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.

Fish are depicted in some of the earliest cave paintings and feature in Grecian and Roman friezes, floor mosaics and on terracotta vases. Some of the most aesthetically beautiful and scientifically useful of all fish pictures, however, are those that appear on paper, generally published in books from the middle of the 16th century.

Two of the first illustrated fish books were by Frenchmen: Pierre Belon in 1553 and Guillaume Rondelet a year later. These feature small woodcut engravings of several hundred fish and other aquatic creatures, alongside occasional imaginary ‘monsters’; Belon is infamous for his ‘sea monk’.

The first ever coloured book of fish by the French émigré book dealer (and alleged spy) Louis Renard, Poissons ecrivisses et crabes (1719), features a less-than-glamorous picture of a mermaid among its depictions of multi-hued tropical fish from Indonesian waters. All these works were produced with scientific intent, but undoubtedly will have also served as valued library pieces for wealthy collectors.

Almost contemporary with Belon and Rondelet was the Italian Ippolito Salviani, who was a doctor with close links to senior figures in Rome, including several successive popes. He was ahead of his time using the more delicate copper engraving technique and he included no monsters in his line up of almost 100 fish and some cephalopods. His exquisite, folio-sized images are considered by many — including the most celebrated ichthyologist of all time, Georges Cuvier — to be the most scientifically accurate, not only of that period, but for several centuries hence.

These early engravings by Belon, Rondelet and Salviani were issued uncoloured, although many have subsequently been coloured to make them more attractive for the market. It is hard to believe that such wonderful engravings on ancient, watermarked paper have survived more than 450 years and yet can still be purchased as individual prints, extracted from loose or distressed copies of these books, for as little as tens of pounds from print dealers. They even occasionally pop up on eBay.

The first notable illustrated fish publication to appear in Britain was Historia Piscium, written by renowned Cambridge scholars Francis Willughby and John Ray in an era of enthusiastic natural-history collection and scientific drive. This book almost bankrupted the Royal Society in London, which published it at such great expense in 1686 that it couldn’t afford to publish Isaac Newton’s Principia, with his theories about gravity, the following year.

Historia Piscium was also issued uncoloured, but, from the mid to late 1700s, a crop of very fine coloured books focusing on British fish was published. One of the loveliest of these is by the Anglo-Irish naturalist Edward Donovan, The Natural History of British Fishes (1806). He took considerable efforts to paint his subjects ‘in the highest state of perfection, and while they yet glowed with the vivid hues of life’. His book featured common species, such as mackerel and cod, as well as rare visitors, including the opah. Remarkably, it received poor reviews at the time, although it is highly sought after nowadays.

Some of the most admired of all fish prints are by the German Marcus Elieser Bloch, from his book Naturgeschichte der Fische (1782). The bold copper engravings were handcoloured, often with specks of metallic paint and egg white to mimic the iridescence of a freshly caught fish, and all are highly collectible. I bought my first Blochs back in the 1990s for £50 a piece; now, they start at three or four times that price.

If game fish, trout and salmon are your thing, then two monographs and the engravings within will appeal most to you. Both were published in 1839 and are very rare. One is by Sir William Jardine, most famous for his mini Naturalist’s Library, but his British Salmonidae is massive — described as elephant folio— a nd has only 12 beautiful plates.

Perhaps more delicate and sumptuous still, although smaller, are the engravings by Louis Agassiz in his Histoire Naturelle des Poisons, completed before he decamped from Switzerland to almost single-handedly establish natural history as a discipline in the USA.

For the American market — and specifically targeted at anglers — two more folios of fish prints merit high praise. Both are later and no longer engravings, but rather chromolithographs produced from originals painted on stone. Samuel Kilbourne’s Game Fishes of the United States (1879) is large format (not quite elephant folio) and captures fish in their natural habitat, whereas Sherman Denton’s images for the U.S. Fisheries Report (1895) are smaller format, yet, I think, still present some of the most sublime ichthyological portraits ever.

I’ve been collecting prints of fish for nearly 40 years. It used to be a case of visiting antique-print dealers and fairs in the UK; further afield, Berlin, Amsterdam and Paris remain brilliant places to pick up beautiful examples at bargain prices. Today, it isn’t strictly necessary to venture out, as many dealers are on the internet and one of my favourite websites is Rare Fish & Marine Life Prints. Be warned, however, that adding to your haul can become extremely addictive.

Paul Martin is professor of cell biology at the University of Bristol.

This feature originally appeared in the July 8, 2026, issue 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 Earl of Kerry, 11th-generation custodian of Bowood, holds a framed certificate in the Diocletian Wing. The text begins: ‘During the Great War of 1914–1919 this building was maintained as a hospital for British sick and wounded.’

Its ornamented borders feature the arms and floral emblems of England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland and the Dominions, as well as the initials of the unidentified artist ‘F. R.’.

Those words commemorate an extraordinary time in the house's history. In the First World War, this space was transformed into an Auxiliary Red Cross Hospital under the aegis of Maud, 5th Marchioness of Lansdowne, whose youngest son was killed at Ypres in October 1914.

A senior member of the Red Cross before the conflict, she was instrumental in establishing 3,000 auxiliary hospitals in houses across Britain. All received identical certificates.

Bowood accommodated 54 convalescing soldiers at any one time, served by 20 Voluntary Aid Detachment nurses, with the Lansdowne family and household staff. Dozens of other country houses across Britain served as wartime hospitals and convalescent homes, including Brighton's Royal Pavilion, Great Dixter and Highclere Castle. Yet if it weren't for the example of Bowood, how many of those would have played the same role?

‘This initiative was not only a turning point in Maud’s life, but in the history of country houses generally,’ explains Lord Kerry.

‘It catalysed social change. By opening Bowood’s doors to troops and breaking down class barriers, it became a beacon of recovery.

'Today, this tradition lives on, with visitor support ensuring Bowood’s continued preservation.’

Visit Bowood's website to find out more.

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

Dogs once knew their place, usually a back room furnished with a plastic ‘bed’, which bore the marks (and odour) of various generations of four-legged forebears. Roaming rights might well have been extended to the kitchen, but not to any of the more formal rooms of the house — and never upstairs.

As their place in the hierarchy of a house has risen from faithful and obedient servant to — in some cases — kingpin, the way houses are decorated has evolved accordingly.

Floor surfaces are chief among them; although terracotta, tile, natural stone and engineered-wood floors can cope, carpet, whether it’s loop-pile wool or woven seagrass, is unsuitable for the daily post-walk muzzle dives — and worse.

Enter the increasingly popular option of faux sisal, which offers the aesthetic warmth of natural fibres, but with the durability, waterproof and stain-resistant qualities of man-made materials. ‘It resists damage from scratchy claws, wet dogs drying themselves and muddy paws and — in most cases— c an be bleach cleaned,’ explains Barney Green, founder of Unnatural Flooring, one of the first to pioneer this method of floor covering. ‘A bonus is that the synthetic yarn we use doesn’t attract or accommodate fleas, pests or textile moths and all our fitted flooring can be easily wet cleaned if necessary.’

Increasingly, dogs in this country, where there is an estimated population of 13.5 million (the highest in Europe), are not content to slumber on the floor; interior designers are discovering that the dogs and their needs are just as important as those of the client themselves.

Witness the fact that elevated interpretations of indoor dog kennels and dog beds have become regular features at WOW!house held each summer at the Design Centre, Chelsea Harbour in London. This year, Henri Fitzwilliam-Lay’s bedroom suite for Misia had a stylish dog bed created by Porta Romana to sit within her Art Deco-inspired scheme. Meanwhile, in Sara Cosgrove’s serene celadon morning room with Phillip Jeffries, a dog kennel sits next to a sofa upholstered in silk. Two words spring to mind: good luck.

To address the inevitable damage, the solution is to embrace a fabric that can withstand such treatment, says interior designer Rebecca Hughes. ‘Engineered for durability, high-performance textiles are designed to withstand everyday wear and tear and resist stains and moisture,’ she says. ‘Better still, many are fully washable, making it easy to deal with muddy paws, pet hair and the occasional spill.’

Advanced synthetic materials, such as solution-dyed acrylic and high-tech manufacturing processes introduced in recent years, have raised these fabrics from stiff and scratchy to soft and barely distinguishable from any natural alternative. ‘They evolved so much that most people would never know they were originally designed for outdoor use,’ believes Gareth Marc of Zimmer + Rohde. ‘You get all the practical benefits without sacrificing comfort or style.’

A further flourish comes in the form of additional plumbing facilities installed just for dogs. The post-muddy-walk hose-down using an outside tap that might have sufficed for generations has been upgraded to a dedicated indoor dog-washing area. Usually located in a utility or boot room and supplied with hot and cold water, these take the form of specially designed dog showers or generously sized sinks. Some have low-level pot-filler taps to keep the dog bowl topped up with fresh water.

Last year, Emma Sims-Hilditch demonstrated how to do it with style at her WOW!house Courtyard Room. ‘It reflects a broader shift towards designing spaces that cater to every member of the household, pets included,’ says studio lead Christina Bull.

This feature originally appeared in the July 22, 2026, issue 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.

Standing up for what you believe in can come at a high price — the highest price. It's a lesson that William Tyndale learned in October 1536, when he was strangled to death, and his body then burnt at the stake. Even that was supposedly a mercy for a man found guilty of heresy: the fact that he was strangled before being burnt was a concession to his stature as a scholar.

Tyndale's crime was becoming a major figure at the vanguard of the Reformation in England. His New Testament, the first complete translation in English, proved hugely influential in both religious and literary terms. Much of it can still be seen today: scholars have estimated that 84% of the King James Bible was taken from Tyndale's work.

Translating the bible had long been a risky pastime in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, but Tyndale might have survived if he'd left it at that. Instead, his scholarship picked at the open sores of the Reformation, enraging first the Catholic Church — by supporting Henry VIII's right to be head of the church in England — and then, two year later, infuriating Henry VIII himself by arguing against the King's proposed divorce from Catherine of Aragon.

Tyndale judged Henry to be the more dangerous, and fled to the Continent — only to be arrested in 1535 by imperial officers of the Holy Roman Empire. He was imprisoned for over a year in Vilvoorde Castle, near Antwerp in modern-day Belgium, convicted of publishing a translation of the Bible without church approval, and executed as a heretic on October 6, 1536.

Four centuries later, Willie Hartley Russell stands in the pulpit that originally came from St Adeline’s Church in Little Sodbury, Gloucestershire, where Tyndale began his ecclesiastical career after leaving Cambridge. Open in front of Hartley Russell is a copy of Tyndale’s translation of the New Testament, first published in Worms, Germany in 1525.

Tyndale was briefly a tutor to the children of Sir John and Lady Walsh at Little Sodbury Manor and, by tradition, preached from this pulpit. It was transferred to the manor house — a former home of the Hartley Russell family — when St Adeline’s was rebuilt in 1849 and then to Bucklebury House in about 1906.

On the table is a bust of Benjamin Franklin, who collaborated on his own abridgement of the Book of Common Prayer in 1773, aiming — in the spirit of Tyndale — to make its text more usable for ordinary people.

Hartley Russell as another connection to one of the men who shaped the modern world: he is a descendant of David Hartley, who corresponded with Franklin, and was a rare voice during the American Revolutionary War as a British MP sitting in Westminster who called for an end to hostilities, and supported the rights of the colonists.

As well as pushing for conciliation, Hartley also proposed the abolition of the slave trade in 1776. As a representative of the British government, he was a signatory of the Treaty of Paris on September 3, 1783, which recognised the independence of the United States.

Find out more about Bucklebury House and estate at their website.

Tucked away in a pretty Nottinghamshire village, this house was built by a lacemaker who helped to transform Nottingham’s city centre into the global hub of the trade in the 19th century.

The owner approached Emma Wraithmell of deVOL to help create a kitchen that reflected that history. ‘She was adamant that it was about restoring, rather than renovating the space and that would start with using unfitted furniture,’ explains the designer.

During preparation work, an old floor covering was removed to reveal the original Victorian red-and-blue quarry tiles that were once the standard choice for kitchens, sculleries and entrance halls. They informed the colour of the cabinets, which are from deVOL’s Shaker-inspired range and painted in the company’s Refectory Red with worktops in black granite. These are set against lime-washed walls in a warm burnt sienna to give a raw and unfinished feel. ‘The idea was to make it look as if this kitchen could’ve been there for decades,’ says Wraithmell.

A two-oven Aga stands in the chimney breast, behind which is a splashback made in tiles from the company’s Lace Market Tiles in sepia. By the window is a double sink with taps in aged brass. The lace café curtain is another nod to the past; it was sourced by the owner. A plate rack from the company’s Heirloom range, also painted in Refectory Red, displays collections of plates. In the centre of the room is a Victorian prep table, which was also the owner’s discovery.

The Real Shaker Kitchen by deVOL starts from £12,000.

This feature originally appeared in the July 15, 2026, issue 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.

Casa Bonavita is very much a family affair — a hotel that feels like a home, but that you wouldn’t dare to call ‘a home from home’ — unless you happen to live in an immaculately decorated, 18th century Maltese palazzo.

The owners are Suzanne and Christopher Sharp, founders of The Rug Company, and before Bonavita opened as a hotel, it operated as their occasional home. Their daughter Sophie's pottery and son Jamie's antiques fill the space.

There were a myriad things to consider when they set about turning a home into a hotel, including planning for everyone taking a shower simultaneously. However, the couple’s flair for interior design and decor has always been innate. ‘Suzanne has the ability to create interiors which are both inspiring and comfortable, and there were constant discussions about… how to get the balance between functionality and design,’ says Christopher. Even when Bonavita is fully booked, there are quiet corners to escape to — with an expertly mixed negroni.

A huge number of craftspeople and artists were involved in the six-year project, but a consistent vision and the couple’s collection of fabrics, furniture, paintings and lighting, collected over the years, helped pull everything together. ‘In many ways, Casa Bonavita is an accumulation of a lifetime of visual memories, brought together to create a place that feels familiar, lived-in and deeply personal,’ says Christopher.

Textiles and artisanal works sourced from throughout the Mediterranean are complemented by antique treasures including a Genoese cabinet, packed with ceramics. One of the dining room’s walls is hung with joyfully-hued art, while a botanical mural by Italian artists Alfonso Orombelli and Luna Aulehla Greppi covers the other.

The Valletta Bar’s walls have not been left behind and are enveloped in a bespoke, hand-painted vista of 17th-century Valletta, by de Gournay. The kitchen is tiled in Sicilian slabs and the grand entrance hall boasts a frescoed ceiling.

The seven bedrooms and suites in the original house (Suzanne and Christopher bought it 15 years ago before purchasing the neighbouring house and land) share high ceilings, but are all unique in design. Suite 5 is located in the former chapel and comes with a private terrace and a statement bathroom featuring a domed ceiling and marble bath. Suite 4’s bathroom is equally impressive with its floral fresco framing the bathtub.

There are five further bedrooms and suites in the Dower House, which can be booked on an exclusive-use basis. This newly built structure fits seamlessly with the existing buildings, accessed via the verdant garden. The building's courtyard centrepiece is a swimming pool atop a subterranean spa. There are more rooms in the former stables and a soon-to-open, stand-alone suite (The Folly) whose lucky guests will be able to brag about their private garden, plunge pool and one-of-kind oval-shaped bedroom.

The ceramics — from monogrammed red dinnerware to statement lamps and urns bursting with fresh flowers — are all painstakingly made, 500 metres away at Villa Bologna, a historic estate that has been home to a pottery studio since 1920.

Back in 2020, Sophie took over the running of the studio and reinstated archival designs. Each piece has a charming story behind it, but few can beat her own tale of growing up with Villa Bologna ceramics filling her home and one day not only owning the business, but supplying her parent’s hotel in the same village.

Art bleeds into the outdoor spaces of Casa Bonavita, too. Between the honey-hued buildings and the palm-and-bougainvillea-framed pool, a vast garden unfurls, studded with ancient columns, statues and fountains.

Christopher nurtured the garden himself: ‘The vision was to create a series of secluded spaces through generous, layered planting, allowing the garden to remain on the edge of wildness while still having structure.’

Plants were chosen with the climate and seasons in mind so that there is something beautiful to look at year round. Once again, this acute sense of care lends itself to a family home; Christopher was dead-heading geraniums when I spoke to him — not your typical proprietor.

Red Savannah can organise four night stays at Casa Bonavita from £2,195 per person, on a bed and breakfast basis. The price includes private airport transfers from and to Malta airport, and return economy flights from London Heathrow to Malta (including a checked bag).

This is the third part of our series on the experts' experts, in which we spoke to two dozen members of the Country Life Top 100 about the artisans, dealers and writers whose work and wisdom have played a huge part in their careers. The previous instalments saw them name the greatest craftspeople working in Britain and the best furniture designers.

Tim Crump, Oakwrights: I like the look of old painted furniture against the oak frames of our homes, so I recommend John Cornall Antiques, Warwickshire, who has simple painted pieces, occasionally, Shaker in style, which are hard to find in the UK. Although not an antique dealer, Shaker of Malvern, Worcestershire, makes beautiful Shaker furniture—which will be the antiques of the future.

Meg Boscawen: Katie Turton, the founder of Perpoli, has an eye for sourcing truly special pieces and a natural talent for uncovering objects with character, history and soul.

Edward Smith, Artorius Faber: Jack Laver Brister always seems to have some interesting things.

Chloe Willis, Sibyl Colefax & John Fowler: Ed Foster and his mother, Val, of Foster and Gane, have an Oxfordshire shop full of interesting pieces, from antiquities to 20th-century works, and I always find something I love. My friend Molly Alexander has opened a store near us on Pimlico Road, London W1, and it is sensational. Strength, restraint and effortlessly chic.

Geoffrey Preston: Su Daybell has a brilliant eye. Her Tetbury shop, Twig, in Gloucestershire, is a place to look for unusual and unique pieces.

Shankar Kothapuram, Tom Stuart-Smith Studio: Darren Jones of Lichen Garden Antiques, Oxfordshire, always finds what you want, even before you knew you wanted it!

Bee Osborn, Osborn Interiors: Liz Morris Decorative Interiors, specialist in French, Swedish and English furniture and interiors, and Martha’s Attic, Oxfordshire, for all kinds of decorative antiques.

Angelica Squire, Studio Squire: We have found some wonderful pieces at Dorian Caffot de Fawes, London NW8, and also eagerly await the Friday drops by Four Quarters Home and Passé The Store.

Hugo Bugg, Harris Bugg: Darren Jones at Lichen Garden Antiques is our go-to dealer. He has an exceptional range of stone and garden antiques, an outstanding eye and sources that are impossible to match.

Lonika Chande: 8 Holland Street, W8, and Sauce, E10, are both wonderful for 20th-century pieces with personality, whereas Lorfords, Gloucestershire, is always a favourite for its breadth and inspiring mix of antiques and decorative objects.

Robbie Kerr, ADAM Architecture: Tim Corfield has been fantastic to work alongside, helping to bring his amazing depth of knowledge to shape clients’ searches.

Francis Terry: I am a huge fan of Will Fisher at Jamb, whom I have known for many years. He has such a great instinct for antiques and a love of classical architecture. He also has immense energy and, together with his wife, Charlotte Freemantle, has developed a wide range of excellent reproduction lighting, fireplaces and other antiques.

Rupert Cunningham, Ben Pentreath Studio: Molly Alexander recently opened the most beautiful shop on London’s Pimlico Road, SW1, a few doors down from her mentor Will Fisher’s great Jamb showroom. Inside you’ll find a beautifully curated blend of 18th- and mid-20th-century pieces.

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.

In a world of Amazon, Netflix, Deliveroo and Hinge, there is little that can’t be summoned with the tap of a few keys, from furniture and films to pizzas and paramours. The result is a collective impatience that has entwined itself with almost every aspect of our lives, including our homes.

For many, the combination of online shopping and social media has turned creating a home into a process akin to Supermarket Sweep, based on poor decisions and little or no product knowledge. It’s a retailer’s dream; enticing backlit images create desire that can be sated with a couple of clicks and three payments on Klarna. It’s also a far cry from the tradition of the trousseau that once existed in many cultures, which was used to collect linen, silver and household goods in anticipation of establishing a home.

• The best antique dealers in Britain
• The best craftspeople in Britain
• The best furniture makers in Britain
• The most inspiring books on architecture and gardens

The combined effect of rash decisions and poor quality is having a disastrous impact on the environment. Little of what we’re now buying is likely to last a decade, let alone be passed to the next generation. Most of it is destined for landfill. Yet we need little reminding of the benefits of both quality and timelessness; historic houses are furnished with pieces that have lasted for generations, not only because they were made with care, but also because they could be maintained and, when necessary, mended. They are integral to houses that owe their beauty and sense of place to evolution rather than revolution.

Online shopping has put even greater distance between the source of production and the end user. It’s one of the reasons why, this week, we publish our annual Experts’ Experts feature, which includes recommendations by designers on our Top 100 list of specialists who put their heart and soul into the goods and services they provide, from stone fireplaces and Windsor chairs to garden furniture and exquisite brass bookshelves, made in rural workshops from Herefordshire to Hampshire.

These carefully crafted pieces are made with materials that don’t diminish with age, but instead develop a patina that lends them a distinctive personality all of their own. Nor will they ever date; quality never does. Better still, they will last a lifetime, not only because they are beautifully made, but because we are more likely to treat them with the respect they command.

Few of the experts listed here will rank at the top of an internet search; instead, their success is based on a mix of word-of-mouth recommendations and a cast-iron reputation for genuine talent. It’s not only craft skills that are the basis of their appeal, it’s trustworthiness, creativity and the wisdom that is only ever attained through experience — qualities that speak far louder than any Instagram post.

The full list of experts' experts can be found in the July 8, 2026, edition of Country Life magazine — and will appear online over the next week. We start with the list of the finest craftspeople working in Britain today, which you can read here.

This leader article appears in the July 8, 2026 print edition of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

Tim Crump, Oakwrights: I ride my bike past Hugh Peachey’s workshop, The Masons Yard in Herefordshire, and it is brilliant to see the beautiful fireplaces he is carving. A clean carved stone fireplace is a great complement to an oak-frame house and Hugh hand creates some fine examples.

Meg Boscawen: Without hesitation, Rupert Bevan in Shropshire. His work spans such a diverse range of disciplines and products, all executed with exceptional raftsmanship and beautifully considered detail. There is a timelessness and elegance to everything he creates that I find incredibly inspiring.

Ben Naylor, Jack Badger: I respect Mike Dennis for his passion for traditional crafts, deep knowledge of historic building techniques and commitment to sustainable, time-tested methods. He also has a remarkable ability to communicate the history and principles of traditional joinery in an engaging and accessible way.

Edward Smith, Artorius Faber: So many, but North Yorkshire-based Linda Fenwick’s shell work is exquisite.

Sarah Vanrenen, Vanrenen Hanbury: Beardmore supplies the most beautiful architectural ironmongery, from cabinet handles to bespoke front-door furniture. Everything is handmade in the company’s foundry on the Sussex coast and the showroom in Chelsea, SW10, is an absolute treasure trove.

Chloe Willis, Sibyl Colefax & John Fowler: What Edmund Le Brun, Flore de Taisne, Nada Debeaumont and the whole team at Ishkar are doing to support Afghan artisans is so important. They have opened a door to brilliant craftspeople, from rug-makers to glass blowers and now embroiderers. I am probably biased, but my mother, Cecilia Willis, produces beautiful bowls and moon jars, which find their way into every one of my projects. Wonderful colours and strong brushmarks.

Geoffrey Preston: Britain has so many brilliant craftspeople, it is hard to pick just one. Instead, I’ll nominate Heritage Crafts, the national charity for historic skills and a great champion of all manner of traditional crafts.

Hugo Bugg, Harris Bugg: Jeremy Weiss of traditional rural skills training and consultancy Proper Edges in Devon is that rare thing: a practical craftsman who is deeply invested in conservation and teaching. Skilled at hedge-laying, hedge banks, gate-making and scything, he now runs hedge-laying courses, too. A laid hedge is a living fence that keeps stock in as well as feeding and sheltering hedgerow wildlife, all without a yard of wire, and a scythe will out-mow a strimmer in a wildflower meadow with no noise, no fumes and no harm to slow-worms or seedheads.

Greg Tirri, RW Armstrong Group: I am blown away by the quality, precision and depth of the work of Mathew Bray of MBMC Studios, encompassing decorative arts, architectural finishes, joinery and furniture.

Shankar Kothapuram, Tom Stuart-Smith Studio: Thomas Rösler works with large pieces of timber in an almost intuitive way. There is much skill involved in his approach and a real sensitivity to materiality that makes the work feel both considered and instinctive.

Angelica Squire, Studio Squire: Gloucestershire-based furniture and cabinetry specialist Ed Keyser is a long-time collaborator of ours; we adore working with him and his team. His attention to detail and skillset make the process and end result a real pleasure.

Lonika Chande: We are lucky to work with many extraordinary craftspeople. Thinking about wall finishes alone, London-based decorative artist John Harragan creates beautiful finishes with real depth and, in East Sussex, Tess Newall’s incredible murals bring huge charm and individuality to a room.

Ross Sharpe, Yiangou: Geoffrey Preston in Devon is a true artist in plasterwork and plaster decoration and a very nice chap to boot.

Robbie Kerr, ADAM Architecture: London-based sculptor, carver and gilder Clunie Fretton really understands materials and every piece comes to life with extraordinary skill. Decorative-arts specialists Mathew Bray and Matthew Collins of MBMC Studios bring so many wonderful crafts together under one roof, all executed to perfection.

Francis Terry: When we were building the new Tapestry Drawing Room at Castle Howard in North Yorkshire, we were nearing the opening date and needed someone to carve the head of Pluto at speed. The amazing Clunie Fretton managed to carve the piece in the required timeframe and, now installed, it looks convincingly like a piece of genuine Baroque sculpture.

Rupert Cunningham, Ben Pentreath Studio: Matthias Garn is a master mason and carver who learnt his craft in his native Dresden in Germany, before settling in York to study under the great Dick Reid. He now has his own workshop and has established himself as one of the pre-eminent craftsmen in the North of England.

Highclere became world-famous in the 2000s as the impossibly grand Hampshire house used as the location for the filming of Downton Abbey. Yet it was a place celebrated long before ITV's film crews turned up to create the classic period drama, not just for its architecture, but also for the treasures that lie within.

The most famous of these are its Egyptian antiquities, collected by the 5th Earl of Carnarvon, excavator of Tutankhamun’s tomb; and its Napoleonic memorabilia, including the Emperor’s chair and desk, personal effects sold from Longwood House on St Helena after his death in 1821.

Today,, though, the Earl and Countess of Carnarvon stand in the Smoking Room at Highclere, an interior redecorated and rehung in the 1990s, in front of a different antique: a table that incorporates decorative panels representing birds and fruits made of ‘hard stone’ or pietra dura.

Making decorative use of stones such as lapis lazuli, onyx, cornelian and sardonyx enjoyed particular popularity in the late 16th century and Ferdinando I de’Medici established a workshop — the Opificio delle Pietre Dure — in Florence in 1588 that became a centre for its subsequent production.

The panels here are thought to date to the 17th century, but were subsequently united in this table, probably in the 19th century. In several cases, the stones actually project from the surface of the panel, giving it real depth.

‘We both love Italy and think the craftsmanship of this table is exceptional,’ says Lord Carnarvon.

‘I love the idea of Nature set into marble, frozen and made eternal. John Keats explores this in his celebrated poem Ode on a Grecian Urn, published in 1819; this table is our urn.’

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

There was, in the 1990s, a counter-cyclical knee-jerk among interior designers against fussiness in its forms. The previous decade had been amazing, but quantity had subsumed quality and, suddenly, most inhabitants of fashionable west London postcodes under-took a dramatic decorating detox, painting their floorboards and hanging cream blinds.

The joy was that the look was cheap. A few litres of white paint are so much less expensive than wallpaper, knicker blinds, paint finishes and acres of beige Wilton. The look sparked a new publishing genre: interior books, all with the word ‘simple’ in the title, featuring simple pictures of simple things and text that offered statements of the blindingly obvious. In the USA, the cult of simplicity got its own magazine, Real Simple, which at its peak sold 7.6 million copies a month.

As part of the reinvention of country houses, a new focus on materiality has seen designers and architects paring back houses to their structural framework, revealing stone, brick and beams that a generation ago would have been plastered or carpeted over.

Spaces have been simplified, too, particularly in smaller houses, where removing a wall, pushing into the eaves or opening up staircases can transform the humblest cottage into something quite light and airy. It’s a look that French architects and builders have always understood, especially in the south, where stone farmhouses lend themselves to being unpicked and unpeeled.

It’s an approach to the look that has become a hallmark of estate houses, cottages and pubs, such as The Wild Rabbit at the Daylesford estate in the Cotswolds, where Lady Bamford has been unwavering in carving out her own aesthetic that seamlessly blends texture with modernity.

Never let anyone persuade you that this rural reductivism is simple; reinventing buildings so that they appeal to a modernist sensibility requires clever design, artful construction, ingenious structural engineers and lots of hidden steel beams.

If the technical aspect of the challenge sounds complex, however, it’s not as hard as the spatial planning and sourcing of materials that will add richness and warmth to rooms that could otherwise look austere. Unlike more layered interiors, there’s no hiding behind colour or clutter, nor strategically placed artworks to cover a multitude of sins.

What is refreshing is its honesty; it is blissfully devoid of the pastiche and nostalgia that have been a mark of country houses for far too long.

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.

When Jess Rowe and Miriam Payne became the first duo to row from Peru to Australia in 2025, they were also the first to use a floating farm to sustain themselves at sea.

Growing their own salad over an 8,000-mile journey was made possible by one of their sponsors, Home Harvest, a tech firm whose flagship product allows consumers to grow herbs and leaves directly from seed mats. The company, which uses hydroponic technology to produce fresh leafy greens in days, adapted its product to be solar-powered and directly attached to the racing shell, to great effect: together, Jess and Miriam raised more than £120,000 for educational charity Outward Bound Trust.

Home Harvest’s flagship product is different. A three-tier box, powered by LEDs, it has a filtration system that disperses water to professional-grade seed mats; one prototype features a different salad crop growing on each level. The boxes connect to an app, which offers recipes and nutritional advice tailored to individual goals (such as to lose weight or increase vitamin C intake), as well as more generalist advice rooted in Home Harvest’s core belief: that our current agricultural system is as bad for us as for the planet.

A camera is built into each box to monitor the growth of the crops, accessible via the app. ‘We offer a direct-to-consumer business,’ explains Hedley Aylott, the firm’s co-founder and marketing director, ‘one that bypasses the need for a middleman and reduces the carbon footprint of imports.’

Hedley is keen to stress the anti-pesticide virtues of indoor hydroponic growing and invites me to sample the radish, rocket and pea shoots that have been grown by a Home Harvest box. ‘The technology works by using higher seed density in the paper seed mats to achieve faster growth,’ co-founder Andrew Johnson, nicknamed ‘The Salad King’, told Country Life last year.

‘The system creates the perfect growing environment with controlled temperature and light. You simply add water and can get fresh, leafy greens in a matter of days, rather than months.’

The market for such a product, according to both founders, is huge. ‘With the weather becoming more volatile and hard to predict,’ Andrew says, ‘it is becoming harder for consumers to rely on crops that are grown outdoors.’ As such, the firm subscribes to the same beliefs as were touted by Michael Gove when he was Defra Secretary: that vertical farming, ‘with vegetables grown in temperature, moisture and nutrition-controlled environments’, can ‘guarantee improvements in yield’ and reduce the risk posed to crop production by freak weather incidents.

‘Vertical farms not only minimise land use,’ Michael told the Oxford Farming Conference in 2019, ‘but can, of course, be located close to the urban population centres they serve.’ Home Harvest, then, stands at the frontier of what the minister teased as the fourth agricultural revolution. Founded in 2021, the company is on the verge of stateside expansion. ‘We launch in America this month,’ Andrew beams.

The US market, roughly five times the size of the UK’s and facing similar issues, could be poised for British invasion. There are, however, important differences to account for. Britain is far more reliant on agricultural imports for fresh fruit and vegetables, taking in about 65% of the latter and 83% of the former. The US, by contrast, is more independent: 59% of its fruit and only 35% of its vegetables hail from international markets.

It would be a great English success story if Home Harvest were to take off across the pond. The more immediate question, however, is whether the British smallholder could suffer from such innovation. If, indeed, the consumer becomes his or her own grower, does this render the work of our own farmers obsolete? Moreover, if this becomes society’s chief way of feeding itself, is it utopian to assume that an endless supply of professional-grade seed mats would become available? The market is likely to do as it always does: split into categories that distinguish between higher-quality, more expensive items and lower-quality, more accessible products.

The root of Home Harvest’s success so far — with £1.2 million secured in pre-seed funding — is the quality seed mats sold with the subscriptions, which are sourced from CN Seeds near Ely, Cambridgeshire. For those banking on this being the future of agriculture, exploring possibilities in the seed space could be a cunning move. The three-tier box costs £399, then £15 per month for seed mats; the one-tier box is £300 and £10 a month.

This feature originally appeared in the June 17, 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.

There's growing nuance to the burgeoning focus on longevity in interior design. Of course, it’s good, vital even, that furniture doesn’t end up in landfill and a visit to a historic house reveals that well-made furniture should never do so.

Yet the appeal is about more than merely avoiding obsolescence; old furniture improves with time and use, gaining character as it passes from one generation to the next, and, when it needs fixing or refreshing, it’s easily done.

Natural materials, such as wood and stone, age beautifully, improving rather than degrading. Many metals do, too, except for iron, which tends to rust and lose strength. In contrast, copper, brass and bronze develop a deep-blue patina over time, ranging in colour from turquoise to green, a process that can evolve over the course of centuries.

Their surfaces oxidise, most memorably on statues and monuments, such as the magnificent dome of St Mark’s Basilica in Venice, echoing its Triumphal Quadriga, four copper horses that were taken during the sack of Constantinople in 1204 and which date from the 2nd and 3rd centuries BC.

In painting, verdigris pigments became highly prized in the Renaissance; artists valued them for their depth and gem-like glow, as demonstrated so beautifully in Vermeer’s The Art of Painting, where the colour demonstrates its supernatural capacity to add both depth and a three-dimensional quality to a one-dimensional representation.

Leonardo da Vinci found it challenging to work with: ‘It loses its beauty like smoke if it is not quickly varnished. It not only goes up in smoke, but if it is washed with a sponge... the verdigris will disappear.’

Because it is the result of an evolutionary process that enhances, protects and improves with age, verdigris has become emblematic of the benefits of timelessness. At this year’s WOW!house (which runs until July 2), it played a key role in the Hector Finch Garden Folly, the façade of which was designed by Adam Architecture’s Darren Price and which featured its sponsor’s new verdigris Zeus lantern.

Given that this highly atmospheric structure came to life in a matter of days, the pervasive sense of permanence is a testament to the combination of classically inspired simplicity and the magical character of this revered finish.

This feature originally appeared in the June 24, 2026, issue 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.

Whenever I visit the British Galleries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, I always stop in front of a Gothic Windsor armchair, made in about 1760, with a towering, pointed back and stacks of intricate tracery.

Although originally intended for a country house such as Strawberry Hill, Twickenham, I like to imagine it in a Manhattan penthouse, blending into the skyline outside the windows. I’m not the only one who thinks so.

‘A new generation of collectors and audiences is turning to British furniture (and to historic works overall) because of extraordinary craftsmanship, sustainability and the human stories embedded in every piece,’ says Helen Allen, the executive director of The Winter Show, America’s longest-running fair for classic art and design.

This is very much in evidence at the Met’s British Galleries, which were completely renovated in 2020, just before the onset of covid.

Where earlier incarnations of the galleries focused on Georgian furniture, a longtime staple of American collecting, the new presentation of the spaces shows the breadth of British design, from a state bed made for the Court of William III to a Victorian side chair by Edward Welby Pugin, son of Augustus. The emphasis here is on discovery as much as it is on history.

‘One takeaway with English furniture is that you have to see it in person,’ believes Wolf Burchard, the curator of the Met’s new galleries. ‘For example, we are now showing an incredibly beautiful China table attributed to Chippendale, which was sitting in storage and which I only knew from photographs. The moment I laid eyes on it in person, I knew it had to go on view. Now I think it is one of the best pieces we have on display.’

Collectors — and, of course, the dealers who advise them — may take this approach a step further. ‘At The Winter Show, there is a growing emphasis on context and storytelling — placing English furniture within narratives that connect design, history and contemporary life,’ explains Natasha.

‘Exhibitors are increasingly thoughtful about juxtaposition, showing historic pieces alongside modern works to highlight their continued relevance.’

The resurgence of certain niche collecting fields highlights this hybrid American taste. Patrick Bavasi, who recently opened his own gallery after a decade directing the venerable Hyde Park Antiques, notes a renewed interest in Anglo-Indian and Chinese export furniture. ‘Americans aren’t fussed necessarily with absolute English tradition in terms of the decorative arts,’ he notes. ‘I don’t think we are averse to interpretations on a theme.’

Where does this leave ‘my’ Gothic Windsor chair? Interior designer Bunny Williams and her business partner Elizabeth Lawrence, New York’s arbiters of Anglophile style, put me at ease. They describe a pair of English furniture collectors who recently moved to a modern apartment in town.

‘They had one of the most beautiful walnut secretary desks,’ reveals Bunny, ‘The wood was beautiful, it was period, it was incredible, and moving that into a white room with contemporary paintings — all of a sudden, you noticed it because it wasn’t with other English furniture. It sort of became a piece of sculpture in the room.’

‘It gave it new life,’ Elizabeth adds. Perhaps, that’s what English furniture can achieve today in the USA: a new, if unexpected, life at a time when we are craving authenticity above all.

‘In a world of digital saturation and fast production, an 18th-century English chair or cabinet offers something increasingly rare and, frankly, radical — permanence, provenance and a profound connection to the arc of history,’ considers Helen. ‘When the present feels uncertain, the past becomes a source of meaning, stability, and truth.’

Why not aim for that in a Manhattan penthouse?

This feature originally appeared in the June 17, 2026, issue 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.

When interior designer Vanessa Macdonald and her husband James discovered an unmodernised Georgian property they loved at the bottom of a valley in Oxfordshire, they lost out to a higher bidder, but the memory remained imprinted in their minds.

On a whim, a few years later, the couple posted a note through the letterbox explaining that they would be interested in buying, if it ever came back on the market. The timing was perfect; the owners were looking to sell.

‘Since seeing it for the first time, quite a bit of work had taken place,’ explains Vanessa. ‘The kitchen, which had been at the back of the house, had been moved into the drawing room, resulting in a large open-plan kitchen and dining room. I wasn’t sure about it at first, but we pressed ahead with the purchase. Now, it’s the room where we spend all of our time and we love the lovely light and the views up the valley.’

As a decorative starting point for the dining space, she chose curtains made up in Indhira by Le Manach, a Pierre Frey fabric that is inspired by a 20th-century Indian sari. ‘I first encountered it on a project years ago and fell in love with it. It works in so many spaces — in London and the countryside — and brings joy to a room.’

The walls are painted in Farrow & Ball’s Vert de Terre, an easy green that doesn’t shout, but which she feels adds depth to a room.

The chairs are part of her own collection and the table came from a shop in London’s Lillie Road, but was widened to function as a workspace, as well as a dining table. Above hangs an Arts-and-Crafts-era pendant sourced from Christopher Butterworth.

The curtain is made from a Namay Samay fabric, available through Tissus d’Helene Ltd.

Vanessa Macdonald leads interior design practice Melissa Wyndham. For more information call 020–7352 2874 or visit the Melissa Wyndham website.

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

Sally Raikes sits in the library with a manuscript copy of the Bible bound in three large volumes. As a note in the front of the first explains, they were ‘The gift of Elizabeth Armstrong to her grandchildren, written by herself’.

The same hand has added the date ‘1823’ with a different pen and continued: ‘To be given to Robert Raikes my grandson when Thomas Raikes (my son in law) pleases to part with them.’

It proved an appropriate gift. Robert was a wealthy young man from a Yorkshire family who fell under the High Church spell of John Henry Newman and John Keble when at Oxford in the 1830s and became a Tractarian. He and his wife, Frances, purchased the Treberfydd estate in the 1840s, and, with Gothic Revival architect John Loughborough Pearson, rebuilt the local church, established a school and created a new house for themselves.

The text is written in an even copperplate hand and — presumably to make it palatable to children — punctuated with engraved illustrations taken from other books. Compiling the manuscript must have been a massive task.

‘These volumes are a physical expression of the High Church spirit that brought my great-great great-grandfather here and created the house,’ says Sally.

‘It is interesting that his namesake and kinsman, Robert Raikes, was the founder of the Sunday School Movement.’ 


See more about the house at the Treberfydd website. 


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

The ‘room’ is a gem of Louis XVI architecture, a triumph of gilded beech, rich velvet upholstery and pineapple finials fringing an exquisite dome. It is not, however, a miniature boudoir, but a maison de chien — a glorified dog bed from about 1775.

Which pampered pooch rested its paws on the plump cushion? The bed is very similar to another, now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, which furniture-maker Claude I Sené made for Marie Antoinette to house her beloved poodle, Pompon. Might this, too, have once been hers — or rather, Pompon’s? The maison de chien will be on offer with Mallett at the Treasure House Fair, London. This year’s edition of the Treasure House Fair will run until June 30.

If antique dog beds aren't your style, one need only look to 'Barkitecture', the kennel design competition that took place at Goodwoof earlier this year.

With entries auctioned by Bonhams on behalf of Battersea Dogs & Cats Home, the highly anticipated competition was, this year, hosted by Kevin McCloud, which pretty much tells you all you need to know about it.

The theme for 2026 was 'Dogs in Space', a perfect choice when it comes to making spaces which will be occupied by dogs, you could argue. The winner was HPW Architecture, with 'Star Paws Sleeping Module'.

Their concept — or concpet if you will —was inspired by rescue dog Murphy and up-cycled from disused components (it looks a lot like a washing machine if you ask me, so I imagine some of the components might have been from one of these).

Another practice, Hall + Bednarczyk Architects, celebrated the moment in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey where a bone transforms into a spaceship with their design.

A rocket-shaped kennel, by George & James Architects, was so good, it even saw real life astronaut Tim Peake get on board.

It just goes to show, however mad your ambitions for your dogs kennel are, there are plenty of designs — both old and new — that are simply from another planet. But that's dog people for you.

A version of this feature originally appeared in the June 10, 2026, issue 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.

The words ‘interior design’ mean different things to different people, from colour, comfort and curtains to fabrics, finishes and floor plans. Yet a visit to WOW!house that opened its doors last week demonstrates that in the right hands it can actually be a form of alchemy that magically fuses all these elements together to create spaces imbued with soul.

Atmosphere is there from the start in the Hector Finch Garden Folly; the Size Group Façade designed by Darren Price; and the Artorius Faber Entrance Garden by The Gardenists, where the poise and balance of classically inspired form are built on a foundation of handcrafted materials as well as finishes in the form of Hector Finch’s new verdigris that elevates these distinctive spaces with a sense of timelessness.

The alchemy recurs throughout the spaces: the Turnell & Gigon Drawing Room by Albion Nord top lit by a magnificent cupola; the Benjamin Moore Minhwa Salon by Young Huh, inspired by the Millions Room at the Schönbrunn Palace; and the Salvesen Graham The Collection Primary Bedroom, which oozes both classic comfort and transatlantic glamour.

An enduring memory of this year’s WOW!house will be spaces that resonate with a sense of drama, not only in the atmospheric celebration of decoration, as in the Schumacher Dining Room by Max Rollitt, but also where you might least expect them, such as the Ca’Pietra bathroom by De Rosee Sa and the moody half-light of the hidden bar behind the Romo Speakeasy Salon by Studio Duggan

WOW!house is at Design Centre, Chelsea Harbour, until July 2.

When interior designer Bee Osborn bought a derelict two-up-two-down 15th-century cottage in Oxfordshire, she knew immediately that she’d need to add an extension to accommodate her three daughters when they came to stay.

Attached to the rear of the house, the addition doubled the property’s footprint, creating a large, open-plan living area and kitchen with a principal bedroom above.

The lack of arms on the large, bespoke L-shaped sofa creates extra perching space when required and the sofa is covered in a hard-wearing performance fabric called Freeport by Thibault. ‘I love using these types of fabrics as it means that any spillages can be spot cleaned or the whole covers whipped off and sent for professional cleaning.’

The walls are clad in timber from a local yard and painted in Alfie’s Tail, a pale taupe by Fenwick & Tilbrook. ‘I wanted the space to look rustic and informal to sit comfortably with the older part of the cottage, so I deliberately chose not to have a regular shadow gap between the planks,’ explains Bee.

The artwork was sourced by Art Untamed, an art advisory run by her daughter, Hettie. Each work was chosen to create a ‘tonal symphony’ of her favourite hues. ‘I don’t go in for lots of colours and liken my palette to the bark of a London Plane tree with all its mottled olive greens, greys, browns and creams. It results in rooms that are calm — everything gets on well together — and yet never boring.’

Almost all the furniture was designed in-house, including the cubed ottomans, which fit under the table when not needed. In the corner is a round table by Robert Langford with a lamp from British lighting manufacturer Porta Romana.

This feature originally appeared in the June 3, 2026, issue 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.

Given that Sir Alec Issigonis, designer of the Mini, asserted that ‘a camel is a horse designed by a committee’, he’d presumably have taken a dim view of the Pontiac Aztek, which was designed, in 2001, by a focus group (and which was withdrawn after only four years).

Collaboration and consensus might be the buzzwords of our times, but there’s something dispiriting about anything that is the result of head nodding, especially in the world of architecture and design. Truly great buildings tend to be the result of a single vision. Architectural examples of Gesamtkunstwerk, a synthesis of different disciplines and art forms where the contents were the result of considerable control freakery, range from Robert Adam’s Syon House in west London to Arne Jacobsen’s faintly Orwellian SAS building in Copenhagen, Denmark (he even designed the cutlery).

In between, there were similarly distinctive personal projects, such as Sir John Soane’s Museum, the Kensington home of the Victorian painter Lord Leighton and William Burges’s extraordinary transformation of Cardiff Castle into a Gothic fantasy for the Marquess of Bute.

In the countryside, a garden and parkland were sometimes part of an even more ambitious masterplan. Although there were plenty of later examples to be found in Arts and Crafts, Art Deco and early Modernism, it’s a tradition that has become rare in the 21st century when the process of creating a house has become a shared endeavour between architect, interior designer and client. Except, that is, in the work of François-Joseph Graf, the French architect, designer and art collector, who designed At Sloane, whose talents were enlisted by the Cadogan Estate and the Parisian hotelier Jean-Louis Costes.

The majority of the building’s contents and structure (except its façade) are Graf’s work, creating a spatial and aesthetic coherence you might not expect in rooms heavily influenced by Thomas Jeckyll, William Morris and Charles Rennie Mackintosh in the same succession of space.

Like a cloistered monastery or riad, the leaded windows obscure the outside, encouraging guests to look in rather than out and to absorb the intimate world he has created. Like Soane, he is also a designer who understands that a little mirror goes a long way. Also like Soane, the result is not unhinged pastiche, but something beguiling and exciting, true to T. S. Eliot’s view that: ‘The past should be altered by the present as much as the present directed by the past.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

The day before we meet, Butter Wakefield has been speaking to Farrow & Ball’s team at their Dorset headquarters about how she uses colour outside. She seems surprised that they’d be interested to hear from ‘little old me’, but there is surely nobody better suited to the job: Butter has, for more than 15 years, been at the helm of her eponymous garden-design studio; before that, she was an interior designer at Colefax & Fowler, a job she landed when she moved to London from her native USA, where she’d worked at Christie’s. She has, in short, spent her career engaging with beautiful, colourful things, figuring out how they work, both inside the house and out.

Her own home in west London’s Ravenscourt Park is a summation of her years of experience, and you feel it before you’ve even walked through the front door — one painted a green so ebulliently vernal that joy seems to emanate from behind before Butter has even unlatched it, open-armed and beaming.

She moved here with her then-husband in 1991, pregnant with their second baby. Working for Colefax & Fowler at the time, ‘I had a real sense of how I wanted things to be done, but we didn’t have the money to do it all in one go.’ It was, she said, actually rather helpful: ‘It made me understand the value of absolutely everything. When we got some cash together, we could do the next step. Drip, drip, drip — redo a bathroom here, paint a room there, that kind of thing.’

She learned to prioritise and very soon realised that at the top of her list was getting rid of the white paint on the Victorian building’s exteriors. ‘Why would anyone paint anything white?’ she asks, genuinely confused. ‘Especially outside, where it stands out like a sore thumb and looks filthy almost immediately.’ Again, working in stages, Butter began with the back of the house, pairing its London stock brickwork with the lead grey of Farrow & Ball’s Downpipe, a choice she remains thrilled with all these years later. ‘It’s like mascara for the windows,’ she says with a smile.

The front of the house wasn’t repainted until later, when ingressing water from a leak forced her hand. ‘I should have perhaps warned my neighbours that I was about to go a little off-piste,’ Butter laughs, ‘but I was just so over the white stucco on our street that I just went for it,’ colourwashing anything not brick in Farrow & Ball’s Hardwick White (a misnomer, really, because it’s more a chalky grey).

These paint choices form part of what Butter calls the house’s ‘colour story’, something she describes as the ‘direct conversation between the interior of a house and its outside.’ Hardwick White, for instance, is the hue she chose for her conservatory too, evidence that Butter is big on the idea that a house should sing as a whole, as well as in parts: ‘You create views internally, linking rooms through motifs or colours or fabrics,’ she explains, ‘and I believe the same principle applies outside. You should look through the window, whether you’re standing inside or out, and be able to see the two spaces in dialogue with one another.’

In her job, Butter is always taking a read on what’s going on in the rooms that overlook the garden, ensuring the colours complement one another. A significant driver of this, she says, is ‘so that you can pick flowers and bring them inside, knowing they’ll work beautifully.’ Butter — sunny, colourful and full of enthusiasm — is unsurprisingly a great believer in having cut flowers indoors: ‘They’re so good for you, creatively. Working with a vase of flowers is just the nicest thing. And if you’ve got a garden full of them, why wouldn’t you want them inside with you? I’m always trying to convince my clients to pick their flowers.’

Also unsurprising is the garden designer’s fixation with the colour green, which appears in ‘absolutely every room’ in some way small or large, and its ability to both soothe and enliven. This is perhaps best in evidence in her bedroom and bathroom, both of which speak to the sympathetic powers of decorating more generally. After Butter’s marriage came to an end in 2016 and her ex-husband moved out, she very sensibly set about redoing — and in the process reclaiming — those two most intimate spaces. Her bedroom, now a confection of softest sage, neutral linen and — for Butter, at least — relatively little pattern, is a haven of the sort that makes you exhale as you step inside, which was ‘the most important thing’ in those stressful, sleep-deprived days. ‘That room has seen me through my lowest moments,’ she says with the utmost sincerity.

Meanwhile, in the bathroom, Butter swapped robust marble and crenellated mouldings for a scheme infinitely prettier and more feminine, in the form of grass-green wooden dado panelling, Blithfield’s blockprinted Medallions wallpaper (green, of course) and ‘a really fantastic tub’ with antique brass fittings. It is — you guessed it — painted green (racing, this time). Now, emerald majolica and shimmering pink Sunderland lustreware join framed botanicals and mirrors in ebony-stained frames to form a gallery of Butter’s favourite things, admired everyday from her evening bath.

These rooms are, like all the others in the house, an alloy of different aspects of Butter’s personality. It is bright, busy and cluttered, but it’s also perfectly put together. Butter’s jostling shelves and walls are not rammed, but rather arranged with a miscellany of things she loves, whether that’s chromatic, garden-focused Modern British-ish paintings by the likes of John Pawle, Kirsty Wither, Vanessa Bowman and Nick Botting, or the cheery cast of Beswick porcelain Beatrix Potter characters that keep their twinkly eyes over the spare room, papered in Nicholas Herbert’s butter-yellow bunny-dotted ‘Toile des Lapins’ and now largely slept in by her grandchildren. She is refreshingly unsnobbish about what makes her happy.

She can afford to be. Butter’s eye is unerring. She owes much of this to her training at a golden period in Colefax’s history, working at the company’s celebrated showroom on Brook Street with the likes of decorating royalty Imogen Taylor, Roger Banks-Pye, Tom Parr and Wendy Nicholls. ‘It was wonderful,’ she says, ‘and it was terrifying. But if you paid attention you could learn so much.’ She credits her stint at Christie’s beforehand — along with her grandmother’s ‘immaculate’ taste — with ‘opening my eyes to beautiful things, from silver to porcelain, rugs and furniture’, but it was on Brook Street she really learned the principles of scale, texture, colour and pattern.

Desiring more flexibility after the birth of her son Kit — and finding ‘the farm girl from rural Maryland in me calling out’ — Butter left Colefax and found gardening, something she calls ‘the third leg of the stool’ in her life. She trained at the English Gardening School in the late 90s and later went on to graduate from the London College of Garden Design, while juggling the running of her own business with the busyness that comes with four children. It has, she says, ‘been such a happy thing for me’. As with her house, Butter’s own garden is a distillation of both her knowledge and her enthusiasms: water features (‘you’ll never regret having one’) and pollinator-friendly planting (‘it’s all of our responsibility’), products made by, where possible, English manufacturers. And — of course — colour. Her latest ‘thing’ is positioning pots in flowerbeds, providing large and concentrated explosions of excitement at eye-height.

In keeping with the rest of the house, Butter’s garden is loose, romantic and vibrant. The influence of the gardens she most admires — Great Dixter, Sissinghurst, Benton End among them — is keenly felt. Though long and relatively narrow, like so many London plots, the rectangular site is far from conventional, spliced down the middle by a slender, metre-wide sliver of wildflower meadow, whose oxeye daisies and Verbena bonariensis frolic in the slightest breeze, thrumming with the bumblebuzz of buglife. The beds, which spill into turfed corridors either side, are generous and painterly; in spring, when I visit, this means frilly tulips in lipstick shades, geums of peach and tangerine and the sunny-skied froth of Brunnera macrophylla, adrift in a sea of greens of every intensity.

Though she was yet to establish her business when she moved here, Butter — surely inspired by her beloved grandfather, a wonderful plantsman — knew there was a gorgeous garden to be made. It was, in fact, what drew her to the house more than anything, the appeal being its west-facing aspect. I’m surprised; surely south-facing is what everybody wants? ‘No! North is better than south, curiously, as it’s not so dry, and in summertime, you get late sun. East is nice for morning light, but west is best: all the light ends up here at the end of the day. For most of us, working during the week and busy at the weekends, that’s the time we spend in our gardens.’

By summer, of course, the garden will feel like a different room entirely, filled with hydrangeas, digitalis and blousy English roses — Wollerton Old Hall, Bathsheba, Roald Dahl, Gertrude Jekyll and Boscobel — and acid shocks of Alchemilla mollis. The same goes for autumn and beyond. No doubt next year there’ll be something new to enjoy and experiment with. Just as the inveterate decorator in Butter knows a house is never really finished, she knows all too well that this verdant patch of west London is her ‘very own Forth Bridge; you get to what you think is the last thing and then you've got to start again,’ she laughs. ‘If you don’t buy into that, well… where’s the joy?’ And, if there’s anything Butter’s home teaches us, it’s that joy is what it’s all about.

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.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a person doesn’t realise how inconvenient something is until it’s done better. Nowhere is this more apparent than in our homes. The key that needs jimmying, the door that requires a knack to close, the drawer that demands coaxing: such irritations soon become unfelt. Until, that is, you have a house that works.

The owners of this Victorian house on Warwick Avenue in west London know this better than most. When they bought it, in 1993, the house — spacious, with a beautiful garden and access to an enormous shared private square beyond — made perfect sense. There was enough room for their growing family and fewer stairs than the Hampstead home they were leaving behind. Yes, there were quirks — the windows were leaky, the configuration was a little strange, the spare bedroom was too big and the master had no en-suite — but these were nothing a bit of patience couldn’t counter. And, besides, the handsome property had charm and character.

However, in the late 2010s, a damp problem took hold, creeping ominously through the lower-ground level. The couple, both lawyers, knew the basement was in need of serious attention, ‘and we also knew we weren’t going to put our 25-year-old kitchen back in,’ one of them recalls. They enlisted Marks Barfield, a Clapham-based practice, who are best known for their public projects — the London Eye, Cambridge Central Mosque, Brighton’s i360, the Treetop Walkway at Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew — but behind the scenes have been quietly building a reputation for their low-waste, regenerative approach to residential ones.

‘The original plan was focused largely on the basement,’ says Julia Barfield, co-founder and director of Marks Barfield, ‘incorporating a study, a mudroom, a gym, some wine storage and a new kitchen extension.’ Receptive to Marks Barfield’s inherent ‘greenness’, the couple also began thinking about installing air-source heat pumps to replace the tiny, cranky combi boiler, but as the practice began examining the building’s performance it became clear that simply replacing the heat source wouldn’t fix the heating problem. As one of the owners puts it, ‘there was absolutely no point in doing half a house.’

Before long, Marks Barfield had engineered an extensive top-to-bottom retrofit that not only addressed the damp ingress, but completely reshaped the building’s thermal performance — something the house was in desperate need of because it had little to no insulation. Under the guidance of practice director Ian Crockford, the team started to install breathable, wood-fibre insulation and lime plaster, fossil-fuel-free air-source heat pumps and mechanical ventilation systems, setting their sights on creating a home that performed to Passivhaus standards.

The course of renovations never did run smooth and as they began to strip things back to the brickwork, the architects came across oddity after oddity, and challenge after challenge. At some point in the house’s history, someone had decided to chop chunks out of the roof purlins, a choice which, combined with the four water tanks, each weighing about three tons and dating to the time the house had been cleaved into flats, means that the external walls had started to bow by 6cm. Meanwhile, a dormer window in the attic was discovered to have no lintel and therefore supporting the entire weight of the roof.

The house is Grade II-listed and sits inside a conservation area, so planning alone took six months, and Marks Barfield were required not just to reinforce the roof, but retain as much as possible of the existing fabric. As an outfit interested in circular building practices, this was, mercifully, preferable. In fact, throughout the house, the architects tried to reuse materials wherever possible, while also designing for deconstruction, ensuring that — as Julia says — ‘anything we’ve done can be taken apart, the materials reused by someone else in the future.’

Underneath the basement extension, Marks Barfield installed stainless-steel screw piles, upon which sits a ground beam made from repurposed rolled steel joists. The window frames and 90% of the brickwork were reused; the extension’s Douglas fir exterior, with its subtle psychedelic grain, came from an old carton factory in Devon. In a neat twist, it originates from the same part of west Canada as one of the owners, likely arriving in the UK about 50 years before her.

Where the architects weren’t able to reuse or recycle, they opted for low-carbon solutions, such as a green roof and heritage-friendly, Fineo sash windows, which use a vacuum between the panes instead of glass to achieve thermal insulation that’s as effective as triple glazing. They also operated a ‘host and donor system’, giving steel reclaimed from this house to another one under the care of Marks Barfield in Stockwell.

These choices reflect Julia’s desire to be ‘a good ancestor’, a term borrowed from the title of Roman Krznaric’s 2020 book about ways in which long-term thinking can benefit future generations. Conscious that the building industry is responsible for 62% of the UK’s waste, she and her practice endeavour to work as responsibly as possible. It’s admirable, but it’s also plain common sense (Julia once saved a client £1.65 million by reusing materials). ‘The driver for us is the planet,’ she says, ‘but it’s enormously reassuring that our principles don’t get in the way for our clients.’

Back in Warwick Avenue, common sense has prevailed in a way it definitely didn’t before. By slicing up the enormous spare room, Marks Barfield has created a spacious ensuite for their clients. They also removed a strange, cupboard-like bathroom that once occupied a nearby half-landing, letting the room’s high window pour extra light into the stairwell. A lot of the work — including the insulation and plastering — is invisible, but no less important. While working on the upper floors, Ian noticed that the joists had been hacked apart to make way for plumbing and reinforced them. ‘It’s a miracle the bathtubs didn’t fall through the ceiling,’ he says. However, where the practice’s handiwork is on show (notably in the basement, which is now a cool and airy enclave with enough space for work, fun and family life) it is undeniably pleasing: comfortable, beautiful, logical.

The logic that Marks Barfield has imposed on this house is what makes it special. ‘We could have stayed here for another 30 years,’ says one of the owners, ‘and it would have been fine. But now it is enjoyable — cool in summer, warm in winter. It’s how a house should be.’

The other one tells me about a window that illuminates the junction between the ground and first floors: large, arched and ‘almost chapel-like’, she says. ‘We lived for decades with its strange mismatch of glass panes. Some were frosted, some were patterned, some were plain.’ Now restored to its original design, the window is a thing of unintrusive, low-key beauty. ‘I didn’t realise how nonsensical it was.’ She is talking about the window, of course, though the observation seems to reach much further.

Visit the Marks Barfield website for more information.

Flowers from the Farm, the UK trade body that represents more than 1,000 small-scale cut flower and foliage growers, has been awarded dedicated Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) codes — the economic identifiers that allow a sector to be formally recognised in the eyes of government, funders and policymakers.

The move comes just in time for British Flowers Week (June 15–21) and is particularly pertinent during the UN International Year of the Woman Farmer, as eight out of 10 members of Flowers from the Farm are women.

The award was secured following pressure on the Treasury for recognition for a sector worth £33.6 million a year by Sarah Dyke MP, Liberal Democrat Rural Affairs Spokesperson, who commented: ‘Securing dedicated SIC codes means that [flower growers’] contributions can finally be measured, supported and championed. These are businesses that not only create jobs and drive local growth, but also enhance biodiversity and support more sustainable land use.’

Flowers from the Farm recently exhibited at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show. Georgie Newbery, the chair of Flowers from the Farm, said: 'Getting this SIC code means that not only can we prove how much flower growers are putting into the British economy but that we're in a position to be acknowledged and encouraged by government, because we finally exist.

'The most important thing is that we can now look at the biodiversity net gain protocol, which will give us protection. The SIC code also allows us to lobby for more, and if we can lobby for more, then it will be much, much clearer for consumers that the flowers that they are buying are British-grown.'

In theory, this will result in fresher, longer-lasting flowers for consumers, making eco-friendly choices more viable and a greater variety of flowers available. Because of this, services like LORE, by The Real Flower Company, a new monthly subscription that deals in cut flowers, will benefit massively from these changes.

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

Sebastian Fenwick stands next to his bed at Shilstone House in Devon. Relatively unremarkable at first glance, you might think, but not once you discover that this elegant creation was designed by the architect Sir Edwin Lutyens, one of the most celebrated architects of the 20th century.

Inspiration for it came from the bed in The Dream of St Ursula, painted by Vittore Carpaccio in 1497–98. This is one in a series of nine paintings depicting the saint’s legend that the artist originally created for the Scuola di Sant’Orsola, Venice, Italy.

There are several versions of St Ursula’s legend. She was the daughter of a Christian king — some claim her as British — who was murdered with her 11,000 virgin companions. According to the 13th-century Golden Legend by Jacobus de Voragine, the angel of the dream foretold her martyrdom.

‘One of Lutyens’s daughters was called Ursula,’ explains Mr Fenwick, ‘and I understand there is a pair of children’s Ursula beds at her old home in Northumberland.

'Lutyens also had an Ursula bed at his home in London,' he continues. 'My grandmother, Violet, who inherited her father’s habit of buying and building houses, commissioned Lutyens to design and enlarge Temple Dinsley, Hertfordshire.

'They became good friends and Lutyens was made godfather to her eldest son, my father. This bed was his christening present to him and I continue to sleep happily in it to this day.

'Shilstone, which I and my wife, Lucy, designed and built, takes inspiration from Lutyens’s work and is a testament to my admiration for his attention to detail and eye for the aesthetic.’

This feature originally appeared in the June 3, 2026, print edition of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe. Visit Shilstone's website to find out more.

After living in this west London Grade II-listed Georgian townhouse for a few years, the owners decided to undertake a top-to-bottom renovation and enlisted the help of Studio Squire.

The lower floor, which is home to the kitchen and dining room, required a reconfiguration to make it work more efficiently for their family of five. ‘My clients love entertaining and think nothing of having 16 over for lunch on a Saturday,’ explains Studio Squire’s co-founder Angelica Squire, who was introduced to the couple through mutual friends. ‘A big part of the brief was to make this room feel cosy, comfortable and liveable.’

Working with such a generous space, she admits, made decorating ‘easy’. The couple already owned lots of good-looking pieces, but some of the upholstery had been subjected to the wear and tear of young children and pets.

Their mid-century armchairs (above) were re-covered in a green printed linen Pineapple Thread by Soane Britain. An ottoman is now in a warm terracotta velvet and the sofa opposite is in a stripe by Guy Goodfellow. Above the latter is a wall sconce by Fiona McDonald.

‘This room lends itself to the existing layout, and it felt almost sacrilegious to remove everything and start again,’ says Angelica. On the floor is a jute rug by Peter Page.

Together with her client, she sourced the print by Tom Hammick, which hangs over the fireplace. It brings jolts of colour into the room. ‘We didn’t want to hang curtains and simply used the existing shutters instead — it not only keeps the room looking youthful and unfussy, but also helps to frame the garden views and draw in colour from outside.’

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

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.

Get 51 issues of Country Life for £150 and save more than 40% with our best offer ever — exclusive to the Chelsea Flower Show.

Receive a bottle of The Grange Classic Sparkling NV (RRP £39) when you subscribe at the stand (PW215, until May 23, offer available to the first 200 UK subscribers).

There are some hotels designed for splendid seclusion with vast televisions for all-day movie marathons, accompanied by room service on repeat. If that kind of luxury is what you’re looking for, well… I hate to break it to you, but the Zetter group’s newest creation — its first in more than a decade — is not for you.

‘We’ve been quite brave,’ says James Thurstan Waterworth, founder of interior design studio Thurstan, which has overseen the redevelopment of six Georgian townhouses into one hotel. ‘We’ve taken out almost all the TVs.’

Such a move is, he admits, ‘a bit of a gamble. I’ve designed everything around the hope that people want to experience their surroundings while they’re here.’ There is, of course, much to see and do in WC1, from gaze at the chocolate-box townhouses of its Georgian squares to visiting its galleries and institutions, the zenith of which is surely the British Museum — mere strides from the Zetter. (In fact, the hotel’s garden wall borders it.)

The museum, home to around eight million objects, has been a lodestar in James’s design process for the hotel. It has been a joy, he explains, to wander its galleries for research — and it’s why the Zetter’s communal spaces and 58 bedrooms and suites are as genuinely eclectic and globally inspired as they are, filled with African and Oceanic pieces, Asian decorative art and more. Cleverly peppered throughout, paintings from the post-war period pay homage to another local inspiration, the late Howard Hodgkin’s studio.

Anyone familiar with Thurstan will know there is a heavy accent on antiques in the studio’s work. Contriving a conversation between historical design and contemporary contexts is, James believes, the most reliable route to genuine atmospheric texture — layering at its most successful. He thinks he has bought more than 1,000 antiques for this project, 2,000 if you count the textiles, sourced all over, from the UK’s rural antiques fairs (Shepton Mallet and Kempton are favourites) to Parma’s Mercanteinfiera by way of auction houses and choice dealers (James cites Will Green among his favourites).

James had already worked with Zetter’s owner (they bought the group in 2021), but this time round was entrusted with overseeing a hotel’s creative direction more broadly, from branding to the website to the entire guest journey. Without the trust and total freedom he has been afforded, James says, ‘all that would have been impossible, not least from a purchasing point of view.’ And it’s easy to see why this is true.

James has been involved with Zetter Bloomsbury from the hard-hat days, almost five years ago, when builders were busy knocking what were two hotels, spread across the six buildings, into one. Even before the rooms themselves had taken shape, he was busy stocking his antiques arsenal, conscious that the auctioneer’s gavel waits for no man. ‘When you see something good, you have to get it,’ he says, ‘even if you’re not quite sure what you’ll do with it.’ Recently, with Thurstan’s 325 square metre storage unit bursting at the seams, the Zetter project was afforded its own depository — and it is only now, as James and his team work towards final installation ahead of opening, that he is working out exactly what will go where.

It’s a process that reminds him of his early days working at Soho House two decades ago, a company for which he would eventually serve as European design director. Working on hotels, they would install instinctively and in situ, a process he found totally ‘invigorating — and a great reminder that overthinking leads to sterility. You have to be able to react to a space, to see how things work, or don’t.’ The idea that you could buy a rug four years in advance and never play with where it might live feels wrong-headed to James, removing spontaneity — and therefore spirit — from the process.

Naturally, with experimentation such as this comes the possibility of disappointment — one of the inherent challenges of sourcing antiques. James is all too familiar with the realisation upon receiving textiles bought at auction that their condition is not quite as described, just as he is with so-called scale fails, recalling the excitement of winning an 18th-century oak chest of drawers that was to become a ‘perfect’ bedside table, only to discover, too late, that it was six inches tall, likely made by an apprentice to showcase their skills. While miniature furniture is destined only for a doll’s house, at least slices of moth-eaten rugs can be salvaged, with a bit of imagination, for cushions and the like.

Such ingenuity is, in fact, a key quality for an antique hunter — and James’s own has served him well in this project. When it came to the bar at Zetter, for instance, James was adamant he wanted something vintage, but after trawling and trawling, he had to admit defeat. Nothing beautiful was big enough. Then he had an idea: why not recreate something? Searching his stores, he lit upon an 18th-century chinoiserie cabinet which he redesigned on a grand scale before taking it to decorative crafts specialists Faberby Studio, who over the course of 18 months painstakingly replicated the original’s craquelured lacquer. Another invention with which James is particularly pleased are the lampshades he fashioned from a 19th-century mosquito net that had been lying around the Thurstan offices ‘with no purpose in mind whatsoever’.

While there is a multiculturalism to Thurstan’s design language, James has also been careful to source lots of English — specifically Georgian — pieces for this project, underscoring the tonal shift that the opening of Zetter Bloomsbury heralds. Where the group’s older hotels in Clerkenwell and Marylebone have a more Victorian design vocabulary (rich colours, heavy drapery, sumptuous upholstery), James has begun to shape a ‘loose Georgian townhouse concept’ for the brand. The emphasis, he explains, is on ‘loose’: he feels strongly that slavishness is to be avoided at all costs, not least as the 18th-century collectors he has held in his mind while dreaming up these schemes ‘would have had pieces from across all eras’.

Crucial to the concept’s success is, James believes, ‘a sense of fun’, but there’s a need for flexibility too; as the interior designer says: ‘Antiques do break’. Happily, his client understands that ‘one or two might fall by wayside’ over time. ‘I don’t mean to be blasé,’ James says simply, ‘just realistic. Things will change.’ Of course much at Zetter Bloomsbury has been designed with practicality in mind, but James’s biggest priority — and challenge — has been to make these considerations feel invisible. ‘We have treated this project exactly as we would someone’s house,’ James says. ‘That’s what makes a room feel truly comfortable.’

Of course there have been friction points — fabrics have to be fire-treated, and for every well-worn beauty there’s a workhorse of a sofa that can handle the weight and wear of ‘ten people a day, 365 days a year’ — but you wouldn’t know, such is the emphasis on individuality that runs through every space. ‘I don’t want people to feel that they’re in just another hotel room,’ James says when asked what he hopes people will feel when they visit. ‘I want the things that surround them to spark a conversation. I want people to know where they are, rooted in place and time.’ It’s a tall order for a hotel, but when each room is a jewel box all its own, it feels possible. Inside each one — part sanctuary, part salon, pure Thurstan — I’m willing to bet you won’t miss those televisions.

Click here to read Will Hosie's full review of The Zetter Bloomsbury.