Clearly the gardens at Columbine are a combined effort, but I wondered if Leslie, as a gardening writer, feels extra pressure

32

They both worked in London (Leslie as deputy editor of Country Life magazine and a garden writer for the Telegraph). Columbine Hall, with its impractical 29 acres of farmland, was not their idea of a weekend getaway. ‘ On the way back to London, we played a game,’ Leslie says. ‘If your Aunt Nora had left you the house on the condition that you lived there, what would you do? We talked about it all the way back to town, and by the time we got there, we knew we had to have it.’

Once it was theirs, the Telegraph asked Leslie to get a garden designer to look at the four-acre garden, and write it up as feature. ‘We chose George Carter, and he immediately noticed that the house had no sense of approach,’ Hew says. ‘It was barren, a straight drive through arable fields. He wanted to make it look as if you were approaching ‘somewhere’. Our slight fear was that it would be too grand, and that it would be a terrible sense of anti-climax when you got here.’

George drew his thoughts quickly on the back of an envelope, and Leslie duly wrote the article, but she and Hew were so impressed with his ideas that they went on to commission him to do a fully worked design. George decided to treat the moat as if it were a ha-ha, linking the garden within to the countryside beyond, with vistas extending out across the water. He levelled terraces around the house and put in steps