Garden designer and television presenter, Mark Lane
THROUGH THE GARDEN GATE A GLOBAL BOTANICAL JOURNEY
This month our media horticulturalist, Camilla Bassett-Smith, takes you on a global botanical journey from the comfort of your own home…..
As the winter sets in and following a year of cancelled trips, what better way to inspire us with thoughts of finer days ahead, than a celebratory canter around some of the most luxurious gardens in the world.
You won’t need to move a muscle (well apart from arms to turn the pages!), as garden designer and television presenter, Mark Lane, with whom I have spent many happy filming hours, has recently published his first book: ‘Royal Gardens of the World’ and what a grand entrance to make as an author!
With 240 pages and a front cover as elaborate as the parterre it depicts, this coffee table book visits 21 celebrated gardens from Het Loo in The Netherlands to Gloucestershire’s own Highgrove.
I am pleased to have visited a handful of these over the years from gazing upon Hampton Court during the yearly RHS Garden
Festival, to a trip to Versailles circa 1994, but I now feel that I have completed the grand tour of high end horticulture and taken an in-depth peek into the plots of the princes.
If you are besotted with box (Buxus), you won’t be disappointed, for it will come as no surprise that these feature greatly throughout in the most magnificent of parterres. During the restoration of Frederiksborg Palace in Denmark in 1996, over 65,000 Buxus plants were used! (Fingers crossed they don’t get blight!). Fantastic fountains are also on tap, with 55 at Versailles alone! In 1609 the new fountain at Het Loo, with its 43 feet jet, was a record breaker at the time – forward wind to 2020 and what would they have made of our 300 feet Stanway fountain here in the Cotswolds I wonder?! Neptune also pops up at a palace or two, aquatically aristocratic and enjoying a different view to the one he holds on Cheltenham’s Promenade.
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THROUGH THE GARDEN GATE CAMI L LA BAS S E T T - SMI TH
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