I feel very apprehensive, a bit like the little boy and the emperor’s lack of clothes, because I am about to commit a heresy – criticising Betto Chatto’s Gardens. As a garden designer, I know my ‘Anthriscus sylvestris Ravenswing’ from … Continue reading
When it comes to garden history and garden conservation; I am a lightweight. I am more interested in the feel of a garden, than the conservation of a broken down bit of wall with an empty plinth where a … Continue reading
I confess that the fashionable New Perennial Gardens don’t do a lot for me. They seem to be transitory will o’ the wisp things with no sense of time or place, that in our climate, where things grow eleven … Continue reading
For some years, I lived in the delightfully quaint hill town of Rye, with its mix of black-tarred timber warehouses, steep cobbled streets and half-timbered cottages; an island rising out of the Romney Marshes, that mysterious landscape of big skies, … Continue reading
My first visit to Kirstenbosch, some seven years ago, was something of a disaster. Driving from the opposite side of Cape Town, in warm sunshine with clear blue skies; a thick sea fog swept in, turning everything into grey gloom. … Continue reading
If Waddesdon Manor, Buckinghamshire’s other great Rothschild garden challenges my Arts and Crafts sensibilities with its glorification of the art of carpet-bedding, Ascott, I find to be a curious mismatch. Like Waddesdon, this is a house and garden where the … Continue reading