Front Garden

A small, curvaceous space in front of the house with raised beds and a large copper filled with water which slides round its ali baba shape in constant motion but with a still, mirror glass surface.

Intensively planted with climbers, large pots of tulips followed by dahlias and tender salvias in the beds.

Gerald Pennant

This is the only part of the garden that I deliberately designed – there being but a low concrete wall a few feet from the house when I arrived. I still had to allow occasional car, oil tanker access past it, but made the garden space as large as I possibly could. I was lucky enough to be able to reveal a large rock face which is under the glacial rocks in the Magic Garden. The copper is the lower half of a whisky still and in the past has done duty as a floating object and a boyhood boat! Two sets of steps from here lead up to the Magic Garden, the ones by the house pass ‘the witch doctors place’, a platform in the cliff under our guardian ash tree and sporting a box Naga – of Buddhist symbolism.