In an interview on Horticultural Inspiration

You started gardening seriously at Hadspen?

Yes, we moved here in the 60s and at first, I was restoring the garden as it had been in the early 20th century. But after a visit to Zennor in Cornwall, I wanted to try and grow some of the things I’d seen there. There’s a microclimate at Hadspen which lends itself to the more tender plants and it’s been a great success.

Some time later I came across Russell Page’s book The Education of a Gardener, and that has echoed through my life ever since I first read it. In a sense, he was making use of what he’d seen in Italy: the elements of the Renaissance gardens there – evergreens, and stonework and sky and trees. He had an enormous understanding of how to use space which made him very exceptional. He wasn’t a flower gardener – although he became a considerable plantsman – but he would see space in terms of volume, not just linear dimensions, and he could feel what should be done.

Later in my life, I started visiting gardens in Switzerland and Italy and France and saw a lot of his work. It was a great inspiration when I started to design gardens myself.

In an interview on Garden Design

That sounds like a lot of gardeners I know. My mother’s house is full of catalogues. Your first choice is The Education of a Gardener by one of the great landscape gardeners, Russell Page.

This was definitely one of the books that taught me a lot – not only about the relationship of designer with client, but also about the dos and don’ts of garden design. I only really knew him vaguely because he was very, very grand when I first started. He was a kind of guru and one hardly dared speak to him. But I could see that he had a mystical side to him and a real sense of landscape. He had a terrific imagination and did things that we all do now, in terms of design and features. A lot of what he did has been adopted by landscape architects. He had a great sense of design, and he was very inspirational in the way that he treated design. He saw it in a different dimension. He understood more about design than meets the eye, and that is why for me he was mystical. He had a real sense for the place where he was working.