Italy by Soap&Skin

 

Very occasionally the music from a film's end credits has me glued to my seat. I remember it happening at the end of 1997's Grosse Pointe Blank when "El Matador" by Los Fabulosos Cadillacs blasted from the cinema's speakers. Italy by Soap&Skin (the experimental music project of Austrian artist Anja Plaschg) is a more subtle track but awesome none the less. 

https://youtu.be/013lbJ-Iehg

Especially when Vicki Krieps dances while the end credits roll. 

And here is an extract from slantmagazine.com:

If Corsage’s narrative closes on a liberatory act of suicide, the film doesn’t quite end there. As the end credits roll, we’re treated to an extended sequence, shot in slow motion, in which Elisabeth, now clad in a free-flowing robe and cape rather than her rib-crunching corsage, dances in exaltation as “Italy” by Soap&Skin plays on the soundtrack. Has she died? Transcended? It’s hard to say. In an oddly cheeky touch, Elisabeth grows a mustache by the time the scene fades out, suggesting that if the problems of men and women are ever to be resolved, it may require a wholesale demolition of our received gender norms.

Review of 2022

 

This time last year not only did I note that the pandemic was still with us despite most restrictions having been lifted, but that it had been a very mild December - 13C on the 30th and 14C on New Years Eve. Unlike this December when snow fell overnight on the 11th/12th. There were also eleven successive nights of increasingly hard frosts and daytime temperatures struggling to rise above zero. In the morning of the 15th December it was minus 9C. Then overnight on the 18th/19th the temperatures started to rise and in the morning all the snow had gone, And 14C again on the Monday.

I mentioned a year ago that running was beginning to be a real struggle. Not only the old glutes (which have actually settled down recently) but in the new year sore calves were the real problem. So after running the MK 10K ( just over the hour but first of 2 runners over 75. I wonder why?) in March and the Marlow 5 in May (my last run of the year). I then gave up running to see if a rest might help. Back to my walking in the Chilterns, I still suffered from some discomfort in the legs and in the summer I was at the doctors for a check up. A thorough examination and all sorts of tests diagnosed a B12 deficiency. That was all, thank goodness. In September I had six B12 injections in two weeks and have been taking tablets ever since.

I think something must have worked as the discomfort has mainly eased for my longish walks. As long as I rest in between. I have to say that I have thoroughly enjoyed being back on those hill walks that I used to do before I started running. There are posts, for instance, in May for those at Ashridge, Coombe Hill/Dunsmore/Chequers and Aston Hill and Pavis Wood. It also meant that Alison joined me on some of these. I have also worked out a couple of level circular walks from the house of over 4 miles. Whether this means I will be able to run again in the Spring I'm not sure. Or if I would miss my walks in the countryside. My last parkrun was on  the 23rd April (heart rate too high for the 9.26 pace. But I still turn up to volunteer on occasion. I had been running for ten years and three months. 

This time last year I mentioned that I'd had three Covid vaccinations and wondered how many more would we have. The answer was another three, in January June and October. So far so good. Although my hearing is not what it used to be, mostly the left ear. So next year I may be looking at a hearing aid, although I will put that off for as long as possible.

Our first holiday of the year was in June (post of the 21st) based at Buxton in Derbyshire. The photo above is taken from the front window of the hotel. The one below is from an afternoon at the  National Trust property at Ilam. 

Alison was taking part in the Baslow Boot Bash so I took the opportunity to visit my home town of Rotherham. At Rotherham Minster I was shown the font where I was christened all those years ago. Blog post of 22nd June.

We stayed in St Ives in October, the earliest week we could find. A little cool but a lovely week.

Also in October I visited the Cheltenham Literary Festival to see Elizabeth Strout (that was cancelled at the last moment) and Ian MacEwan. 

The main feature of the garden this year has been the lawn. It looked great as usual through the Spring and into June and July..... until we were hit by the drought. More photos on my post of 7th September where "The Lawn Recovers".

Despite the lack of rainfall and soaring temperatures in July (37C on the 19th), the plants all survived particularly the dwarf dahlias that have been the best bedding plants so far. 

However the best flower in the garden is the rose Blue for You. It gained it's own post on the 27th October after it flowered for the third time this year. The first photo from June, the second in August and the third in November.

I have been making use of my season ticket for Cineworld in Hemel Hempstead. 

The best movies seen this year have been Nightmare Alley, Parallel Mothers, Cyrano, The Duke, Benedetta, The Northman, Benediction, MEN, Good Luck to You, Leo Grande, Nope, Laal Singh Chadda, The Forgiven, Amsterdam, Decision to Leave. Living and She Said.

In March I went to see an excellent Wuthering Heights at the National's Lyttleton Theatre which was coupled with a visit to Queens Jubilee Galleries in Weston Tower at Westminster Abbey. The ballet The Great Gatsby was a disappointment but ABC at The Royal Albert Hall were great as was Jack Absolute Rides Again in July, also at The National. But less so The Glass Menagerie (even with Amy Adams) at The Duke of York's Theatre in August  and Henry V111 at The Globe in September.  During the interval I found that the queue for the Queen's Lying in State was now way past the theatre.

On TV I enjoyed Irma Vep (see post), Astrid: Murder in Paris and They Were Ten.

In February we celebrated twelve years of our book club. There have been some interesting choices this year, I enjoyed Claire Chambers' Small Pleasures but Sarah Winman's Still Life was one of the best novels of the last few years. Elizabeth Strout's Oh William and Jane Gardam's The Flight of the Maidens I gave five stars on Goodreads. There was much that was familiar in Gyles Brandreth's terrific Odd Boy Out, taking me back to a parallel childhood of London in the 1950's.

Have You Seen.......? by David Thomson Part 2: Touch of Evil, Mulholland Drive and All About Eve

 

Another movie in the film noir category currently being shown on Sky Arts. Here is Orson Welles, both director and villain, bulked up in size as sheriff Hank Quinlan in a border town on the very edge of the USA and Mexico. We never always know which side of the border the action plays at any one time. The start of the film is one long single take as a time bomb is planted in a car as Charlton Heston and his stunning wife played by Janet Leigh also make for the border point. That feel of unease and even dread never lets up. But to me, the film feels quite dated. The dialogue is sharp but seems much too fast. David Thomson describes the film as being "made with sheer brilliance". where "the melodrama is played for full value". There is no doubting that this was Welles at his best.

Did the poster get it wrong. Should it be Mulholland Dr? A great start with the car crash, yes, on Mullholland Dr. There is a tiny clue at the very beginning, before the crash, but I missed it. That might have explained why everything in the first three quarters of the film is not as it seems. But it does look great, and Naomi Watts (Betty) and Laura Harring (Rita) are an engaging couple. Naomi looks so fragile but is so strong on the inside as her screen test will testify. A clever mystery surrounds the background of Rita as she and Diane try to find out who she is. But then it all gets very weird. Who is Camilla? Who is Rita? 

A black and white movie from 1950, it gained fourteen academy award nominations and won six Oscars including best picture, best supporting actor for George Sanders, (leads Bette Davis and Anne Baxter lost out) and best screenplay and directing for Joseph L Mankowitz. Best screenplay yes, but the camera hardly moves as the actors just sit or stand around talking. David Thomson says that Mankowitz "is not a very interesting director and the direction was "static and plain". But he does add that the film is "modest, self contained and brilliant", " a talky snob film" and "a celebration of theatre". 

It is all about theatre. It opens with an award ceremony: "the minor awards have already been presented" says our part time narrator and theatre critic played by George Sanders. These include writer and director! The main award goes to the impossibly young Eve played by Anne Baxter, as looking on is her angry mentor Margot Channing, a steely eyed Bette Davis.  But this is a terrific satire about the people who inhabit the theatrical world. It is very wordy but always highly entertaining.

The film then goes back in time to see when just a fan, Eve first arrives outside Margot's dressing room, and follows her increasingly cruel ride to stardom. At first Eve seems too nice to be true. She was actually awful. At a party who should arrive with George Sanders but a very young Marilyn Monroe. I thought Celeste Holm as Margot's friend Karen was excellent. Te film did seem a little predictable in the second half, but all the dialogue is brilliant. Margot's classic line "Fasten your safety belts, its going to be a bumpy night". 

Letters from America by Alistair Cooke - 1946 to 1951

 

In the absence of a book of non-fiction that I keep close by when I want a rest from a novel, I found this second hand copy of Alistair Cooke's Letters from America 1946-1951 bought from a charity shop a few years ago. It had been languishing at the back of my book case ever since. It was bought because I knew that my mother was an avid listener to his radio programme after the war. Everything stopped for those fifteen minutes, she never missed an episode. My copy was published in 1951 and reprinted in 1984, so is thirty eight years old. The pages are falling out. So here I am, trying to elicit the dulcet tones of his trans-Atlantic dialect. These are some notes from my favourite pieces:

GETTING AWAY FROM IT ALL

At the end of summer, they are packing up the cottage at the end of Long Island. It's Labor Day and bringing in the "rusty barbeque grill we haven't used in years".

MY FIRST INDIAN

Here he travels to Santa Fe in the footsteps of D H Laurence who wrote books about the Indian view of life. "I took the Santa Fe train from Los Angeles and discovered, as everybody does, that it doesn't stop at Santa Fe". Going on the Albuquerque and taking the bus. 

WHAT'S THE MATTER WITH AMERICA

"An American senator, speaking from those cavernous lungs which the Almighty saved for American senators" Speaking at a conference, the author's piece was on "the comparative significance of cricket and baseball". On the latter, the crowd expects a frequent show of indignation .... it's a good show while it lasts and is included in the price of admission". Compared to "the Englishman's strict fidelity to the umpire's little finger".

LONG ISLAND DUCK

All about Long Island, not just the duck. "The geography of Long Island is very easy to describe. It is a flat fish lying north-east of New York City, parallel with the Connecticut shore. It's nose burrows into Manhattan and it's tail is a hundred miles out to sea. , divided into two forks, or flukes".

"Near Riverhead is a big duck farm.....a small snowscape that turns into several thousand ducks".

NEW YORK, NEW YORK

When J B Priestly visits New York, his subsequent controversial review was picked up by he New York times and created a stir. Cooke had resided in the USA for 15 years when he wrote this piece which is about travellers writing their first observations on a new location.

WINTER AND FLORIDA

Writing about New England and "our regular blight - a winter keen and cold that blasts the land and withers it ....... winter is a thing to be endured ....... come November and again in February and March, the wish that we were somewhere else". That is the escape to Florida. Later we are told about "a jook party or tonk", words I had never heard before.

SPRING - THE NINTH OF APRIL

A sensitive piece about the American civil war, and particularly a glowing portrait of the defeated Robert E Lee. A stunning biography in only three pages. Unbelievably, this head of the Confederate army was first offered by Lincoln the leadership of the Northern Union army. "One of the great ironies of military history".

AMERICAN SUMMER

"Of the four American seasons none is more dramatic or more humbling than the summer. It is a time when heat-waves roam around the continent, moody as bandits, and close in on unsuspecting places, on southern swamps and midland prairies and northern valleys, with thunder out of the Apocalypse and a one night respite of cool after rain". Maybe except for Maine, the Pacific coast  and Western Oregon and "the price they pay is the English one. cloudy skies and gentle showers.     . but everywhere else summer is a blinding ordeal".

(Later: "you might think that everybody who speaks a form of English knows what a nettle is? ......No!" The author also goes on to explain about a corn dance. But what is corn?

"At this time of year about twenty-odd million Americans are living in some other place than home: in summer camps, by lakes etc etc". 

THE FALL OF NEW ENGLAND

Here Alistair Cooke is "marvelling" at "the English spring and New England in the fall". He explains about the phenomime that is the weather with, for example, Arkansas with its "blazing hawthorns" whereas ours "the leaves stay green until the first frost kills them". The evocation of the American countryside is conjured up with sentences like "I drove up and over the hills across New York State into Connecticut..... and the maple with it's bursting sugar which blazes into scarlet". And then on, into Vermont.  

MOVING A HOME

The author talks about his old apartment in New York in a community bound by 72nd Street and 68th Street on Lexington Avenue. Here his run down and seedy apartment has a long corridor with the dining room at the far end, "so far away that we used to say let's go to 70th Street and eat". They are moving to another village bounded by Fifth and Madison Avenue. Going up in the world. He talks about the typical open plan American apartment: the door allergy and steam heating. Talking about New York: "This great, plunging, dramatic, ferocious, swift and terrible big city is the most folksy and provincial place I have ever lived in".

MARGARET AND MISSOURI

This is about Margaret Truman, the President's daughter, a mid-western girl hitting Washington society! With the observation "Snobbery is a whole time job over here, and is therefore more conspicuous and more pathetic than it is with the same people in Britain".

NO SYMPATHY FOR APATHY

More about the New York summer, the same latitude as Madrid: "the summer comes in with a crash of thunder , and thereafter the heat broods over the city until it has turned rancid". 

"Perhaps New York and other American cities are no place for sensitive souls" ..... "steam pipes under motor parkways so the snow melts as it falls".

IT'S A DEMOCRACY, ISNT IT?

About other people's noise and music. "In Britain, one of the minor duties of good citizenship is not to disturb the private life of other citizens. In this country, it's the other way round"........."the ability not to hear what you don't want to hear, or selective deafness"......."one aspect of the American character, the ability to withstand a great deal of outside interference".

LETTER TO AN INTENDING IMMIGRANT

"Today you can cross the three thousand miles of the American continent and never want for a private bathroom, a cement highway, a night baseball game, an airplane connection, a pair of nylon stockings or a gallon of ice cream in six different flavours".

December Snow

 

It all started with the first heavy frost of the year, early on Thursday 8th December. The same on the mornings of the following Friday, Saturday and Sunday. With increasingly cold temperatures when on Sunday it didn't get above freezing during the day. Then overnight on Sunday/Monday it snowed. A decent couple of inches which is still with us today, the 18th December.

After Sunday, the frosts have been getting harder and harder until on Thursday it was -9C overnight. On Saturday the 17th it was still -7C when we woke up. Still below freezing on Sunday the 18th. So that is ten days of frosts in succession. The spiders webs do look lovely in the early morning sunshine.

Fortunately the last two days have been sunny. Here is the mock acacia tree at the end of the garden.

After the frost of Sunday morning, it only managed to get up to 2C at 1pm. But then the milder weather we had been promised a week ago started to arrive. By 8pm it was up to 7C and then 11C overnight. This morning, Monday 19th, it was up to 14C by midday. All the snow had disappeared and I was able to walk on the pavements. Amazing. 

The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy, Winter Garden and What Are You Like

This is a companion book to "The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry". We read that novel in February 2013 for Book Club, where he is walking from Kingsbridge in Devon to Berwick-on Tweed to "save" Queenie Hennessy. She is terminally ill and a resident of a hospice and while Harold is walking, here she takes up her story of how she came to meet Harold and how she took flight at a difficult time.

It is therefore nine years since I read the Harold Fry book that I now see I really loved. This story is equally great, Rachel Joyce mixes a one-way love story with charm, wit and darkness. The shortish chapters alternate between Queenie's time at the hospice and the other patients, with what happened 20 years ago when she worked alongside Harold Fry. At the heart of this story is Harold's son David. A clever boy, on his way to Cambridge, he sees Queenie (who went to Oxford) as an older kindred spirit.

His parents never know about this relationship, something Queenie will live to regret. He actually despises his parents. David is sponger, a thief and actually one of the nastiest characters I have encountered for a long time. Rarely do I get angry reading but stealing from someone who actually cares for him. That's bad. "I'd rather die than be ordinary".

Queenie is persuaded by the nuns at the hospice to write her story. She wants to tell Harold everything that caused her departure. She tells us how she made her way as far away as possible and ended up at Embleton Bay in Northumberland. This was particularly interesting for me, as we had walked this part of the coast a few times on holiday. She describes where she made her home, near the golf course, Dunstanburgh Castle and Craster which are all so familiar. Wonderful

Having enjoyed all the seven other Beryl Bainbridge books I have read; this came as a major disappointment. Whilst it is humorous on occasions, it just seems to show off the author's knowledge of Russian tourist spots as our three visitors are whisked from Moscow to Leningrad and Gori? Obviously, the trip does not go as planned. There is a very boring repetitive plot about a missing suitcase. The whole time there is the mystery of the missing Nina, whom our "hero" was hoping to spend time with. Not for me.

This was another disappointment. Anne Enwright's most recent book "Actress" was a delight. "What are you like" is from twenty years ago and only takes shape after halfway. Maria is born with a twin sister, but with the death of her mother in childbirth, her father, Berts, can only cope with one. It is only later we find out what happened to the other.

There are so many switches in time and character, it takes some concentration to keep up. Even later in the book, new characters pop up. Is this the author practicing for her later better novels? The best parts follow Maria at twenty: "She always felt like someone else. She had always felt like the wrong girl".

SPOILER ALERT

The book settles down in the latter half with the alternating stories of the separated twenty year old twins Maria and Rose. It's just that we had to wait so long for coherent story telling

Have You Seen ....... ? by David Thomson - Part 1: Shadow of a Doubt, Don't Look Now and Blue Velvet

These three movies are the first of the forty eight I have listed from David Thomson's Have You Seen..... So Here we go:

I manged to catch up with Hitchcock's 1943Shadow of a Doubt when it was shown on an obscure film channel. David Thomson says that "this was a turning point in Hitchcock cinema". But it was not the best film to start these reviews. It was only because it was a Hitchcock movie that I had never seen that I listed it at all. As Thomson says "So the film lurches in and out ........ much of which has dated badly". I couldn't agree more. The cinematography is the best thing about the film, there is one shot when two men follow Joseph Cotton's Uncle Charlie and the music beat matches their footsteps. The camera follows them from behind and we see Charlie between them. Why Hitchcock said it was his favourite film, I have no idea. We have to sit through an interminable story for an exciting two minutes at the end.

David Thomson says in his review of Don't Look Now "what cool intelligence can do with horror". Personally, I would not describe the film as horror, although there are nasty bits, especially at the very beginning and the end. I think it's more of a psychological thriller, especially about the dangers of seances. We are in Vienna, spookily quiet in 1973, and based on a story by Daphne Du Maurier. The locations are very well shot and director Nicolas Roeg has given the whole movie an eerie feel all the way through.

It was worth watching just for Julie Christie, beautiful, fragile and vulnerable, she's an easy target for the seance sisters after the death of her daughter. But when  she smiles, it is devastating. He costumes are fabulous. I suppose I have to mention Donald Sutherland who is just OK. And the ending is surprisingly nasty.

David Thomson says in his review that "it emerged seemingly from nowhere". Blue Velvet " from 1986 was David Lynch's breakthrough film that he "wrote and directed with an implacable assurance that he never quite matched since". It has been called a "neo-noir mystery thriller" or a psychological horror. I thought it was just too uneven to be classed as a classic. The story does not make a lot of sense, but the style is certainly first class. One to watch at the cinema rather than a TV where the widescreen DVD took up less than half the screen size.

The young Kyle McLachlan gets into trouble after finding an ear and tries to do a detective job on an unhinged Isabella Rossini and a bonkers Dennis Hopper who steals the show. The offbeat music early on is replaced by something more haunting, and is supplemented by  Roy Orbison's In Dreams and Ketty Lester's wonderful Love Letters. And, of course Bobby Vinton's title song.

Have You Seen ..... by David Thomson

 

Or to give it it's full title: Have You Seen .... ? A Personal Introduction to 1,000 Films including masterpieces, oddities, and guilty pleasures (with just a few disasters).  

I cannot say that I read every review of the 1,000 films described in this epic work. David Thomson devotes a whole page each film, so this is quite a labour of love. What I have done is to list the forty-eight movies that I do want to see. I have discounted all those that are too familiar or are just not to my taste. So, the first on my list is Charlie Kaufman's "Adaptation" starring Nicolas Cage. I thought I had seen this film before, but the trailer suggested I had not. It was probably "The Player" that I was thinking of. And the last is Antonioni's "Zabriskie Point".

There are some on my list to watch that I have seen before, but either too long ago or I would like to see again. For example, "Ben-Hur", "Blade Runner" and "Brazil". I'm not sure how long it will take for me to catch up on all the forty-eight, but I have either recorded the first three or ordered a cheap DVD. They will not be  in any particular order, alphabetical or otherwise. Then I might get round to listing the huge number that were too familiar. For example, I watched "Rififi" on a DVD when the cinemas were closed and included in my post of 1st January 2021. I might watch it again and compare my thoughts with those of the author.

But I have to say that this book is Thomson at his perceptive best. Note the picture from Blow Up on the cover. 

The Art of Architecture - The Art of the Garden on Sky Arts

 Episode 1   Dan Pearson - Lowther Castle, Cumbria

I should have known Dan Pearson from his landscaping at King's Cross and Coal Drops Yard. But I didn't. That goes for all the garden designers in this series. Lowther Castle has been abandoned since 1957, everything has gone except for the castle walls. The gardens were let go after 1935. Here they are in their heyday when formal manicured gardens like these needed an army of gardeners.

It was the latest heir to the estate, Jim Lowther, who commissioned, and worked in partnership with Dan Pearson to create a sustainable, manageable and naturalistic landscape, bringing in the Lake District in a scaled down form. And to "stop it being a frightening place". The inspiration for Dan Pearson came form his time working in Italy and the gardens of Ninfa near Rome.

We were told about the castle, a neglected picturesque ruin, there was spruce everywhere, "better as a ruin than a house".  But now the remains look wonderful surrounded by the new gardens.

The clearance of the site enabled the designers to put their own imprint on the estate.

The transformation is amazing, "a re-interpretation of the lost gardens for the 21st century". 

Even the courtyard has the style of an Italian piazza, You can sit under umbrellas and enjoy a glass of wine. We saw the new rose garden and a Japanese garden looks down form above. Obviously, we were told a lot about Dan Pearson's other work, notably the landscaping around King's Cross and Coal Drops Yard. There is even a clip of the path I walked down, and the terrace next to the canal. My photos from September 2021.

Episode 2  Arrabella Lennox- Boyd - Gresgarth Hall, Lancashire

Arabella Lennox-Boyd is an international garden designer. Her own garden at Gresgarth Hall near Lancaster is influenced by her Italian roots. It has been developed over 40 years and is open to the public on certain days. A huge woodland surrounds the more formal garden. 

We hear about her horticultural education and a portfolio of eight hundred gardens with which she has been associated. We are shown some spectacular examples such as Kew, Chelsea Physic Garden and

those for English Heritage. Eaton Hall (below) is especially amazing.

The programme goes to Italy to see how the landscape of her childhood influences her work. We see the gardens at Ninfa, an Italian Natural Monument.

Arabella Lennox-Boyd has won six gold medals at Chelsea. In 1998 she won best in show for a contemporary water garden. 

Episode 3  Tom Stuart-Smith - Hepworth Wakefield Gallery Garden 

Surrounded by Victorian multi storey mill buildings and the new gallery dedicated to Barbara Hepworth, Tom Stuart- Smith's garden is situated on waste land with a bust six lane highway as it's neighbour. we are shown how the designer draws and draws everything before he starts on site, The aerial view below demonstrates the layout of formal beds and the snaking paths between. 

I skipped his history and all the other gardens he has designed over thirty years, including eight Chelsea gold medals. 

Along one side is a tall concrete screen that you can just see above at the back to hide and buffer the noise of the traffic. The planting of the beds is superb, especially the yellow achillea and the purple verbena. Excellent.

Episode 4 Tania Compton - Fonthill House, Wiltshire

Fonthill has been transformed from a sad 16th century garden into something modern. The new owners moved in during 2005 and wanted something that needed to respect the original but be easy to maintain.

There were aspects of the old walls and other original features that whilst being preserved, needed a modern update.

The surrounding landscape is particularly beautiful, there are lovely changes in level and different types of soil to contend with.

Compton remarks "I have, unwittingly, changed a lot of people's engagement with nature". This garden is a prime example and not too far away for a visit.

Episode 5 Cleve West - Horatio's Garden, Salisbury

In the grounds of Salisbury District Hospital, next to the spinal injuries unit, is now a garden that patients and carers can enjoy. Cleve West, a winner of six gold medals, has created a landscaped garden from scratch. With two metre wide resin bonded gravel paths and space for families to gather next to an apple arch, we were shown designs of dry stone walls that represent the spine and radiating features.

Horatio was seventeen when he was killed by a polar bear and his parents have been instrumental in in realising his dream of a garden for the spinal injuries unit. And here it is. 

Cleve West is just as happy in his allotment, but the inspiration of this garden in Salisbury has travelled to other hospital units around the country.

Episode 6 James Alexander- Sinclair - Northamptonshire Gardens

This episode showed two gardens designed by RHS Vice President Janes alexander Sinclair. The first was a bare site for new owners Polly and Giles Wilson. So a brand new garden from nothing. Just an old farmyard and fields, a brand new mansion with a view.

There is some spectacular planting around the house (unfortunately not available on the net) but this disappears as you move away with something altogether more natural. There are two lakes created from a stream running through the site and the long winding drive has trees planted either side which in the future will look great.

The other garden in Preston Capes, this time a mature garden for the old rectory next to the church.

Nothing much to say except the idea was to remove the leylandii hedge and add as much colour and excitement as possible.