging it out to a depth of 22in. Big machines were hired to help with this major operation and fertile fresh soil brought in. The only feature spared was a handsome, well-established quince tree, which now dominates one of the garden’s four quadrants.

As so often happens, the old kitchen garden was not a regular shape — polygonal, but not a rectangle. Nevertheless, Sir Crispin had a clear idea of the formal design and layout that he wanted. There should be a fountain at the centre, aligned on the two doors — one entering near the side of the house and the other leading out to the main garden. He drew out in detail the ground plan that he wanted and asked Mr Westcott to prepare working plans and specifications. Each of the four segments should have a distinct design and character — meandering, romantic, suitable for entertainment and a cottage garden.

This means, for example, that the ‘meandering’ garden has a wiggly layout that begs the visitor to dawdle and soak up the beauty of the roses, whereas the ‘entertainment’ garden includes a sheltered, sunken area where eight dining chairs surround a round garden table. The character of the whole walled garden is now defined not by the names of its four quadrants, but by its roses, even if the way one traverses each of the segments does confer a distinctive sense of exploration.

When it came to choosing roses, Sir Crispin turned to David Austin Roses for advice and the company sent its top rosarian Michael Marriott to help. Mr Marriott remembers that ‘Sir Crispin asked that a fair selection of the roses should be fragrant and include a good proportion that were suitable for cutting’. The upshot is that a very great number of Austin’s ‘English’ roses from 10 years ago are the main inhabitants, but mixed with the best old roses, including Rosa gallica var. officinalis, R. gallica ‘Versicolor’ and ‘Charles de Mills’.

Mr Marriott advised that no fewer than five specimens of each cultivar should be planted closely together so that they appear to develop into a thick clump — advice that Sir Crispin accepted and now endorses because, he says, the impact of the individual clumps is vastly improved.

Among Sir Crispin’s favourite David Austin roses are Desdemona, which has large, white, strongly scented flowers in small clusters, and two sumptuous sweet-scented crimson varieties, Munstead Wood and Darcey Bussell, that are now difficult to find. He praises pink Princess Anne for its long season of flower, but he also thinks very highly of many once-flowering roses — everything from ‘Versicolor’, the striped Gallica rose sometimes called ‘Rosa Mundi’, to the glorious scented ‘Fritz Nobis’, which cannot be bettered for sheer flower power early in June.

Traditional Hybrid Teas and Floribundas are not forgotten — ‘Sally Holmes’ and A Whiter Shade of Pale perform very well here, but Chandos Beauty is perhaps the best of all modern roses for its scent, colour and health, as well as its prolific production of flowers.

The underplantings are simple: lamb’s lugs, nepeta and hardy geraniums, chosen to complement the many-coloured roses discretely. Incredibly, all is maintained by just one gardener, the gifted and tireless Laura Feltham, who sustains the highest standards of cultivation. Skilled rosarians know how difficult it can be to succeed so consistently. Sir Crispin’s dream of England is today among the best modern rose gardens in private hands.

This feature originally appeared in the June 3, 2026, print edition of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

'Put the brown end in the soil, the green end above it, and you’re in with a much better chance,’ said the late Yorkshire gardener Geoffrey Smith. There is no arguing with that. The trouble is that even when following these basic guidelines there are pitfalls ahead, the most crucial of which is planting depth.

It’s many years ago now that I was reprimanded by the then curator of Kew Gardens, who was watching me plant a rhododendron. ‘Too deep, Alan, too deep.’ I learned then the perils of deep planting, and now that I garden on acid soil and I am actually establishing the rhododendrons and azaleas that were but a dream in my days of gardening on chalk, his words ring in my ear.

Rhodies, as we affectionately call them, are surface rooters; bury their rootballs too deeply and they suffocate and decline to flower. I’ve learned the wisdom of planting them so that the rootball of container-grown plants sits about an inch above the surrounding soil level. This does exacerbate the drying out of the rootball in sunny weather, but mulching the soil around the plant with chipped bark will help to reduce evaporation and encourage the exploration of those upper roots. Regular watering in times of drought — especially with newly planted rhodies and azaleas — will ensure rapid establishment.

During the hot, dry period in May of this year, on soil that is acidic and sandy, I was a slave to the hosepipe as far as my new charges were concerned. They were very quick to let me know they were short of water, as the foliage would wilt dramatically. After a good soaking, the recovery was equally dramatic: the plants picked up and bristled with health after only a few hours.

The importance of planting depth is every bit as critical for the large specimen trees that now seem to be the choice of folk who acquire a new estate and want instant effect. That option is available, of course, but at a price. Trees 10ft or more high and wide, often with a price tag in the tens of thousands, will be purchased by the dozen in the hope of creating a landscape that looks mature in a matter of weeks.

Touring one such estate a month ago, in the company of Kew’s former head of the arboretum, Tony Kirkham, we sighed over tree after tree that was struggling to survive only a few years after planting. Some were already dead, towering specimens devoid of leaf and brittle of wood; swarthy skeletons against a forget-me-not-blue sky. The cause of the problem in each and every case was deep planting.

In the same way that established trees are susceptible to changes in the water table, so trees that have been container-grown or containerised later in life are equally sensitive to a change in the level of planting. When committed to their new earth, the surface of the rootball should sit level with the surface, not 7in–11in deeper as was the case with so many of the sad specimens we saw. One can bemoan the waste of money on a tree that cost several thousand pounds, but, more than that, the loss of a formerly healthy specimen is agonising for a gardener to behold.

Why are trees planted too deeply? Probably in the belief that being tall they need greater anchorage, which deeper planting will provide. Stability is far better afforded by guy ropes that can be provided in the first year or two of establishment and removed once the tree has anchored itself. The problem is not confined to large specimens. Last week, I bought two pot-grown Japanese maples and planted them in tubs. I already have a couple that were established a few months ago. I had no reason to believe that the newcomers would not do the same, but they sulked. Then the likely reason dawned on me and I scraped away at the compost at the foot of the stem on one of them. Three inches down, I found the first root.

As rhododendrons and azaleas do, Japanese maples resent deep planting. The top of the roots that emanate from the base of the stem should be just visible on the surface of the compost, then they will romp away.

The base of the trunk or stem on any tree is recognisable, as it is generally swollen immediately above the emerging roots — the brown bit that Mr Smith told us needs to go in the soil. Let that swollen stem base be your guide and your means of ensuring the survival of both the tree and your sanity.

'Chatsworth: The gardens and the people who made them' by Alan Titchmarsh is out now (Ebury, £35).

This feature originally appeared in the June 17, 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.

'Sissinghurst, as I see it, is an amalgam of peaks and troughs,' wrote the great Christopher Lloyd in Country Life in 1996.

'On the peaks its reputation hangs,' he continues. 'In contrast, there are areas where little seems to happening... worst of all is the area called Delos, outside the entrance to the Priest's House. Why this has never been taken by the scruff beats me. I know if faces north and that cold winds sometimes blow through it, but we are talking about Kent when all's said and done. Delos seems to have mesmerised generations of gardeners into a state of number helplessness.'

Lloyd would no doubt be delighted, because over the last couple of years, Dan Pearson and the National Trust's team of gardeners at Sissinghurst have done just that. This neglected corner of one of England's most celebrated gardens has finally been completed according to the original vision of Vita Sackville-West.

The story of the Delos garden began in 1935. Following a trip to the Greek island, Sackville-West and her husband, Harold Nicolson, were inspired to re-create its essence in their own garden at Sissinghurst. In 1953, the author and garden designer commented: ‘This has not been a success so far, but perhaps some day it will come right.’ The project had been blighted by both the Kent climate and the garden’s north-facing position.

It might have taken more than 90 years, but National Trust staff and landscape designer Pearson — a multiple Chelsea gold medallist — have worked in partnership to bring to life the couple’s vision to life. They've added gritty topsoil, raised terracing and put in about 6,000 typically Mediterranean perennials, as well as numerous other plants. Now, the work is done, and the Delos garden is open to the public.

‘From towering thistles and zesty euphorbias to frilled Greek horehound and the bright flowers of the Cretan rockrose, the plant combinations here are endlessly beautiful, interesting and evocative,’ says Sissinghurst senior gardener Richard Gravett.

‘Delos is a part of the conversation around using water more wisely and how we might be gardening in a changing climate. In the recent heatwave, the plants in Delos have kept performing, whereas some other plants in the garden have shown signs of stress.’

See more at the Sissinghurst page on the National Trust's website.

A shorter version of this story originally appears in the print edition of Country Life of June 17, 2026. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

For five glorious days, London’s Garden Museum will become a verdant tapestry of early summer flowers, blooming profusely from every corner of the museum's medieval core to celebrate British Flowers Week. The takeover from June 17-21, 2026, comes courtesy of five leading floral designers whose large-scale installations will showcase the beauty and breadth of exclusively British-grown blooms, uniting florists, growers and flower-lovers in an event that has come to mark the start of the summer horticultural calendar. June is the zenith of the botanical year.

This year’s installations will take inspiration from the painter and plantsman Cedric Morris and his wild, bohemian garden at Benton End, which is also the subject of the Garden Museum’s summer exhibition, Benton End: A Paradise of Pollen and Paint.

The Garden Museum’s festivities align with the annual British Flowers Week campaign, founded by Flowers From the Farm, a pioneering trade association made up of more than 1,000 British growers that promotes a sustainable cut-flower industry.

British flowers account for only 20% of cut flowers sold in Britain, though this number is on the steady rise thanks to the efforts of British Flowers Week and the designers and consumers who champion seasonal blooms. As a country of gardeners, though, we can do better.

Buying imported flowers supports an industry with a large carbon footprint and completely unregulated chemical usage. Bouquets can carry up to 1,000 times more chemical concentrations than is allowed on food, increasing the likelihood of cancers and birth defects for growers, florists and their children. No self-respecting flower-lover would fill their vases with them, let alone dream of burying their faces in a bunch and inhaling deeply.

The Garden Museum’s upcoming efforts are a true celebration of British blooms, artfully arranged for your sensorial pleasure by five designers: botanical artist and researcher Cynthia Fan, Vervain Floral Design, naturalist and grower Nate Moss, Elder & Iris and dancer-turned-grower Andy Monaghan. Each installation celebrates the bounty of a British summer in its own way and take loose inspiration from an aspect of Cedric Morris’s work; the Vervain installation, for example, will be a chromatic painters palette of lush flowers, each hue filling corten steel bowls to mimic the texture of paint on a canvas. Long gone are the days of the crumbly green styrofoam bricks that once were omnipresent in all large scale flower arrangements — Vervain’s design has been grown by then and arranged using sustainable mechanics such as flower frogs.

Cynthia Fan’s museum installation will speak to the art and science of botanical hybridisation, magnifying plant structures that naturally occur in the wild, without human interference, in order for people to better appreciate them. By assembling felled logs from wild places around London, her work seeks to create a microcosm of seasonality and is a powerfully moving portrait of finding beauty in the subtleties of nature. In her hands, every branch and leaf is honoured as much as the blousiest bloom.

Nate Moss’s work is intrinsically linked to the ecology of native species and their exchange with pollinators, wildlife and the landscape as a whole, and rather than planting in advance, he lets the seasons dictate what is truly of the moment. His woodland glade installation, carpeted with own-grown and foraged wildflowers, will also feature moths and nightingales.

The tide is, thankfully, turning, and every year growers report dramatically increased demand for their wares. In the last five years, the value of imported stems has fallen by nearly 10%. Britain has spoken and we want more fragrant, wild and natural, vital and characterful, sun-kissed, rain-soaked, beautiful and seasonal flowers.

Visit the Garden Museum's website for more information.

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.

I love the Chelsea Flower Show and this year’s was a corker. I first went in 1974. It was free to members of the RHS (we were known as Fellows then) and I don’t remember any of the jostling crowds that people complain about now. Nor was it so micromanaged: journalists today are urged not to refer to the Chelsea Flower Show, but to the RHS Chelsea Flower Show. I am happy to confirm, therefore, that it is micromanaged by the RHS and not by Chelsea F. C.

There are, indeed, many different Chelseas, which means that there is something for every-one. First, there are the gardens that get all the media attention. Their purpose is to promote their sponsors and to further the careers of their designers. Television programmers love them, but they offer little to real gardeners. Second, there are the innumerable stalls along the Eastern Avenue, whose relevance to gardening is sometimes hard to deduce, although almost all are manned by pleasant people selling beautiful things that you end up buying because you had not realised how much you needed them.

Then there are the plants, because it is in the Great Pavilion that you find the best of all possible Chelseas. I made a beeline for the new roses, especially ‘Sir David Beckham’ from David Austin. I recounted the story of its life, from seedling to commercial launch, in Country Life last year. It’s unusual among Austin roses — quite like a Floribunda, with a hint of the Hybrid Musks, although its incurved petals form the shape of a Champagne goblet and also reminded me of ‘Mme Pierre Oger’, a fine Bourbon rose from the 1870s. The flowers are scented, medium-sized, mother-of-pearl in colour, fading quickly to pure white and held in large clusters. The slender pedicels sometimes bend a bit sideways, which I think will make a fine effect in the garden, although it is hard to know how it will perform as a cut rose.

It will make a good modern substitute for ever-popular ‘Iceberg’, first introduced in 1958 and now rather too susceptible to blackspot in our damp, cool climate. If the new rose fares as well as I hope, Sir David may eventually find that he is remembered less as a skilful footballer, but more as a fragrant English rose.

‘Sir David Beckham’ was Austin’s only new rose at Chelsea and I rather miss the prolific days of the 1980s when David Austin had established his house style — strongly scented, repeat-flowering roses with an old-fashioned shape. His business was expanding fast and we filled our gardens with his wonderful introductions: nine were launched in 1982, 14 in 1983, and 12 in 1984. The company believes its roses are constantly improving, so I heartily wish it would introduce many more.

Harkness Roses introduced no fewer than five new roses at Chelsea (and one disturbingly pink garden gnome), including a fine twin-tone bush rose ‘Youth Without Limits’ in support of the charity that runs the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award.

I will certainly buy its new ‘Special Granddaughter’, a splendid super-pink ground-cover rose with a vigour and sheer prettiness that show up the shortcomings of old favourites, such as ‘The Fairy’. Harkness also introduced two new Persica hybrids — Philip Harkness has been working with Rosa persica for many years and his father, Jack, pioneered Persica-breeding 50 years ago with double-flowered ‘Tigris’. Mr Harkness’s ‘Chelsea Sunset’ has really large, semi-double flowers with a thumping red splodge at the centre of the flower, an excellent follow-on from last year’s ‘Memories and Moments’. Both should make hearty garden plants.

Yet there is more to Chelsea than roses. The Flora of South Africa exhibit brought a spectacular display of native plants and all on a princely scale — fynbos proteas stacked up, row upon row, to a great height, contrasting with a little rock garden planted entirely with forms of Drakensberg rhodohypoxis. I gasped at its boldness and brilliance, certain that it was the most inspired and inspiring exhibit in the show. The judges agreed.

Burncoose Nurseries can be relied on for excellent unusual plants: I greatly admired its new pink Cornus kousa ‘Scarlet Fire’ and covet its rare Debregeasia edulis ‘Elite’. Also impressive were cosmos from National Collection holder Jonathan Sheppard in Lincolnshire, clivias from Hoyland in Yorkshire and Anemone coronaria forms from Little Cornish Glasshouse.

Kevock Garden Plants, the Edinburgh nursery that trains and employs disabled persons, had a thoughtful design of spring-flowering herbaceous plants. Raymond Evison brought three splendid new clematis cultivars from Guernsey: ‘Queen’s Nurse’, ‘Eliza’ and ‘Ithemba’. His 50 years of devoted hybridising have transformed the way we grow clematis.

Finally, Blue Diamond’s massive exhibit showed the new Hydrangea paniculata cultivar Groundbreaker Ruby, whose flowers turn from white to crimson. It’s a good plant, but which novelty plant was best of all? The judges plumped for a purple-leaved hosta called ‘Red Ninja’, but I fell for a runner-up, Hydrangea ‘Velvet Night Red Lace’, with dark-red leaves, almost black, that set off the rich pink lace-cap flowers. Soon, I hope, we shall all be growing it.

Charles Quest-Ritson edited the RHS Encyclopedia of Roses. His book Climbing Roses of the World (2003) describes more than 1,600 climbers and ramblers.

Seventy-five years ago, London was enjoying a celebratory summer. The dreary, bombed-out South Bank had been transformed into a gleaming display of colour and national innovation as the centrepiece of the 1951 Festival of Britain. Optimistic architecture and design reflected British resilience back to its people with a decided sense of hope about the future. On top of that, there was Battersea, a spirited homage to the city’s lost pleasure gardens where festivalgoers could suspend their disbelief and enjoy an atmosphere of fun.

Every day, boats ferried passengers three miles upriver between the two sites, resulting in upwards of eight million visits made to Battersea Pleasure Gardens that year. Country Life’s Christopher Hussey was full of praise, describing the gardens as ‘light-hearted, gay, charming and imaginative, without a lapse (that I could see) into the tawdry or merely funny, and with little that one can criticise as dull’. This was quite the result considering early opposition, political stalling and funding problems. Organisers had had only 15 months to turn 37 acres of parkland, most recently used as wartime Dig For Victory allotments, into a family-friendly dreamscape. The weather conspired against them, too; the first five months of 1951 were the wettest since 1815. A blizzard on January 1 was followed by a thaw, then rain. The park, which had been reclaimed from the riverbed, seemed to be slipping back into the Thames as the water level rose and bulldozers were half submerged in the mud.

It was all rather different to the picture festival director Sir Gerald Barry had been nurturing in his mind of old Vauxhall Gardens, where Georgian men and women strolled in their finery among tree-lined avenues, dotted with music pavilions, taverns and theatrical entertainments. James Gardner, the chief designer charged with urgently realising this leisurely vision, called it ‘the experience of a lifetime’. In 1949, he had travelled to Denmark in search of inspiration, soaking up the lessons of Copenhagen’s much-loved Tivoli Gardens, which had opened a century earlier just as its London predecessors at Vauxhall (present-day SE11) and Ranelagh (SW3) both neared their end.

Gardner chose not to rely on pastiche, but also agreed with Barry that too much modern abstract design would be off-putting to ordinary visitors. His ideas were eclectic. A toadstool maze was rejected, as was the avenue of revolving flowerbeds, but he got the go-ahead for a pneumatic giant, a mouse village, Punch and Judy theatre and a clock that would go ‘mechanically mad’ on the hour.

In his memoirs, Gardner recalled designing a kiosk a night to stay on schedule. Nonetheless, half his spending had to go on the infrastructure of ‘pumps, piers, paving and planting’. Unlike on the South Bank, commercial sponsorship was allowed to make up the shortfall, but manufacturing fun on a tight budget was hard work. The job required a lot of lateral thinking and the sort of novel construction techniques learnt during the war.

A central feature of the gardens was the dance pavilion, which looked like a circus big top with its red and yellow stripes, except that it rose to a much higher point and had glazed screens around its perimeter. At the time, it was the biggest single-pole tent the world had ever seen; the fabric covering it weighed 15 tons. From inside came the big-band sounds of the era, with dancers at London’s newest ballroom assured of non-stop enjoyment eight hours a day, six days a week from May to November.

When visitors had danced up a thirst there were plenty of options, including a tea shop, two snack bars, three pubs, a wine garden and six restaurants. Delays meant the Pleasure Gardens opened three weeks after the main Festival of Britain exhibition, but The Daily Herald kept its readers abreast of the treats in store for them. According to a list published on May 8, these would include old favourites, such as seafood and jellied eels, alongside the new American import of hamburgers. For the sweet of tooth there were doughnuts, waffles and ice cream, all sure to tempt a population still subject to sugar rationing.

For the duration of their visit, the brains behind Battersea wanted people to forget their daily privations and inhabit a colourful world of plenty. Along the edge of the Crescent Restaurant that enclosed the western end of the pleasure gardens, the architect Patrick Gwynne designed a series of bow-fronted balconies, their roofs decorated with rope in sinuous patterns that looked like icing piped onto the plump peaks of fancy cakes.

The restaurant itself was another ingenious tent structure that used external suspension cables to make the roof float above diners. Next to it was a booth where tumblers performed throughout the day. This eccentric mix was key to the Battersea charm and at the Riverside Theatre, Gardner commissioned another of his ‘unorthodox artists’ to create a space for Victorian music hall, revues and puppet shows. Guy Sheppard, who had made his name designing sets for the Ballet Rambert, produced a 450-seat auditorium out of tubular steel scaffolding and fibrous plaster panels, which could theoretically be dismantled and re-erected at the end of the Festival, but sadly never was.

The outside of this pretty Regency-style building was painted pale blue, a detail we know thanks to the very rare collection of colour slides taken by Waldo Lanchester, whose Lanchester Marionettes proved a popular draw at the Riverside Theatre. Lanchester’s images, now in the South Bank Centre Archive, make the Pleasure Gardens real in a way that black and white stills simply cannot.

They also describe a very different context to the Battersea we know today. In one view, looking across the lawn, a tall gasholder looms behind the multi-domed Garden Buffet and three towers of the not-yet complete Battersea Power Station rise up in the distance. This was still a London landscape of dingy streets, wharves and railway goods yards, which made the playfulness of the temporary architecture, set amid the bright floral scheme of master plantsman Russell Page, all the more striking.

The focal point of the garden’s plan was the Grand Vista, a collaboration between artist John Piper and cartoonist Osbert Lancaster in which they contrived to spectacularly blend follies, arcades and pavilions around canal-like sheets of water and fountains that were illuminated at night. During the twice-weekly firework displays, magical reflections shimmered across the surface of these pools. Hussey described the life-size figures modelled in wickerwork that topped the round end pavilions, as ‘looking like sketches by Henry Moore’. This sense of two-dimensional art being brought to life was most compellingly achieved in the Far Tottering and Oyster Creek Railway based on the Punch cartoons of Rowland Emett. Three quixotic engines named Nellie, Neptune and Wild Goose ran along 500 yards of track into gently absurdist stations; it was so popular that the miniature railway made back its costs within three weeks.

Another must-see attraction was the Guinness Clock. Graphic designers Jan Lewitt and George Him filled their 25ft high structure with a menagerie of animals from well-known Guinness advertising campaigns that sprang into manic motion thanks to multiple and elaborate mechanisms hidden inside. Yet more delights awaited in the six-acre funfair complete with the latest American thrill rides. Shops lined the Parade, there was a children’s zoo, an amphitheatre for family shows, a boating lake with ‘Cornish harbour scenery’ and a tree walk where visitors met dragons among the canopy of leaves. Country Life called it all ‘an unqualified success’.

The London correspondent for the West Sussex Gazette reported that, at Battersea Pleasure Gardens, ‘one is reminded of Alice in Wonderland, eastern fairy tales, and the Regency splendours of Brighton Royal Pavilion — all at once, and getting on quite joyously’. It was an ideal and much-appreciated complement to the more serious South Bank. Beloved of Londoners, the festival gardens long outlived their better-known counterpart, but deteriorated over time until there was little left.

In 2011, Wandsworth Council, with assistance from the Heritage Lottery Fund, restored some of the main landscape features and introduced new elements referencing those from 60 years earlier. In this anniversary year, it’s a lovely place to while away some time — but oh, how I wish I’d been there in 1951.

This feature originally appeared in the print edition of Country Life on May 6, 2026. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

You can see ginkgos, araucarias and wollemias in many English gardens, but what do they have in common, apart from difficult names? The answer is that they are all living fossils — truly ancient conifer species that ruled our planet long before flowering plants evolved. They existed before most of our insects, too — which is just as well, because they are pollinated only by the wind. Like all conifers, mature trees release vast quantities of pollen for gusts of wind to carry away in search of a grateful reception by other trees. What's more, ginkgos and araucarias are either male or female — a rare phenomenon in the tree kingdom. So some trees release the pollen and others say thank you for it. Wollemia, however, has the best of both sexes, because it produces both male and female cones.

The amazing thing about fossil trees is that they have survived so long. Most of their relatives in the group that botanists call the Gymnospermae were squeezed out by climate change and the rise of flowering trees, the so-called Angiosperms. But these fossil trees are tough; some ginkgos even survived the atom bomb that fell on Hiroshima. And now it is widely planted as a street tree, because it is disease-free and utterly imperturbable in the face of air pollution, quite apart from its pretty leaves and amazing autumn colour.

Triassic fossils prove that ginkgos date back about 250 million years. Nevertheless, they no longer exist in the wild, but owe their survival entirely to human intervention. Individual trees live for 1,000 years — some are reputed to be 4,000 years old — and they were widely planted in Taoist temples in Ancient China, as symbols of immortality, rather like yew trees in our own churchyards.

Why then have they died out in the wild? The usefulness of their wood is one explanation — humans destroy diversity. And there is another reason, which is that gingkos ignored the maxim 'diversify or die'. The usual aftermath of a catastrophic event such as sudden climate change or an asteroid impact is to speed up evolution. Ginkgos should have evolved and developed new forms and species that could cope with change, but they didn't. Or perhaps they did, because it may be that Ginkgo biloba is the last survivor precisely because it was able to evolve constantly.

However, the trees that were preserved in Chinese temples are all identical, with little or no variation among them. And since they were first taken into cultivation in Europe in the 18th century, a host of new variations have turned up. No one knows why. There are more than 320 different cultivars in our National Collection in Worcestershire. Curious ginkgophiles should contact Plant Heritage to know more.

Ginkgos hold one more mystery. Their fruits have a disgusting smell of putrefaction, which combines all the most revolting odours you can think of. And they are thought to be carcinogenic. Then why are the nuts a valued food ingredient in several East Asian countries? Because they taste delicious.

Araucarias are the monkey-puzzle trees and just as prehistoric as ginkgos, dating back at least 175 million years, but they have diversified over the millennia so that there are still 20 species in the wild. Fourteen are unique to just one island, New Caledonia, famous as one of the world's diversity hotspots. Some botanists think that the proliferation of monkey-puzzle species, all on one tropical island smaller in area than Wales, could only be the result of a burst of radiation about 5 million years ago, but they are at a loss to explain how this might have occurred.

Best known to us, of course, is the original monkey puzzle Araucaria araucana from Chile, first introduced to England in 1795 by a botanist called Archibald Menzies, who travelled round the world with the explorer ship HMS Discovery. When the Spanish governor of Chile, an Irishman with the glorious name of Ambrosio Bernardo O'Higgins y O'Higgins, invited the ship's officers to dine with him, they were served a dish of large nuts for dessert. Menzies slipped a handful into his pocket, germinated them on the voyage home and presented five saplings to Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.

The seeds of a monkey puzzle are not notably large — about the size of an almond — but the cone that carries them has more than 200 seeds and drops heavily off the tree when it is ripe. The largest of all monkey puzzle cones belongs to the bunya pine, Araucaria bidwellii from Queensland in Australia. It has the size and shape of a rugby ball or a large pineapple, weighs up to 20lbs and may fall from a height of 70ft. Best avoided.

There was great excitement in the 1940s when Chinese botanists discovered a prehistoric tree that was known to palaeobotanists as Metasequoia glyptostroboides. Palaeobotanists are students of extinct plants that existed millions of years ago — they hope, by working with fossils, to develop a better understanding of evolution.

The popular name for metasequoias is dawn redwood because they resemble the redwoods of California, but pre-date their evolution. In 1947, American botanists financed an expedition to collect metasequoia seed, which was shared between Chinese, American and European botanic gardens, including Kew and Edinburgh. Metasequoia glyptostroboides has proved very amenable to cultivation and is now available from garden centres all over the world. The city of Pizhou in the Chinese province of Jiangsu has planted 5 million metasequoias as street trees, including the longest avenue in the world — nearly 30 miles, thickly lined with metasequoias on both sides.

The wollemia pine — Wollemia nobilis — is the latest fossil tree to have been discovered, as recently as 1994. It exists as just one wild population of about 80 trees in a ravine less than 100 miles north-west of Sydney, Australia. Actually, no wollemia fossils have ever been found, but they are thought to have evolved about the same time as the monkey puzzles.

Like all fossil trees, however, wollemias have proved easy to grow in a great number of climates and soils all over the world. It seems that fossil trees are great survivors so that, once discovered and cosseted in cultivation, they fare very well. It has no close relations — there is only one species of wollemia — so how did it survive so long, and in just one very small area? No-one knows. Forty million years ago, Australia was warm, humid and thickly forested. Now, by contrast, it is hot, dry and slowly turning into a desert — but wollemia has adapted to the change. And, over the last million years or so, Australia has on several occasions suffered extensive glaciation, just as we did during the European ice ages. But wollemia has survived and now you see it as an ornamental tree in a wide range of climates all over the world.

One of the big changes in the world's flora followed from the evolution of flowering plants. The earliest flowering trees to evolve — the ancestors of magnolias — date back nearly 100 million years and could not rely on wind to disperse their pollen. Some other creature, usually an insect, had to be drawn to their flowers and transfer the pollen to another so that seeds could be set. Bees did not evolve until about 50 million years ago — their ancestors were predatory wasps who hunted other insects, whereas bees feed on nectar and pollen and have pollen baskets on their legs to carry supplies back to their young.

How then were magnolias and other flowering plants pollinated before bees evolved? The answer is that beetles are attracted to the protein-rich pollen and spread it from tree to tree. They still do so today. Bees do not bother with magnolias, but the flowers continue to attract beetles. Magnolias have large, thick petals (known as tepals) that are strong enough to stand up to large insects. And sometimes they close their flowers to trap the beetles inside for a fruitful overnight experience of pollen-shedding.

Many species of water lilies — another prehistoric plant — also seek beetles to pollinate them, drawing them deep into sweet, sticky nectar to relieve them of the pollen they carry. They, too, close their flowers at night and, once fertilised, plunge their flowers beneath the surface of the water, whether or not the insects have been able to escape. Other plants are pollinated by bats, and even lizards. And the common harvest mouse, searching for pollen and nectar, will climb into tulip flowers, gorge itself and fall asleep inside after feeding.

These ancient trees — some of the oldest plants in the world — survived so much climate change, as well as catastrophes such as the mass extinction that killed off the dinosaurs (as well as three quarters of all living species) 69 million years ago, because they produce a very large number of seeds. Plus, mass extinctions are surprisingly good for evolution. And, despite everything you read about mankind's destruction of the natural world, it is quite possible that further fossil trees remain to be discovered somewhere in almost every corner of the world.

At the check-out of most garden centres in France and Italy, alongside the chocolate bars and cheap trinkets, are piles of almanacs. These are not the almanacs we are familiar with in Britain that claim to predict the winner of the Grand National or offer relationship advice based on your astrological sign. The almanacs that French and Italian gardeners buy give a detailed schedule of the phases of the moon each day of the year, with advice on the work to do that day in the garden.

In many parts of Europe, gardening is guided by the lunar cycle. Often called moon gardening or lunar gardening, it is a traditional practice followed by generations of gardeners. Here in Britain, it has usually been seen as a preserve of eccentrics. Recently, however, a new generation of our gardeners, many seeking a stronger link to the natural world, has become interested in moon gardening.

The principle belief of the system is that the moon’s gravitational pull affects all water on Earth, not only tides, but also the water within the soil and the sap in plants and that the changing strength in moonlight affects plant growth.

The practice can be broken down to a simple rule of thumb: a waxing moon, when energy and sap are rising, is the time to sow, transplant and take cuttings of leafy and fruiting plants that grow above the ground; whereas a waning moon, when the sap is low, favours root crops, bulb planting and pruning. The period between the last quarter of a moon through to a new moon is considered to be a dormant period when no planting or sowing should happen. This is, however, a propitious time for pruning and for harvesting crops such as potatoes, apples and squash that will be stored through the winter. Within these broad principles, there are specific days when particular tasks are either proscribed or encouraged.

A lot of my vegetable-gardening know-how was acquired from a French neighbour, whose beautifully planted and astonishingly productive potager I tried to emulate. Whenever Madame Boyer sowed, transplanted, pruned or harvested, so, more or less, did I. All her life (she continued to garden until the age of 99), her work was guided by the cycles of the moon. She had no need to follow an almanac, but observed the state of the moon and understood, from knowledge learned from her parents and grandparents.

Like, I suspect, most gardeners, I am far too busy (and ill disciplined) to follow such a rigid timetable. Jobs get done when I have the time and when the weather is clement, which may explain why my vegetable garden was never, nor ever will be, as magnificent as Boyer’s. Each year, we both cut hazel wands ready for the job of supporting beans and staking dahlias. One spring, hers were stout and strong, mine were weak and fragile. Her explanation was that I had cut the hazel at the wrong time: do it when the moon is low and there will be no sap in the poles to attract insects that will munch through the wood. I do not know if that is the explanation for the failure, but, ever since, I check the moon before coppicing hazel that I want to use in the garden. Just in case.

Science has not been kind to this practice and there is no robust, repeatable study or body of evidence proving that following the rules of lunar planting reliably changes yield, taste or plant health. The moon does, of course, influence large bodies of water, but, researchers argue, those forces are too weak at the scale of soil moisture and plant cells to explain the claimed gardening outcomes in a consistent, reproducible way.

Trying to calculate the material advantages of moon gardening is perhaps, however, missing the point. For many gardeners who garden following the cycles of the moon, the benefits are not measurable in increased yields or sturdier plants. Feeling part of a centuries-old gardening tradition that provides a rhythm to the year and requires careful observation of the world around is, in itself, rewarding. Even the most sceptical of us can appreciate that, in an increasingly alienating world, anything that helps us appreciate the joys of the changing seasons and the pleasures of the natural world is welcome.

This feature originally appeared in the April 29, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

When applying for planning permission for more solar panels here last year, the eco-adviser commented that my suggestion of a native hedgerow screen around them would not especially up the ‘biodiversity net gain’ because we would be keeping it at about my height (5ft 7in).

I was not sure I followed the logic: stock-proof hedges, after all, are kept at about this height and are famously biodiverse and mine would be wild and willowy. My interest was piqued enough, however, to sleuth some labour-saving alternatives that would form a magnetic ribbon of pollinator lures and a nesting heaven, yet never cast a shadow on one precious iota of sun-given power.

A solar array is expensive and expansive, but, luckily, we have a small square field we can use. Formerly littered with modern agricultural buildings, it has been cleared and compacted into a hard wasteland, rubble-ridden acres that have developed their own eco-system of poor grass, grasshoppers and voles. We have been ‘rounding’ them at the edges with hedgerow and copse planting, but more would be needed.

My thoughts turned to quick-growing annuals — good for birds. Perhaps I should go for game crop, that mixture of sunflowers, millet, quinoa, niger seed — exotically named Guizotia abyssinica — oats and teasel (a very west London menu), which you see in pheasant country. Mr B stipulated ‘no maize’, to avoid an onslaught of rats, badgers and deer, but I have always been rather fascinated by game crops. The planting of woods and copses with a shrubby understorey created the pentimento of woods and fields we know and love. Game and hunting have had a huge hand in what we think of as ‘wild’ countryside, with cover varied in height and density, as opposed to monumental monotonous agri-farming. Yet annuals would require too much work and the look would be too outlandish and incongruous here in the wet Cheddar lands.

Quick-growing perennials were my next thought. Miscanthus sinensis, for instance, which is tolerant of many hard conditions and great for wildlife to nest and hide in, offering perennial cover. Willows and cornus for coppicing would suck up any standing water, but this look was too managed and hard work.

We turned back to the hedgerow idea and searched for different ingredients for low-level, wildlife-friendly, fruitful strips of semi-permaculture. Hedgy things woven together with fruit-bearing Rosaceae; brambles, berries, dog-like roses and perhaps some damsons and quinces, bramleys even; an edible hedgible. The body of this would need to be shrubby multi-stems — perhaps a slow-growing holly, such as Ilex aquifolium ‘J.C. van Tol’. Common lilac in hedgerows gets too tall, but the Persian lilac is much smaller. Syringa meyeri ‘Palibin’, S. pubescens subsp. microphylla ‘Superba’ and S. x josiflexa ‘Bellicent’, for example.

Then species roses in abundance, adding thorniness and hips for the birds, from the apple-scented eglantine Rosa rubiginosa to Ayrshire roses, even the odd cultivar such as repeat-flowering Friendship of Strangers and the aptly named low-level Grouse. The adorable, scented, yellow currant ‘Gwen’s Buffalo’ would stay the right size. I could add currants (‘Rovada’ and ‘White Versailles’, royal and ancient) plus the recommended robust blackcurrants ‘Ben Connan’, ‘Ben Hope’ and ’Ben Sarek’, all bred for disease resistance, compact habit and heavy cropping with minimal intervention. Gooseberries, which I love to make into the simplest of fools, make brilliant nesting cover — Ribes uvacrispa ‘Invicta’ is all it purports to be.

For weaving and binding this basket, I would add honeysuckle — straight Lonicera periclymenum — on the shady side (with the currants, which sulk in the sun) and Rubus, the bramble family, too, from the enchanting white-flowered R. ‘Benenden’ to blackberry ‘Black Butte’ and the Japanese wineberry, R. phoenicolasius. The Japanese thought led me back to quinces — white-flowered ‘Jet Trail’, the perfect addition to the apple and blackberry pie. The very idea of wild raspberries means the likes of ‘Autumn Bliss’ and ‘Glen Ample’ must go into the mix, again on the shady side. Many of these are better cooked and excellent for sauces and souffles.

The hedge was becoming a Queen of Puddings, a veritable pie, which could have its uses in all sorts of places — not only the solar screen. Yet the adage about too many cooks is true, too, of ingredients and I will need to edit mine: nobody wants their screening to look like an abandoned municipal car park. As ever, the rule is simplicity — to choose species ideally and reduce the number of varieties; boldness in everything.

Gently flowing water invigorated more show gardens than usual this year at Chelsea, from the slenderest of rills to shallow, stepped pools, the prevailing mood being calm and tranquil.

Also noticeable in the gardens were exceptionally varied trees. They ranged from substantial hawthorns in full blossom to ancient, espaliered pears and potted Persian ironwoods. There were pines in unusual abundance, size and form, convincingly despondent ‘weeping cedars’ and the contrastingly cheerful acers of Japan, in their coats of many colours.

The ‘woodland edge’ maintains its might in 2026. I did think we had reached ‘peak woodland’ a couple of years ago, but apparently not. Romantic, pretty and fashionably wild, intentionally sylvan designs took away top awards for the Campaign to Protect Rural England (CPRE), Tate Britain and the Woodland Trust.

Meanwhile, in the Great Pavilion, luscious leaves had their moment: The Sienna Hosta nursery received the coveted President’s Choice award and the unique new Hosta ‘Red Ninja’, its foliage streaked with burgundy, was anointed the Plant of the Year.

The Tate Britain Garden

Gold Medal

A forest of art: Barbara Hepworth’s bronze Bicentric Form (1949) sits amid Tom Stuart-Smith’s Chelsea scaled-down sample of the Clore Garden for Tate Britain, due to open in 2027 on its 1½-acre site at Millbank. Its bold, naturalistic planting includes herbaceous euphorbias, the tractor-seat plant Ligularia reniformis, sago palms, Cycas revoluta and sparkles of white Libertia grandiflora. Slender water rills cut through the paving.

Tokonama Garden–Sanumaya No Niwa

Silver-gilt Medal

Last year’s Best in Show winner Kazayuki Ishihara presented yet another masterpiece. The popular Japanese designer’s trademark landscapes of hefty rocks, mosses, tumbling waters, acers in varied hues and characterful, crumpled pines have earned a loyal following — and has ‘gravel gardening’ ever been as perfectly presented? I thought a silver-gilt was a little harsh, it seemed to me to be his best yet.

The Curious Garden

Presented by Frances Tophill for the RHS and The King’s Foundation, this pleasant muddle of flowers and edibles was planted around an oak building containing produce gleaned from the garden, including dyes, jams and dried herbs. As the media fixated on its several garden gnomes, gardeners were more interested in the crimson-flowered broad beans, planted for their beautiful blooms among Rosa ‘The King’s Rose’.

The Campaign to Protect Rural England Garden: On the Edge

Gold Medal, Garden of the Year

Seemingly plucked from the countryside and brought to the show by Sarah Eberle, the garden was planted with exquisite detail in its natural flora, associated with the woodland edge. Deftly presented with soft, earthen paths, its genius moment lay in the prostrate, timber form of a gigantic, sleeping ‘Gaia’, or Mother Nature, made by a chainsaw artist, the appropriately named Chris Wood.

Addelshaw Goddard: Flourish in the City

Gold Medal

Boulder dash: attention to detail in its attractive, gurgling water features and careful planting aimed at water conservation produced a unified concept by Joe and Laura Carey. Visitors appreciated its ‘user friendliness’ as a potential mild-climate, small city garden in which it would be delightful to relax or potter. Planting included poppies, verbascums, cistuses, salvias, irises and woolly leaved Ballota pseudodictamnus.

The Eden Project: Bring Me Sunshine Garden

Silver-gilt Medal

This interesting, complex garden, by Harry Holding and Alex Michaelis, was a crowd pleaser. Its central terrace and canopy are part of the permanent structure due to be relocated to a new Eden Project, at Morecambe Bay in Lancashire. The structure looks quite space age, but is modelled on the form of a bivalve sea shell. Luminous yellow Baptisia ‘Lemon Meringue’ brought sunshine in all weathers.

Flood Re: Contain the Rain Garden

Gold Medal and Best Container Garden

Drawing upon ancient Persian design, this was the most glamorous container garden I have seen at Chelsea since the category was launched some years ago. Within a tiny space, John Howlett captured the ambience of a private courtyard at an elegant Mediterranean villa or high-end hotel. Its secret was the gathering of contrasting foliages in interlocking, large containers, set off by the drama of tall, Parrotia persica trees. The copper/verdigris finishes and contrasting pale limestone and render brought calmness and unity to the bold ensemble.

The Killik & Co ‘A Seed in Time’ Garden

Gold Medal

‘Save for a rainy day’ was the subtitle for this cleverly organised garden by Baz Grainger, using its imposing, rectangular structures to gather rain and redirect it to a central wetland area, crossed through with stepping stones. Intended for family enjoyment, its planting was engagingly mixed, with fruiting trees such as big, old, espaliered pears and self-sowing flowers, such as foxgloves and primulas. The prettiness of the planting and lush greenery nicely counterpointed the hard, modern lines of the structures.

Trussell’s Together Garden

Gold Medal

Under a Constable sky and overlooked by the roof dormers and soaring chimney stacks of the Royal Hospital, this garden was laden with declared messages about ‘togetherness’, ‘connection’ and ‘communities holding each other up’ related to the ambitions of its sponsor. That is all well and good, but does it succeed also as a garden? Happily, this one did and it drew the visitor to peruse its central area of sociable seating, contained within an inventive and striking timber structure, all of which contributed to Rob Hardy receiving the Best Construction Award.

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

Ninety-nine years ago, Country Life’s final edition of 1927 contained an article, with photographs by renowned photographer Geoffrey Roland Ballance, on the Palace and Gardens of the Prince of Monaco.

Ballance was born in London’s heavily-polluted Hackney, in 1874, and caught tuberculosis, the debilitating lung infection, in his early twenties. He moved to St Moritz, Switzerland, to convalesce in the clear, mountain air. There, the keen outdoorsman took up the fairly-new, patience-requiring art form of photography, and went about mastering the expensive, but ethereal platinum print process.

Country Life commissioned Ballance on numerous occasions and shared his beautifully composed and exposed photographic views of European architecture, flora and fauna to readers in the UK.

Ballance's Monaco work was no exception, and, granted permission to photograph inside the palace by Louis II, Prince of Monaco (who, incidentally, was the prince who oversaw the inaugural Formula 1 Monaco Grand Prix in 1929), it was the cornerstone of this magazine’s Houses & Gardens of the Riviera collection.

For this collection, Ballance photographed the Palace of Monaco, its State Apartments, gardens and breathtaking, panoramic views. He later returned to the Principality in 1929 to capture the Prince’s astonishing and extensive succulent collection, nestled high above the rock-clinging palace.

Ballance died young, aged just 60, but some of the beautiful work he left behind lives on in the Country Life Archive — a selection of which we've reproduced below.

The Country Life Image Archive contains more than 150,000 images documenting British culture and heritage, from 1897 to the present day. To search and purchase images directly from the Image Archive, please register here.