Garden Design

"Well, Page was in turn heavily influenced by Sylvia Crowe and I think for anyone starting to be a garden designer, her book Garden Design is about the most useful one you could have. People think when you’re designing gardens, you’re dealing with beauty. In fact, it’s a hard slog! You’ve got to be diplomatic with clients and contractors, yet quite forceful. What do you do if they want something awful? After a bit you can say no, but it’s hard to begin with. No books can really help you with that, it’s a question of experience, but in terms of the theory Sylvia Crowe is the one. Yes, I got her book when I first moved there in fact – the garden there was my initial inspiration and then, incredibly, my home. I had no idea that was to happen but I was of course delighted. There’s a whole chapter in this book on the garden and it was perfect for me at that time: not too detailed, no pages and pages on how to construct a wall, for example. I just wanted to capture the theory of it all. I didn’t know at that stage I wanted to be a designer, although I was also visiting Italy a lot at about the same time and I read J C Shepherd and Geoffrey Jellicoe’s Italian Gardens of the Renaissance and Jellicoe’s indispensable The Landscape of Man ."