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
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
The camera can lie. Visiting gardens is not the straight-forward business it would seem to be, and I don’t like to think of the number of wasted days I have had travelling full of anticipation to see some second-rate garden … Continue reading
The gardening professions divide into two occasionally hostile camps, the horticulturalists and the designers, and what is one’s cup of nectar is often the other’s draught of poison. At its most extreme it is an obsession with new cultivars which … Continue reading
What a tantalising thought. Putting together the two greatest masters of landscape in a single garden; but Andre Le Notre met his maker in 1700 sixteen years before Lancelot Capability Brown was even born. However this novel idea comes closest … Continue reading
I think of the ‘Japanese’ gardens that my clients from time to time have asked me to design as a bit of exotica to jazz up an English garden. A curved granite bridge over a stream, a bank of hostas, … Continue reading