Alan Titchmarsh

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

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

Charlotte Harris

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

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

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

Arne Maynard

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

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

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

Isabel Bannerman

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

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

Fergus Garrett

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

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

Jo Thompson

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

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

Tom Stuart-Smith

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

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

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

Angel Collins

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

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

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

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

Tilly Ware

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

Tilly Ware is a garden writer and Country Life contributor

Charles Quest-Ritson

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

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

Mary Keen

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

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

Rupert Golby

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

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

Polly Nicholson

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

Polly Nicholson is curating an exhibition on tulips at the Garden Museum, London SE1, opening March 2027

Bloms Bulbs — 01234 709099; blomsbulbs.com

J Parker’s — 0161–848 1100; dutchbulbs.co.uk

De Jager — 01622 840299; dejager.co.uk

Jacques Amand International — jacquesamandintl.com

Sarah Raven — 0345 092 0283; sarahraven.com

Avon Bulbs — 07425 833906; avonbulbs.co.uk

Peter Nyssen — 0161–747 4000; peternyssen.com

Scamp’s Bulbs — 07826 067175; www.scampsbulbs.co.uk

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

Layered look 


Prints and plains can be combined to create an attractive layered effect: curtains and ottoman in Nori Ochre, £86 per metre, with chairs in Emile Copper velvet, £90 per metre and cushions in Leon Stripe Green, £92 per metre, all from Jane Churchill.

Classical accent 


The six-inch-diameter Tracery velvet rosette with floral motif, from the Velaré collection by Samuel & Sons, features embroidery, cutwork and appliqué. Each rosette costs £138 and can be used to add decorative embellishment to upholstery and soft furnishings, including cushions.

Decorative appeal

Floral brass castings sit beneath each wicker shade and crown the central stem of the Edith chandelier, resulting in a Parisian-inspired flourish. Shown here in Indian Red, it costs from £4,998 for the large size from Porta Romana.

Rug and roll

Julian Chichester is launching his debut rug collection in collaboration with Amy Kent Rugs, drawing inspiration from his favourite Tapa barkcloth designs from the Pacific Islands, which traditionally feature patterns in black and rust-brown dyes. The Harvest rug costs £845 per square metre.

Lighting the way

A pierced brass ring and pagoda top add to the decorative appeal of the Artemis lantern from Hector Finch. It costs £4,158 for the large size in Verdigris finish and is suitable for indoor and outdoor undercover use.

Star attraction

Fabric and wallpaper house Zoffany will be hosting a pop-up at Focus/26 in partnership with interiors brand Sharland England, featuring its indoor-outdoor collection of fabrics produced with celebrated American interior designer Michael S. Smith.

The collection includes Kyoto Stripe, Lily Stripe and Thorny Vine, from £134 per metre.

A parallel career

Alongside creating an evolving collection of lighting and furniture of enormous stylistic depth and breadth with his wife, Lucy, Michael Vaughan is also a talented painter whose work has been exhibited in New York and London.

A new exhibition of his recent work, ‘Two Experimental Years 2024–2026’, opens at No 11 Avenue Studios, Sydney Mews, London, on September 24–25, 12pm–7pm, and then on September 26, 11am–1pm.

Moveable feast

Made from solid brass with a fluted glass shade, the Cotswold rechargeable table lamp can be moved around the home with ease — without trailing wires. It has a touch-dim function and costs from £174 from Corston Architectural Detail.

Glossy good looks

The tapered, high-gloss base of the Malmo table lamp in Cocoa pairs elegantly with its wide shade in Almond Cream to create a striking look. The lamp costs £288 with shade, from £174, by David Hunt Lighting.

The wonder of wool

The Rannoch Wools collection from Osborne & Little includes wool checks and geometric patterns in a palette of soft neutrals, heathered tones and rich earthy colours that have been inspired by the Scottish landscape. Prices from £105 per metre.

Chelsea calling

Head to the London Design Social on September 23–24 to meet the creative people behind an enticing collection of boutique fabric, wallpaper and homewares brands, including Parker & Jules, Barneby Gates, Eadie & Crole and Speronella Marsh.

Explore their designs and enjoy talks by celebrated design experts at Chelsea Old Town Hall, King’s Road, London. Visit The Design Social website for more details and to purchase tickets, from £27.33.

Antiques in Colour

At Westland London, five distinguished designers demonstrate how thoughtfully considered colour can transform the way we experience antiques and enhance their enduring relevance in today’s interiors.

From left to right, below, Henriette von Stockhausen (VSP Interiors), Edward Bulmer, Marco Mansi, Aliénor Cros and Darren Price (ADAM Architecture) have each designed their own gallery space, using pieces from the company’s expansive antique collections, with each room focusing on a distinct historical period.

The designers will be in conversation with Country Life's Executive and Interiors Editor Giles Kime on September 24, 6pm, at Westland London, No 295 Willesden Lane, London, discussing Antiques in Colour: The Role of Colour in Reimagining Interiors. Tickets are free of charge.

To secure a place, please email nicole@rawlinsgeorge.co.uk

Focus/26 on Design

The annual interior-design event takes place at the Design Centre, Chelsea Harbour, London, on September 14–18 and offers an opportunity to enjoy talks and view the latest launches from a host of leading brands that do not exhibit anywhere else in the UK.

Everyone is welcome and entry is free of charge. For the full time-table and details, visit the Design Centre website.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Find more about Wakehurst and Kew at the Kew website.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who would have thought that a mirror could have sex appeal? Historic paint expert and interior designer Edward Bulmer does — at least when it comes to the Drawing Room at Northumberland House, which he calls a ‘sexy mix of mirror, gilt and sparkling coloured glass’. What survives today is only a fragment of the Percy family’s opulent London residence, saved from ‘the wrecking ball’, as he puts it, that destroyed the rest and now preserved at the V&A Museum, London SW7.

Even in partial form, these mirrors retain a powerful charge. It is easy to imagine the social choreography that once unfolded within the room. Under candlelight, a glance could be caught, angled and returned in many ways; a fan flickered; an eyebrow raised. Mirrors create, as historian Sabine Melchior-Bonnet puts it, a ‘fictive space in which an imaginary scenario is played out’, a setting for a game of love and ‘seduction’, or war and peace, as the case may be.

Elsewhere, the looking-glass was employed as a tool of restraint. In her memoir Wait for Me!, Deborah, Duchess of Devonshire recalled the hours spent training to be a debutante, learning how ‘to stand still, to sit still, and not to fidget — which was far harder than it sounds’. Here, the mirror was less an object of admiration than a quiet instructor in composure. ‘Mirrors have always shaped social behaviour,’ concurs Rupert Bevan, a leading specialist in antique mirrors and glass. ‘Today, they still subtly choreograph how people gather, pause or orient themselves, especially in transition spaces such as halls, staircases and drawing rooms.’

That choreography, however, was once reserved for the few. In the 18th century, long before electricity, a large piece of glass was a feat of engineering and a declaration of wealth: sheets of Venetian and, later, French glass were carried across Europe at vast expense. Consequently, as Bulmer explains, ‘the amount of mirrored glass you owned was a very obvious status signal, just as with the number and quality of candles you burnt’. In the ‘Mirror Room’ at Kensington Palace in London — the colloquial name for The King’s Gallery and adjoining Cupola Room, used for receptions, audiences and courtly display — mirrors became instruments of power, rather than decoration. They were designed to extend space, broadcast wealth and double the presence of courtiers, uniforms and jewellery. Visitors saw not only themselves, but their place within society, reinforced by the deliberate placing of a mirror.

Mirrors were positioned not for private vanity, but to amplify light and sociability. Most commonly, they appeared as pier glasses, set between windows to catch and return daylight or candlelight, doubling brightness and extending space. Others rose magnificently as overmantels, integrated above chimneypieces and treated as part of the wall architecture itself, or on the back of shutters to create one long, extended sparkling scheme. As furniture dealer and interior designer Jermaine Gallacher wrote tellingly in Vogue: ‘A mirror should be more than the surface we pass by.’ In short, they remain one of the most powerful ways to shape a space.

How they were framed also mattered. According to furniture historian Adam Bowett, by the early 18th century, the grand frames of looking-glasses had become architectural constructions in their own right, designed to organise rooms and animate social life, rather than simply surround glass.

Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire provides a classic example. Here, the effect of the magnificent Baroque pier-glass mirrors in the State Rooms was not about intimacy, but command. The visitor is made acutely aware of space, symmetry and order — the visual language of governance — thanks in large part to the ornate frames designed by the Duchess of Marlborough’s ‘oracle’, as she called him, the royal cabinetmaker James Moore. His authority lay not in signatures, which were rare, but in scale, patronage and recognition. Even Thomas Chippendale did not routinely sign his work, despite regarding mirror frames as among his most prestigious and costly commissions. Nevertheless, as Bulmer points out, ‘account books of the period frequently show glass having cost well in excess of the fancy carved frames it was set in’.

Sir Alastair Pilkington, who invented the float-glass process in the 1950s, effectively democratised what was once a rare luxury. Bulmer reveals that he tends to allow for a mirror in most rooms, because ‘they are cost-efficient in terms of providing incident at scale compared with large pictures — and, of course, they suit most tastes’.

As furniture-maker Jonathan Sainsbury observes, an 18th-century country house was designed from the outset to accept the furniture, mirrors and objects fashionable at the time. ‘What’s interesting is that the same thinking has returned,’ he reflects. Those tastes now seem ever-more oriented towards mirrors, thanks to a new wave of post-covid, post-crypto country-house buyers faced with acres of spare wall space. ‘Mirrors have become very important items,’ believes Charlie Thomas, UK group director at Bonhams. ‘They are seen to work as functional art and add to the atmosphere.’ This is particularly the case if the glass is foxed.

This type of glass, which mists over time and was once dismissed as flawed, is now prized as a trophy: it is seen as proof of age, lineage and survival, with a frisson of ghost-story glamour. ‘An antiqued mirror gives a much more subtle and soft look, with character and a feeling of warmth,’ explains Bevan. ‘The effect is more organic, with not one panel the same.’ In effect, it re-creates the softness of candle-light on glass, a quality that remains flattering in an age of mobile-phone selfies. Where once a raised eyebrow caught in a mirror might convey a message across a room, today, that image can travel far beyond it via social media. ‘The rise of the selfie has perhaps heightened self-awareness, but, in refined interiors, mirrors tend to soften rather than sharpen self- consciousness, offering atmosphere rather than confrontation,’ Bevan believes.

A renewed appetite for mirrors sits alongside a broader shift in thinking: a growing determination to preserve great country houses in their entirety, rather than carving them up. This inevitably brings fresh attention to how their walls, rooms and sequences once worked together.

When Nick Ashley-Cooper, 12th Earl of Shaftesbury, unexpectedly inherited both his title and St Giles House, his ancestral home in Dorset, he was DJing in New York. The house had been left derelict for decades. Working with his neighbour Sainsbury, a specialist in historically accurate mirrors, he came to regard them not as decorative afterthoughts, but as integral to the identity of the house and the way its rooms functioned. The originals had long since been sold and were ‘arguably the finest English mirrors of their type ever made,’ believes Sainsbury. ‘It became clear that, for the rooms to function properly again, the mirrors would need to be made identically for their original locations,’ he adds. This marks another shift in the social life of mirrors. ‘Replica’, once a pejorative, is no longer a dirty word.

If mirrors affect the behaviour of a room and its contents, so, too, do they influence the behaviour of those within it. In the 18th century, to be polished was not merely to be well dressed, but to be socially refined, a word that draws directly on the physical act of polishing surfaces, glass among them. Think of a glance adjusted, a posture corrected, a gesture softened. For servants, however, mirrors were among the most difficult household objects to clean. The 19th-century servant diarist Hannah Cullwick repeatedly recorded having to wipe away soot after evenings of company, together with the pride taken in producing a shine.

Mirrors also have a habit of misbehaving. By candlelight, reflections could waver or double; a face might appear where none was expected. It is hardly surprising that they slipped easily into ghost stories. In many houses, mirrors were traditionally covered with sheets during periods of mourning and were rarely placed opposite beds, lest they weaken the spirit or invite restless dreams. At Blickling Hall, Norfolk, where Anne Boleyn’s ghost is said to return, sightings are often described as fleeting and indirect: figures glimpsed in mirrors or glass, rather than confronted face to face. At Glamis Castle in Angus, Scotland, the Earl of Strathmore once ordered a mirror be boarded over altogether after a spirit was said to be trapped within it.

If such unease clung to mirrors in some places, Sir John Soane positively revelled in it. At his home, now Sir John Soane’s Museum, London WC2, he played with reflection and visual illusion impishly, placing mirrors above bookshelves and within arches so that rooms appear to open where none exist. Visitors still ask guides how to reach these phantom spaces. Here, the mirror’s ghostly tricks are used for wit, creating a deliciously labyrinthine sense of depth in a remarkably small house. In doing so, Soane neatly demonstrated the late Duchess of Devonshire’s belief that ‘a house must be full of light, movement and people if it is to feel alive’.

Mirrors, after all, keep rooms animated even after their occupants have left — whether the legacy they leave behind is ghostly, theatrical or, indeed, a rather provocative one

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When the new tenant of this house on the Blenheim estate in Oxfordshire engaged the team at Blyth-Collinson Interiors, he had a very specific brief, says founder Saskia Blyth. ‘His instruction to me was that, with the exception of beds, fabrics and towels, nothing else could be bought new. He wanted to walk into the house and feel as if it had been around forever.’

Armed with a guideline of colours from her client, Blyth set to work. The deep electric blue (main image) was inspired by a photograph spotted in a book; it was mixed on site and applied by decorative painter Will Foster.

Other colour transformations include a study where all the walls and the ceiling are painted black, green lacquer in the dining room and a hallway in rust. The generous sofa here (main image) was sourced by the decorator, who had it upholstered in an oatmeal-coloured Belgian linen. Over the top are several rugs and blankets that were found in various markets and antique shops.

The coffee table was made bespoke by FRD. The Dorset-based designer, who established his workshop in the mid 1980s and produced designs for Sibyl Colefax & John Fowler, is described by Blyth as ‘the best metal-worker known to man’. The top of the table is made of polished brass with a hammered effect on the surrounding sides. Either side of the sofa are lamps by Vaughan. The table against the wall was a family piece and the blue lamp was found at Guinevere. At the windows is a pair of curtains in a heavy red velvet from de Le Cuona (all main image).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In an increasingly digital, mechanised world, it’s hard to resist anything that bears the mark of slow and considered craftsmanship and deep cultural symbolism.

Traditional Kuba cloth, a distinctive, graphic textile from the Congo region, is a fine example, admired by designers for its abstract pattern and textural beauty, which can be layered into rooms as wall hangings and cushions.

Hand woven from local raffia palm fibre — split into fine strips — on hand-operated looms using centuries-old techniques, Kuba cloth is known for its bold, geometric and often intricate design. Vegetable dyes enliven the natural tawny colours of the fibre.

There are two main types: flatwoven cloths with embroidery or appliqué and cut-pile ‘velvet’ cloths. The result offers a window on Africa’s rich textile history and specifically the artistic legacy of the Kuba Kingdom, which flourished from the 17th to the 19th centuries in Central Africa, now the heart of today’s Democratic Republic of Congo.

Made for everything from sleeping mats to prestige pieces, as well as ceremonial and funerary attire, Kuba cloth has had a lasting influence on art and design and is widely considered a precursor to modern abstract art. Henri Matisse (1869–1954) acquired examples of Kuba cloth and he is said to have remarked: ‘I never tire of looking at them for long periods of time, even the simplest of them, and waiting for something to come to me from the mystery of their instinctive geometry.’

Some early examples of Kuba cloth still exist, as Bryan Reeves of gallery Tribal Gathering London explains. ‘Although things made from fibre don’t last forever, it is still possible to find late-19th-century pieces,’ he says. ‘They have the distinctive geometric quality, as well as a lovely sense of movement and a free-flowing design, less structured than later pieces, which is what I look for.’ Reeves recommends reading Weaving Abstraction: Kuba Textiles and the Woven Art of Central Africa by Vanessa Drake Moraga (The Textile Museum).

Recently, the striking, graphic quality has inspired contemporary designs, such as printed cushions by Raj Tent Club, linen by Titley and Marr and cotton by Warwick Fabrics. Yet, Kuba cloth remains a deeply artisanal product, woven on traditional hand looms and finished with layered surface decoration to create the distinctively graphic result.

The demand for Kuba cloth in modern interiors is helping to preserve the techniques of its craftsmanship, as Ben Nel, co-founder of Botanical Boys explains. ‘Every cushion sold helps keep this weaving tradition alive,’ he says. ‘You can feel the hand in every thread — a kind of soul no machine will ever copy.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Visit the Auckland Project website to find out more.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Having picked up the keys to what Studio Vero’s co-founder, Romanos Brihi, describes as a ‘white box’, his client felt rather underwhelmed by her purchase. ‘It felt as if it could’ve been anywhere in the world,’ he says. ‘What she wanted was somewhere with warmth, comfort and character.’

His solution was twofold: to soften the existing space by introducing architectural focal points and to source elements that would give the apartment a sense of place that rooted it to its location in the historic heart of London.

The oak bookcase was designed to fit around various panels required to access services such as the air conditioning. Described by Brihi as ‘a wall of interest’, it took its cue from the work of the Italian architect Gio Ponti. The team at Ultimate Library was commissioned to curate a selection of books that would reflect the interests of the well-travelled owner. ‘We also added mouldings to the walls, which helps to give the apartment its own distinct identity.’

The dining table, with a solid-oak top, was also designed in house and made by Treeslounge. The dining chairs, with their cane backs, are by the Danish mid-century furniture designer Niels Møller. Above hangs a pendant from the American lighting designers Urban Electric.

On the right-hand wall is a work by Leila Bartell from Tristan Hoare. ‘Then, we sourced lots of decorative accessories, ceramics and sculpture to bring in colour, texture and crafted details that would soften the formality and bring soul to the space,’ adds Brihi. ‘Ultimately, it’s a space that tells the client’s story; every element reflects the places and people that matter to her.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jersey-based interior designer Bryony Richardson describes this Grade II-listed property as ‘a chimera of a house’ that had evolved over the centuries.

The first section was constructed in the late 1580s and the most recent additions were made in the 1970s, allowing her to reconfigure the internal space extensively better to suit the family’s needs without disturbing the rest of the house.

This sitting room is in the oldest part of the property and, as a result, remains structurally untouched. ‘We wanted this room to be somewhere the family could retreat to in winter evenings or when a storm closes in on the islands,’ explains Richardson.

The inglenook fireplace takes centre stage. Above it hangs some ironmongery that was found hidden in the chimney, together with the collars of much-missed family dogs.

As the house sits in a slight hollow surrounded by established gardens and fields, the views of greenery and western sunsets helped shape the room’s colour scheme. The walls are covered in a woven-silk, paper-backed fabric by Phillip Jeffries in a colour that hovers between deep pink and orange.

The bespoke sofas were made by William Yeowardand upholstered in Linwood’s Omega stain-resistant velvet — ‘essential in a family with three labradors,’ says Richardson.

In between is a box table covered in a Pierre Frey bouclé. As the room is designed for entertaining, this can be easily pushed out of the way, and guests can perch on the club fender, too.

In the far corner stands a lamp from Vaughan inspired by 18th-century splatterware. Above is a television that sits in a frame made locally to simulate a painting when it’s in standby mode.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Charles Courtenay, 19th Earl of Devon, holds open a volume titled A catalogue of the honorable Sir William Courtenay’s library at Powderham-Castle Devon. It lists Classical texts, as well as books on topography, history, travel, medicine, law and antiquities.

Sir William, 3rd Baronet (and later 1st Viscount), who inherited Powderham in 1735, was a Jacobite and undertook major changes to the castle. As part of that work in 1740, two bookcases made of rosewood with inlaid brass were delivered to store some of his collection. They are now owned by the V&A Museum.

An engraved-brass plaque records that they were made by John Channon, a virtuoso London cabinetmaker who began his career in Exeter. Each bookcase is identified by a numeral and every shelf within it by a letter, allowing for the catalogue to record the precise location of particular books.

‘The recently rediscovered catalogue was probably compiled by the 1st Viscount himself,’ says the Earl, ‘and it offers an insight into his interests and enthusiasms.

'A country-house library of the early 18th century is a rarity and our new Powderham Unbound project, seed-funded by Historic Houses and supported by Exeter’s UNESCO City of Literature, aims to inform our understanding of it.

'The catalogue is not simply a record of our library’s past; it is a contemporary tool to understand its present significance and to inform its future.’

Courtesy Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Follow Powderham Heritage Foundation on Instagram.

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

Framed by spiky palms and overlooking the teal expanse of the Salcombe estuary in Devon, Overbeck’s, an Edwardian country house currently under renovation, harbours a secret that delighted me as a child.

Amid the curiosities collected by its eccentric owner was a hidden door. I remember the excitement of hunting for it and entering the dimly lit space beyond: a room with wall-to-wall dolls’ houses and petite proportions that were perfectly suited to a small child with a big imagination.

Decades later, my own children ran their tiny hands over the same dark-wood panels beneath the stairs, letting out appreciative squeals when they made their discovery.

Our country houses are brimming with hidden spaces, quickening the pulse of all those who learn their secret. Chavenage House in Gloucestershire, subject of the YouTube channel Life at the Manor and fictional home of the O'Hara family in the Disney+ adaptation of Dame Jilly Cooper's Rivals, has proved ‘full of surprises,’ notes James Lowsley-Williams — who inherited the Grade I-listed Elizabethan property in 2023.

One day, in a passage leading to a library and billiard room, he noticed a groove in the panelling behind a large Jacobean chest. When he pushed the panel, ‘it popped open’ to reveal a heavy steel door and a hidden room beyond that couldn’t be found on any of the plans.

‘The library was actually the dining room for the original 500-year-old house,’ he explains and, because in those days ‘every meal was candelabras and silver cutlery’, this windowless room was its silver safe. He had hoped to find ‘mountains of gold’ or some silverware at least, but he was met with dusty books and disused furnishings.

His grandfather had more luck in the attic, where a hidden room contained designs signed by George IV for the remodelling of Windsor Castle. He sold them to the Crown and the proceeds paid for Chavenage’s new roof.

Back in the 19th century, our fascination with the secrets hidden in country houses helped drive the trend for Gothic literature. As Allan Fea remarked in Secret Chambers and Hiding Places of about 1900: ‘In exploring the gloomy hiding-holes, concealed apartments, passages, and staircases in our old halls and manor houses we probe, as it were, into the very groundwork of romance.’

Edward Bulwer-Lytton, for example, drew on the trapdoors, hiding places and oubliettes of his ancestral home, Knebworth House, Hertfordshire, in The Haunted and the Haunters, in which the strange supernatural energy in the house is orchestrated from a room hidden beneath a hatch; whereas in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, the garret occupied by Mr Rochester’s deranged first wife was inspired by the hidden attic room believed to have housed ‘Mad Mary’ at Norton Conyers in North Yorkshire.

Of course, in most country houses, hidden doors and secret passages served a primarily functional role. At Harlaxton Manor in Lincolnshire, a hefty jib door in the carved-oak panelling connects the great hall to the state dining room, allowing servants to move with discretion as they undertook their daily tasks.

Such doors were also an aesthetic choice, preserving the symmetry of an ornate interior. Yet even practical features were sometimes imbued with a proprietor’s sense of fun. In a false bookcase in the library of Oxburgh Hall in Norfolk, for example, the 6th Baronet included a volume titled La Porte, hinting playfully at the room hidden beyond.

At Hever Castle, the secrets are constantly evolving. A discreetly hinged wall panel with holly and oak marquetry once provided access to a turret to launch surprise attacks on assailants. When the luxury-loving Lord Astor purchased the Kent castle in 1903, he saw no need for a defensive tower and hid something else behind the door more suited to his lifestyle: a cocktail cabinet.

This appetite for whimsy is still alive and well. Andrew Tolochko of Solid Carpentry, which creates bespoke designs for clients in the London area, has noted an increase in requests for hidden features. ‘For many, it’s their dream from childhood,’ he tells me, whereas others are inspired by James Bond. Projects include a mirror concealing a home office and a hinged bookcase opening onto a lift to private apartments.

‘When the door is closed, you’d never guess there is something behind it,’ he says. Some clients have security in mind and request hidden panic rooms or vaults. ‘It elevates the interior, but it also has a function,’ explains Tolochko, who believes that a hidden space helps a property stand out to buyers and can even increase its value.

Witley Park in Surrey is one such unforgettable property, its secret a testimony to the extraordinary imagination of its flamboyant former owner, the mining speculator and financier James Whitaker Wright. Beneath its lake, a glazed tunnel leads to a glass-domed underwater ballroom (now derelict), its apex marked by a statue of Neptune rising from the water. ‘Outside the clear crystal glass is a curtain of green water, and goldfish come and press their noses against the glass,’ reported the Royal Magazine in 1903.

Hidden spaces serving to save lives rather than impress visitors were no less creative. Baddesley Clinton in Warwickshire, where Anne Vaux and her sister Eleanor ran a safe house for Jesuits during the Reformation, has three priest hides or holes: in the roof, behind wood panelling and in a shaft leading to the sewers accessible only by rope.

The cleverly hidden spaces outsmarted the persecutors, who, she says, ‘behaved like a lot of boys playing blind man’s bluff, who, in their wild rush, bang into tables and chairs and walls and yet haven’t the slightest suspicion that their playfellows are right on top of them and almost touching them’.

During Oliver Cromwell’s pursuit of Royalists, these hides found a second life. At Boscobel House, Shropshire, Charles II sought refuge in one beneath the attic stairs — only fractionally more comfortable than the oak tree he famously hid in on the estate.

In times of conflict, knowing the secrets of a country house — its underground passages and hidden stairways — gave the owner power over their visitors. In some cases, that extended to eavesdropping on guests, particularly political rivals.

In the Great Hall of Edinburgh Castle, a metal grill to the right of a colonnaded fireplace is the only clue to a secret chamber beyond known as a ‘laird’s lug’ (lord’s ear), where James IV once listened in on his subjects. Centuries later, in 1984, this primitive wiretap would unsettle the KGB, who insisted it be bricked up when Soviet leader-to-be Mikhail Gorbachev visited.

There are some secluded spaces, however, that you’d rather not know about. ‘Horrific’ and ‘terrifying’ are the words Lowsley-Williams uses to describe a tiny room up a stone stairway discovered by his grandfather: a prison cell, with a stone seat and barred window, and reportedly haunted. The discovery of a disused boiler room was also inauspicious. ‘We cracked the padlock and went down and then found a mountainful of asbestos, so that wasn’t ideal,’ he admits.

For better or for worse, heritage properties continue to give up secrets that are sometimes centuries old. In 2023, conservation work at Johnstown Castle in Co Wexford, Ireland, revealed a mysterious circular room hidden behind a bricked-up wall in a tower and accessible only by boat.

It may be ‘a small turret bedroom’, the castle manager told the BBC. ‘We will need to investigate this further.’ Meanwhile, in the Cotswolds, Lowsley-Williams’s latest find in his 50-room home has also left him perplexed. ‘The question’s still out there,’ he tells me. ‘What do you do with an unused vault by your library? If any of your readers have any ideas, let me know.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Visit Renishaw Hall's website for opening times.

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

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.