The 'Gardening Beatle' did a spectacular job of reviving an historic alpine garden in the shadow of the 'Henley Matterhorn'. Now, his widow, Olivia, has enhanced what was Britain's largest rock garden with her exceptional and imaginative planting schemes, as Charles Quest-Ritson reports.
WHEN George Harrison bought Friar Park in January 1970, there was grass growing up through the floorboards. 'My God! What's he done?... look at it!' his sister in-law Irene exclaimed. As for the garden, she later observed that 'you didn't go for a walk without a machete in your hand to cut your way through'.
Few properties can have had so many advantages and disadvantages as this house on a hill above Henley-on-Thames in Oxfordshire. On the plus side, the former Beatle had found an estate of 30 acres, close to the town, but completely protected from it.
It was a place of privacy where he could concentrate on his career as a solo musician-the first thing he did was to build himself a recording studio. On the minus side was a crazy Gothic monster of a house, surrounded by a jungle of tree seedlings and brambles and an abandoned walled garden thick with glass from all the collapsed greenhouses. The house which captivated and amused Harrison would require years to repair. The garden needed complete re-making.
Harrison was 27 years old. His friend Derek Taylor remarked of Friar Park: 'It is a dream on a hill and it came, not by chance, to the right man at the right time.' Harrison had enjoyed gardening as a boy-planting and picking his own flowers-and, as an adult, plants appealed to his spiritual sensibilities.
He was particularly interested in trees and shrubs, visiting the Hillier Arboretum in Hampshire and the gardens of Cornwall.
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