We rarely work outside the south west, but when we were asked to build a garden for The Rt. Hon the Lord Michael Heseltine, we spent several weeks in Oxfordshire. The area we constructed was a new rose garden close to the house; as Lord Heseltine has full time gardening staff we were contracted to undertake the hard landscape element of the garden. The project consisted rebuilding and realigning a large random stone retaining wall, building two separate flights of steps in local Horton stone with random walls topped with sawn stone coping stones, the side walls of which incorporated stone piers with rusticate stone banding. A seating niche with a rear wall 2.8 metres tall, which was curved in elevation and plan view. Finally, we set all the planting beds and edged them with stone sets ready for Lord Heseltine’s staff to complete their soft landscaping. We returned the following season to view the garden once planted, only to find a rabbit problem had forced the garden staff into protecting the beds with wire netting whilst the planting established.

view to house on start view from lawn on start     view to house view from lawn     view to house after view from lawn     pier and steps niche

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