My Favourite Place: Levens Hall, Cumbria
What I love about Levens Hall is its individuality. It has a real uniqueness and character and is a really good example of an iconic garden. When you see it in pictures there’s no mistaking it for anywhere else! And it’s transformed by different weather. If you see it in summer or in heavy frost or in snowfall, it’s amazing, just magical.
In a way it feels eccentric, and I think that’s because it’s not over-designed. It’s not all symmetrical and perfect, you can feel that it’s grown organically. In places, the pieces of topiary are quite ridiculous – brilliant but mad! They’re like characters at a party or the people in a family photograph. And they've a real presence about them.
They’re beautifully maintained from a horticultural point of view. But there’s nowhere else quite like it. It’s not unusual for a garden to have topiary, but the sheer volume and scale of these shapes… it’s like something out of Alice in Wonderland.
My other half has no interest in horticulture at all, but he was quite blown away. I think that if you have an artistic mind, or a visual appreciation of something like interiors, you can’t fail to be moved. It’s not the sort of place you can go and not say ‘wow!’
You arrive along a big drive flanked with landscape trees, and go past the house – it feels like any other country house, but suddenly you’re in among the trees. It’s an intense and immersive experience. I don’t know at what point topiary becomes a clipped tree, but some of them are massive, you feel really dwarfed by them. It’s a world away from the popular ideal of a box ball in a pot!
I wandered around with the head gardener last time I went. He’s lovely and it was a bit of a masterclass. It takes a lot of confidence to create a garden like that. It demonstrates that design doesn’t have to be everything; you don’t have to be serious all the time – it's OK to have fun!
■ Levens Hall, Kendal, Cumbria LA8 0PD; www.levenshall. co.uk, tel: 01539 560321.