Green-fingered Wossy’s grand garden design

WITH his 60th birthday looming later this year, loudmouth peacock and veteran chat show host Jonathan Ross is displaying a new- found maturity — and gentility.

He is, I can disclose, embellishing the extensive gardens of his North London mansion with a £ 16,000, Victorian- style greenhouse. It is part of his bid ‘ to become more self- sustaining through the growing of fruit and vegetables’.

Emulating the chicken house grandeur of tycoon Crispin Odey — who splashed out £150,000 on a Palladian- style stone temple to shelter 20 chickens at his Grade II-listed mansion in Gloucestershire — Ross and his screenwriting wife Jane have opted for the ‘Mottisfont design’ from the National Trust collection.

This is inspired, in name and style, by Mottisfont Abbey, in Hampshire, originally a 13thcentury Augustinian Priory, but transformed by society beauty Maud Russell in the 1930s. Maud commissioned Rex Whistler to paint a spectacular trompe l’oeil mural in the former entrance hall.

Her guests included Bond author Ian Fleming and Derek Hill — the Prince of Wales’s favourite artist who, four years before his death in 2000, gave the National Trust 86 of his pictures, which are now displayed at the Abbey.

Ross, who was brought up in London’s East End, clearly aspires to more than a simple garden allotment, as his planning application makes plain.

‘The owners of the property,’ it explains, ‘have deliberately chosen a high- quality structure which has been designed to the highest standards to be in keeping with the appearance of the earliest domestic greenhouse.’

Their ‘Mottisfont’ boasts a water reservoir, lighting, raised planters, and specially strengthened glass.

The son of a lorry driver, film-buff Ross is a man of eclectic tastes, who collects American comics and Thunderbirds memorabilia.

His broadcasting career began when his mother, an extra on EastEnders, successfully put him forward for parts in TV commercials for Persil and Rice Krispies, and culminated in his status as chat-show king.