WHEN Caroline Nelson married novelist and biographer Max, 2nd Baron Egremont, in 1978 and came to live at Petworth House, she knew little about gardening. She was, however, clear that she wanted both to celebrate the extraordinary position of their garden on the private side of the 17th-century house and to create a sense of privacy and intimacy.
‘At night when I look out onto the park, I can see the deer snoozing below my window,’ she says of the view over 700 acres of Capability Brown parkland. Stands of oak and a glittering stretch of lake extend right up to the house, with only the slimmest of terraces and a rounded bastion-shaped ha-ha to separate public from private.
‘The scale of everything here has been very influential. The vast landscape that reaches out from the house as far as the eye can see comes right up to the windows, but the real garden, the walled flowery garden, is out of sight 250 yards away. I wanted to give the sense of the park sweeping over the ha-ha onto the South Lawn and to make here a garden of simple walks, vistas and green glades.’
Caroline became friends with the garden writer Laurence Fleming when he came to Petworth to film for a series called The English Garden with Sir John Gielgud. Together, they started to think about ways to soften this part of the garden. ‘It looked a bit like a golf course crossed by a wide gravel path like a drive. My mother-in-law used to back her Jaguar down to a turning circle by the William Kent urn and drive across the lawn to load up with fruit and flowers from the kitchen garden to take to her house in London.’
Denne historien er fra May 13, 2020-utgaven av Country Life UK.
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Denne historien er fra May 13, 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.
