PRUE’S RECIPE FOR A GLORIOUS GARDEN

The Great British Bake Off star opens her showstopping space in this second extract from a new book of celebrity sanctuaries by Victoria Summerley and Hugo Rittson Thomas

There were a number of reasons why chef and food writer Prue Leith decided to move to Oxfordshire 40 years ago, but the desire for a bigger, more beautiful garden was not among them. The main aim was to set up a duck farm. At the time, Prue was running her eponymous Michelin-starred restaurant, and one of the most popular items on the menu was duck. ‘We used to have to buy so much duck, and it was so expensive that I thought perhaps we could produce our own,’ she explains. ‘So we bought this old rectory plus a few acres of land with that intention in mind, but when we did the sums we realised that duck is expensive because it costs a lot to produce – you need thousands of ducks to justify the cost of a plucking machine and hand plucking was just not viable.’

Prue and her first husband, the late Rayne Kruger who died in 2002, decided to give up the idea of duck farming and simply enjoy the rural setting around their honey-coloured stone house, although they didn’t make a garden in the conventional sense. Rayne wasn’t keen on flowery gardens, apparently. ‘He preferred grass, water and stone,’ recalls Prue. ‘So the only flowers I had were rosa mundi [ Rosa gallica ‘Versicolor’] below the terrace, where he couldn’t see them if he looked out of the window.’ This old rose, a red- andwhite-striped variation on Rosa gallica var. officinalis, possesses a wonderful classic damask scent, but despite its antique origins it’s a hardy, easy plant to grow.

There were other flowers on the site, but these were grown, along with vegetables, for the restaurant. Today, that pattern has been reversed. The large walled vegetable garden is now filled with ornamental plants, with pink achilleas in place of herbs and brassicas in the formal parterres, flanked by rows of standard Japanese cedars (cryptomeria). Prue still grows vegetables but they are protected from birds and other flying pests in fruit cages and cold frames.

The five-acre garden surrounds the house, with the kitchen garden, featuring a round window in the wall, on the east side. The Red Garden is also here, next to the kitchen itself, with herbs growing in pots outside the back door, saving the cook a walk to the kitchen garden. There’s a woodland garden brimming with hostas on this side too. Above: the lake with its red pagoda. Right: the terrace and a bank of Rosa gallica ‘Versicolor’. Below: Prue Leith To the west of the house, a box parterre planted with roses acts as a counterbalance to the kitchen garden, and beyond that there’s a tunnel of ‘Perle d’Azur’ clematis and the rambling rose ‘Sander’s White’. At the back, you look out over a meadow towards the lake, which Prue and Rayne dug out when their children had learned to swim.

The garden is now more open than it used to be. A tall screen of holly and brambles surrounded the property to the west, but this has been cleared. To the east, a massive hedge of Lawson’s cypress ( Chamaecyparis lawsoniana) has also been drastically cut back. Prue’s second husband, John Playfair, whom she married in 2016, is responsible for much of this work. Handy with a chainsaw, he has a good eye for landscape design and has opened up hitherto unseen vistas.

John has also built an impressive playground for the couple’s mutual grandchildren, with zip lines, platforms and trapezes. On top of a grassy mound, on a seat made from an old tree stump, is the figure of a man. It’s actually a prop, bought from the Royal Shakespeare Company during one of their decluttering sales. Originally painted white, it’s now black, and over the years it has lost most of its clothes. The figure was once used by Prue’s children, Danny and Li-Da, in a prank to tease their father, whose study looked out from the house towards the lake. They positioned the figure with a rod to look like someone had wandered in and started fishing. ‘The reaction was all we hoped for,’ said Prue with a broad grin.

Although John plays his part, Prue is the main driving force in the garden, aided by her ‘wonderful’ gardener Malcolm. There is a sound, practical reason for everything she does, allied to a sense of design that combines flashes of flamboyancy with attention to detail.

Beside the kitchen, a stone pergola shelters a long table on the terrace that can seat up to 24 people. Apparently Rayne used to tease Prue, saying that for the price of building the pergola they could have flown 24 people to the south of France and given them lunch in a top restaurant. Friends and family are important to Prue. She herself had no connection to Oxfordshire before she moved here, but her and Rayne’s great friends Sir Peter Parker (the former chairman of British Rail) and his wife Jill had bought Manor Farm at Minster Lovell, near Burford, where they created a wonderful garden. ‘Our husbands played tennis together, and we wanted somewhere that wasn’t too far away,’ says Prue. ‘They were just

‘Flashes of flamboyancy combine with attention to detail’

30 minutes drive from here. Our house is also close to Wiltshire, Somerset and Bath – all places I love to visit.’

John says Prue is the best colour coordinator he knows, and he has encouraged her use of colour in the garden, particularly hot shades, a taste that she attributes to her childhood in South Africa. The Red Garden, where the pergola is situated, bears testament to this. Prue has planted ‘Bishop of Llandaff’ dahlias, with their scarlet flowers and dark foliage; Crocosmia ‘Lucifer’, probably the most vibrant of all the montbretia; and the smoke bush, Cotinus coggygria ‘Royal Purple’, with its sultry maroon foliage.

The planting palette on the southfacing terrace includes cooler shades

of blue and white, and a box parterre on the other side of the house features the rose ‘White Pet’, a dwarf shrub variety, originally bred from a variation of the rambler ‘ Félicité Perpétue’, that produces clusters of pompom flowers.

Prue is a great believer in mulch – no less than 12cm on each planting area – and proudly shows off her extensive series of compost heaps. She mulches twice – with this general compost and with leafmould. Her philosophy is ‘right plant, right place’, pointing out that if the conditions are suitable, you can let the plant get on with it.

Prue’s favourite job in the garden is a real hands-on task: sorting out a border by removing everything and putting it on a tarpaulin before dividing and replanting. She prefers to restrict annuals to pots, but admits that poppies are good for planting in borders. She loves the Ladybird types ( Papaver commutatum ‘Ladybird’), which have bright

A table that seats 24 beneath the pergola decorated with red lanterns scarlet flowers with big black spots, like the insect after which they’re named.

Like her garden, you could describe Prue’s career as multicoloured, and in 1999 she fulfilled a long-held ambition to write fiction, publishing her first novel, Leaving Patrick. One of her subsequent novels, The Gardener, features a garden historian who goes to work for a millionaire. She says she had to curb her instincts to write a planting manual and force herself to focus on the love story to keep the publishers happy.

Perhaps this is what creative people value most, consciously or unconsciously, about their own gardens. In a world where agents, publishers, directors, managers or editors always want to change things, often for commercial reasons, there is an intense pleasure to be found in doing exactly what you want in your own backyard.

The Secret Gardeners: Britain’s Creatives Reveal Their Private Sanctuaries by Victoria Summerley with photos by Hugo Rittson Thomas is published by Frances Lincoln, £30. To order a copy for £24 visit mailbookshop.co.uk or call 0844 571 0640, p&p is free on orders over £15. Offer valid until 21 October.