Through much of my life, Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown has been just a few steps away from me……….I wonder how true this is for other people? Whilst a boy, I would pull my father’s golf trolley around Belton Park in Lincolnshire, … Continue reading
It was a trip to see my old friend Gerhard and time on my hands that led me to the Karl Foerster Garden in Potsdam-Bornim a short train ride from Berlin. It’s a journey that can easily be combined with … Continue reading
Having practised for many years as a garden designer and also being such an avid garden visitor I am often asked what makes a good garden. It is much more complex than it might at first appear. Certainly … Continue reading
The Alhambra is Spain’s top tourist attraction, and although this covers a large hilltop site overlooking Granada, it is the three intact Nasrid palaces that the visitors head for. Surprisingly these are a series of small and intimate but … Continue reading
We get glimpses of what the past was like from what remains today, whether it is Bath’s Georgian crescents, Capability Brown’s landscapes, Hampstead Garden Suburb and Letchworth or the post-war New Towns. In all of these examples there was a … Continue reading
Great Dixter was one of those beautiful Jekyll-inspired gardens when I first visited, a close relative in garden style to neighbouring Sissinghurst, but then in the late 1980s something remarkable happened. Tall stems of sultry yellow verbascum, like an invading … Continue reading