Meadowlands

It was my grandfather who dreamed of creating a lake in the valley below the house. He was a prisoner of war, and it was the vision of the lake that kept him sane during his years of captivity. In 1946, he made it a reality. When he died, the first thing I did was to return to my old room where, aged four, I would sit for hours looking at the lake. As I dwelt there once more, it became obvious what I should do. Surrounding the house was a huge thuja hedge that eclipsed the hilltop view on all sides. This had to go. A year later, in 1999, I enlisted the help of garden designer Tom Stuart-Smith. My brief was to bring all the views into the garden rather than exclude them, or merely glimpse vistas from a series of curated rooms. Thus, it has become a garden that is all about the landscape.

The meadow, like the garden, is 24 years old, and now covers 22 acres in three contiguous sections. For many years it was a fraction of that area, a modest foreground to the hilltop house. Now the meadow extends south, gently sloping down to the lakeside and then upwards to a hanging wood – Haile’s Wood – which is our boundary, and the first full stop in a crumpled patchwork of undulating pinks and greens that runs towards Ross-on-Wye and the Forest of Dean.

For anyone considering creating a meadow, beware: there is no instant gratification. It’s expensive. It’s hard work. But, if you persevere, Nirvana’s greatest hits await. My meadow muse was Miriam Rothschild, once a member of Alan Turing’s Bletchley Park team, but also a wildflower expert, lepidopterist, eminent natural scientist and an expert on fleas. But it’s her writings about meadows that resonate with me. Responding to a male colleague who scoffed that it would take 1,000 years to reproduce a medie