All fired up: The garden at Gresgarth Hall, Caton, Lancashire The home of Sir Mark and Lady Lennox-Boyd

In a non-stop firework display of sulphurous yellow, flaming scarlet and glowing amber, this garden lights up the soul–and the autumn skies, reports Non Morris

- In a non-stop firework display of sulphurous yellow, flaming scarlet and glowing amber, this garden lights up the soul–and the autumn skies, reports Non Morris

MY new discovery is Berberis. They are very unpleasant to touch and you don’t want to look at them for most of the year, but, in the autumn, they are absolutely covered in fruit and turn orange, yellow and red—every colour imaginable.’

It is the beginning of November and the landscape designer Arabella Lennox-Boyd is sitting in her Lancashire studio. Directly below her, the rushing water of Artle Beck runs up to the walls of Gresgarth Hall, the castellated sandstone house that has been home to her and her husband, Sir Mark Lennox-Boyd, since 1978. On the opposite bank is a richly textured tapestry of carefully selected trees and shrubs in every shade of green, with sudden pools of coral or claret and dancing spatters of yellow.

She describes the end-of-year show, which starts with the glowing lakeside Cercidiphyllum japonicum, the first tree to colour, and continues to towering spires of liquidambar, the last to fire up in the inspirational 10 acres. There are glorious specimens of Cornus kousa—any that develop dark-burgundy leaves are much favoured and will be duly propagated—and magnolias that offer wonderfully buttery shades. Bridging the gap between the more structured parts of the garden closer to the house and the wilder feel as you move away from it is her ‘short avenue of tulip trees’: a light-catching glade of Liriodendron tulipifera, on the spreading branches of which thousands of butter-yellow tulip-shaped leaves shift and flutter in the breeze.