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
When I first saw the Howardian Hills, that area of outstanding natural beauty with its distant views of the blue horizon and big skies I thought this was landscape perfection. Not for me the scraggy mountains of the Lake District … 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