The remarkable thing about St James’s Park is not its undoubted charm but the fact that it has over five million visitors a year yet still looks fresh and well-kept, a tribute to the Royal Parks. The sense of tranquillity … Continue reading
Someone interested in gardens and gardening would have found it difficult to avoid the television obsession with garden makeover programmes. As a starting point the garden team sends a family away for a couple of weeks. The garden is then … Continue reading
At last, it looks as if the final part of this great jigsaw is about to fall into place. Stowe was a garden that always irritated and disappointed me. Undoubtedly it has the finest collection of 18th century temples, follies, … Continue reading
I have always thought that there was something curiously contemporary about the Water Garden at Studley Royal. It seems to have more in common with modern British landscapes than with Le Notre’s work at Versailles or Chantilly built just a … Continue reading
I have to admit I write about gardens I have been to several times, gardens that excite and inspire me, and ignore the numerous ones that don’t. Earlier in the year I came away from a garden feeling even more … Continue reading
April is a wonderful time to visit Seville. In the two weeks after Easter, the weather has become more settled, the temperatures are in the comfortable upper 20s, the wisteria, judas trees and acacias are at their best, but also … Continue reading
My visit to the Gower Peninsula started well. A long hilly and winding single track road led through the dappled light of mature beech and oak woodland, still wonderfully green in early August. There’s a lot to be said for … Continue reading
‘Not since Central Park opened in 1857 has a park reshaped New Yorkers’ thinking about public space and the city more profoundly.’ New York Times 20 September 2014 … Continue reading
Wearing one of my other hats, I serve on the committee of an amenity society for one of the inner London boroughs. Our job is to vet planning applications and pass on that advice to the planning officers and planning … Continue reading
I feel a bit embarrassed that on my trip to Japan I was only able to see a couple of the gardens of Tokyo, when in fact there are over thirty, many dating from the Edo period (1600-1867), some others … Continue reading
An organised garden tour is a bit of a mixed bag. You see many more gardens in the time available and have a helpful well-informed guide but the disadvantages are that you’re hurried, and often haven’t time to take all … Continue reading
Passing through deep-cut narrow Surrey lanes winding through tunnels of beech woodland, my first memory on arriving at Vann was of being confronted by a 12 year old boy whizzing round on a tractor, cutting the car park’s long meadow … Continue reading
Beside the Grotto at Vaux le Vicomte can be found a pair of allegorical stone statues of a lion protecting a squirrel. The lion was meant to represent Louis XIV, the tiny squirrel Nicolas Fouquet (whose name in … Continue reading
After an absence of six years, this was my second visit to Vergelegen, and I am always encouraged and excited to see a garden where new developments have taken place and the garden is still evolving; but this is also … Continue reading
How can a garden be so famous yet so little understood, be so vulgar and so magnificent at the same time, and be a symbol of overwhelming power yet so ravishingly intimate? Versailles somehow manages to be all of these … Continue reading
It’s a strange sensation when you study the face of someone who’s fallen asleep. You sense that although they are physically with you, they are not really there. It reminds me of when I was a small child lifting my … Continue reading
I cannot help but feel a certain sympathy for the French royal family. After Louis XIV created the absolute monarchy and centralised all the power at Versailles the pressures of state resting on the shoulders of one man, the king, … Continue reading
Italians just don’t get it. At the inappropriately named Villa Adriana (more the size of a city than a villa) the stifling bureaucracy of the Italian State manages, but not quite succeeds in strangling something that is hauntingly beautiful. Getting … Continue reading
The most remarkable thing about my hotel on the outskirts of Frascati was to see the walls lined with dozens of period garden engravings. Expecting Villa d’Este to have the greatest prominence, I was surprised to find it eclipsed by … Continue reading
I had always wanted to see the gardens of Lake Como and it came as a surprise, on a weekend trip to Milan, to find that I was only 35 minutes from Como by train. This proved to be an … Continue reading
For too long I have been pussyfooting around avoiding the big beasts of the garden world. Time to man up, Richard. Villa d’Este is to my mind Italy’s finest, and one of the world’s greatest gardens, and words and pictures … Continue reading
Villa Lante is one of the best-known Italian gardens, famed for its iconic ‘water-chain’ cascade, and the identical small stylish Palladian palazzine that sit to either side of the main axis of the garden. Of all the gardens around Rome … Continue reading
In Jacque Tati’s hilarious film ‘Playtime’, Monsieur Hulot, the buffoon hero parodies the house as a machine for living. The owners of a gadget-ridden house are baffled by its technology, which M. Hulot manages to cause to malfunction, all to … Continue reading
A few years ago, I visited Bilbao, and I found almost as much delight in seeing Jeff Koons’ subversive and witty giant ‘Puppy’, as I did from the setting of Frank Gehry’s famously sculptural Guggenheim Museum. Koons plumbs the … Continue reading
I am a huge fan of garden author and broadcaster Marylynn Abbott, and her garden near Basingstoke is one of my favourites, a great garden upon which she has stamped her flamboyant personality. It is a breath of fresh air, … Continue reading
Rising sea levels, and the changing patterns of our more unpredictable weather are already presenting us with a dilemma – to what extent do we try to fight nature, such as holding back incoming surge tides at The Thames Barrier … Continue reading
Sometimes a garden delights and irritates in equal measure, and none more so than Wollerton Old Hall. When a smallish private garden with limited opening times allows the public to visit, it seems somehow churlish not to be nice. … Continue reading
It should all be so easy. Much of the attraction of places like Hidcote is that visitors can relate to the scale and planting of the Arts and Crafts ‘rooms’ and copy and transpose them into their own smaller gardens. … Continue reading