Belmont House, East Sussex
THIRTY years ago, the designer Anthony Paul created a pond and bridge for a client in Sussex and planted it with bold exotics, such as gunnera and yucca, adding strong colour punches with 10ft stands of bright yellow inula and the smaller yellow heart-leaved ox-eye daisy, Telekia speciosa. It was a striking installation, designed to be viewed across the lawn from the front of the house.
The years passed as Mr Paul built a career from his home in Dorking, Surrey, designing gardens across the world from France and Switzerland to Australia and America and gaining a reputation as someone with an artist’s eye who understood plants. These he used to paint the landscape with sweeping blocks of single plantings, working with an eye to the natural surroundings. At La Jeg in Provence, for example (COUNTRY LIFE, August 7, 2019), he evoked the local lavender fields by planting symmetrical rows of evergreens inside the garden. In a garden he made in his native New Zealand, the use of aloes and succulents planted into gravel echoed the wild flora.
Water became another signature component, as did the confident placement of contemporary sculpture. The latter was inspired by his wife, Hannah Peschar, for whom he brilliantly landscaped the garden at their Dorking home to create a backdrop for her important collection of modern sculpture.
Then, one day in 2012, the telephone rang. It was the Sussex client asking if Mr Paul could return: the garden was in need of some help. ‘The distribution of plants across the garden had not been properly considered and didn’t really suit the house, whereas the large walled garden had the potential to be more than a few vegetable beds and fruit trees.’
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Denne historien er fra September 16, 2020-utgaven av Country Life UK.
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Save our family farms
IT Tremains to be seen whether the Government will listen to the more than 20,000 farming people who thronged Whitehall in central London on November 19 to protest against changes to inheritance tax that could destroy countless family farms, but the impact of the good-hearted, sombre crowds was immediate and positive.
A very good dog
THE Spanish Pointer (1766–68) by Stubbs, a landmark painting in that it is the artist’s first depiction of a dog, has only been exhibited once in the 250 years since it was painted.
The great astral sneeze
Aurora Borealis, linked to celestial reindeer, firefoxes and assassinations, is one of Nature's most mesmerising, if fickle displays and has made headlines this year. Harry Pearson finds out why
'What a good boy am I'
We think of them as the stuff of childhood, but nursery rhymes such as Little Jack Horner tell tales of decidedly adult carryings-on, discovers Ian Morton
Forever a chorister
The music-and way of living-of the cabaret performer Kit Hesketh-Harvey was rooted in his upbringing as a cathedral chorister, as his sister, Sarah Sands, discovered after his death
Best of British
In this collection of short (5,000-6,000-word) pen portraits, writes the author, 'I wanted to present a number of \"Great British Commanders\" as individuals; not because I am a devotee of the \"great man, or woman, school of history\", but simply because the task is interesting.' It is, and so are Michael Clarke's choices.
Old habits die hard
Once an antique dealer, always an antique dealer, even well into retirement age, as a crop of interesting sales past and future proves
It takes the biscuit
Biscuit tins, with their whimsical shapes and delightful motifs, spark nostalgic memories of grandmother's sweet tea, but they are a remarkably recent invention. Matthew Dennison pays tribute to the ingenious Victorians who devised them
It's always darkest before the dawn
After witnessing a particularly lacklustre and insipid dawn on a leaden November day, John Lewis-Stempel takes solace in the fleeting appearance of a rare black fox and a kestrel in hot pursuit of a pipistrelle bat
Tarrying in the mulberry shade
On a visit to the Gainsborough Museum in Sudbury, Suffolk, in August, I lost my husband for half an hour and began to get nervous. Fortunately, an attendant had spotted him vanishing under the cloak of the old mulberry tree in the garden.
