36 fountains, 9 pools... that’s a water feature!

MICHAEL Heseltine, 85, is a Conservative politician and founder of Haymarket publishing. The former Deputy Prime Minister lives with wife Anne in Thenford, Northamptonshire. They bought Thenford House in 1976 and have been restoring the gardens ever since. The 70-acre arboretum is home to more than 3,000 species of tree and shrub.

HOW WE GOT THE BUG

I’ve loved gardening from the earliest age. I inherited it from my parents, who were keen gardeners. When I went away to prep school at the age of nine, the headmaster gave new boys a square yard of mud and a packet of seeds, and a month later I had a square yard of beautiful Virginia stock. We did our current garden bit by bit and I’m most proud of the rill where we have 36 fountains and nine pools. I don’t do much digging nowadays but the physical process of moving around the garden is good. Gardens are hugely therapeutic.

OUR GARDEN LOOK IS…

Plant it and see. Every autumn the head gardener and I go around and locate a position for what’s in the nursery – that’s how it works.

HERO PLANT

It changes from season to season. It starts in January, when we have a collection of more than 600 different snowdrops, then in spring the garden is full of wonderful bulbs – daffodils, scilla – and magnolia. We have thousands of trees and shrubs, extensive herbaceous borders, an alpine trough garden, a rose garden, so it would be an invidious choice.

BIGGEST CHORE

Clearing debris. Woodland around the house had been untouched for 60 to 70 years – trees had fallen and were simply lying where they fell. The medieval fish pond had long been silted up so had to be dredged and the water flow restored. The two-acre lake had to be cleared of 10ft of silt.Then we found that an internal wall of the lake had collapsed, so we had to rebuild that.

FAVOURITE PUBLIC GARDEN

Hidcote in Gloucestershire. I love its variety and pace, which changes ‘room by room’.