Four Squares and Terrace

Entering through the gate a spectacular view stretching to Bredon and the Malvern Hills lies before you. A Berberis thunbergii 'Rose Glow' hedge helps to highlight this. Here also is the entrance to the tea-room.

Four Squares from the house

Around the corner of the house the enormous leafed Magnolia delavayi covers the wall. Planted by my grandmother, it is somewhat of a mixed blessing as every fallen leaf has to be cleared away by hand after a bad winter. Opposite this is a raised border planted primarily for August effect with red flowers and purple foliage plants.

As well as the roses Frensham and Lilli Marlene, the dahlia Bishop of Llandaff and Lobelia cardinalis provide strong colour.

From here we turn down some steps to a paved area divided into four beds with a sundial as a central feature. Although the design is formal and edged with box the planting certainly is not. Clumps of paeonies show well with the different leaf textures of Salvia candelabra and Rodgersia pinnata 'Superba', and the pink and red roses all deliberately have a blue strain running through them. A Viburnum x hillieri has rather outgrown its station but as Robin Lane Fox said of it in an article in the Financial Times in June 1989, 'the viburnum is so good, indeed, that at first I walked all round the garden without noticing it. We visitors are earthbound creatures whose instinct is to look down at our feet, not upwards and onwards to the framework in which the small plants are set'. The delicate Cestrum parqui grows to a height of ten feet in front of Viburnum hillieri and has been there twenty years; although cut to the ground after a cold winter, it always comes up again. Also in this garden is the scented leaf Prostanthera cuneata.

Passing on to the 'terrace overlooking the escarpment there are two large terracotta lemon pots, bought in Italy and filled each year with the more tender fuchsias, geraniums and Melianthus major. A further pair of these are on the terrace overlooking the Wide Border, generally filled with grey foliage plants and Malva Primley Blue. The raised border behind is planted with the hybrid musk rose 'Felicia' which was planted by my grandmother pre 1939. Anyone seeing it in flower will wonder why one is told roses wear out after a few years!