استكشف المجموعة الواسعة من العناوين المتاحة.

[...]David - author of the Gloucestershire volumes in Nikolaus Pevsner's \"Buildings of England\" and the founder of a local museum - comes across as a far more attractive human being than steely, perfectionist Rosemary.

SIR - My mother, Rosemary Verey, didn't just burst on the scene, aged 62 (Gardening, November 27). Earlier, in 1972, the cover of the National Gardens Scheme Yellow Book showed a photograph of the garden at Barnsley House. By this point, most of the garden at Barnsley was already in place, popular with visitors and moving ever closer to the form in which it would become better known in the Eighties and Nineties. My mother was then 51 years old.

We agree with you that marigolds are common. Neither are we fans of carnations. When somebody gives you carnations, there is always the suspicion that they buy their flowers from the supermarket or the petrol station, don't you think? Big, blowsy dahlias are so vulgar and OTT, really, without even the bonus of fragrance. At the risk of alienating every Dutch (or English, for that matter) reader, I must admit that I am not a fan of tulips, either. The weird colour mixes and frilly ones just don't do it for me, though a sea of pure perfection in a single colour is not so bad. Mrs [Rosemary Verey] was such a quintessentially English gardener, wasn't she? Highly skilled, clearly of good stock and well mannered, but such a fine plantswoman. We did try growing her Lavatera Barnsley, but it wasn't quite the stop-you-in-your-tracks performer here that it is in the UK. In fact, it staged a bit of a takeover bid here and, while it flowered well, as it grew ever larger, it tended to become increasingly scruffy and to fall apart. We cut it out after a season or two. We have a profound respect for Mrs Verey and what we saw of her garden and you must have, too, as she was closely involved in the development of yours. It may even have been she who placed [Dino] in your garden after you had accepted him as a gift. Rather than making him a major focal point, Dino appeared to have been tucked discreetly amongst the undergrowth and the overgrowth. We watched her walking in your garden and, pausing by Dino, commenting that he seemed to have settled in rather well. At the time we both burst out laughing because we interpreted that comment as a veiled reference to a hope that in another year or two, the foliage around would have grown sufficiently to block out all sight of Dino, but we wouldn't have told you that had you come to our place to visit.

With a scare about tainted toothpaste, perhaps it's time to start brushing our teeth with sage leaves. It's a good party trick to rub a leaf of sage across your teeth until they are squeaky clean. As one who knows heaps about herbs, Karen Michaud showed me this trick in her Puslinch garden, Country Lane Herbs. Another recipe for sage tooth powder is in Rosemary Verey's The Scented Garden. Verey recommends drying fresh sage leaves and coarse salt in a slow oven. When the leaves are brittle, pound the mixture and put it through a sieve. The powdered mixture can be used as a toothpaste. Let me know how it works. When lavender blooms, don't you think it should be accompanied by roses? Verey lists some of the best roses for fragrance -- Tuscany Superb, Buff Beauty, Fantin Latour, Stanwell Perpetual -- that I have seen in private gardens and at the Royal Botanical Gardens.

Noted English gardener and writer Rosemary Verey (she of Barnsley, as in Lavatera Barnsley, fame) was fond of saying that \"the garden should curtsey to the house\". It does help to have a house that is worth curtseying to (naturally Mrs Verey had a splendid English manor house of considerable charm and stature). It is somewhat more problematic if what you have is a characterless box which comprises the majority of this country's housing stock. But the principle of integrating house and garden remain. In modern parlance, it tends to be referred to as indoor outdoor flow but that only tells half the story. That ability to move freely and with convenience from the living areas and often the master bedroom through to outdoor living areas is pretty much the norm with modern house design and where renovations take place in older houses. On a typical town section, the long vista is not as easy to achieve unless you can borrow the view from your neighbour's property or you adjoin a reserve. But this does not mean that you can't achieve an interesting outlook in most situations. The bedroom window which looks out to a tall boundary fence two or three metres away is more problematic but with creativity, espalier and a focal point to attract the eye, even this can have a view of sorts. The focal point does not have to be an ornament or pot. It may be a clipped plant or a splash of colour.

West Dean had 11 staff in its heyday: now it is looked after by Jim Buckland, with the help of his wife and one other gardener. The Victorian glasshouses have been immaculately restored. They comprise fig houses, vineries, peach houses and floral display houses, as well as houses growing gourds, peppers, tomatoes, melons and strawberries. Many of the vegetables are grown from seed obtained from the Heritage Seed Library, run by Garden Organic, but seed also arrives from gardens round the world. The atmosphere of neat and determined industry brings back to life the essential nature of the Victorian kitchen garden. After the Second World War, the size of kitchen gardens shrank. Popular today is the potager, the size of which can differ from an acre down to a few square yards. Potager is simply the French word for a vegetable garden but, thanks to our exposure to the great potager at Villandry in France and its extraordinary aesthetic approach to kitchen gardening, the word has come to mean an ornamental kitchen garden. The potager is geometric in character, both for practical and aesthetic reasons, and often incorporates some degree of nostalgic installation such as a simple open knot garden, the compartments of which can be used for herbs. Fruit trees tend to be trained into restricted shapes, as they were in the large- scale walled gardens of old, but the availability of dwarfing and semi-dwarfing rootstocks has been a boon to the potagiste. One of the greatest and most influential exponents of the potager was the late Rosemary Verey, whose potager at Barnsley House in Gloucestershire was laid out in the early 1980s. The house is now a hotel and the potager has been extended to provide the restaurant with fresh produce. Her potager is laid out in a part-walled, part- hedged enclosure, outside the garden proper, close to grazing cows and a pony field. The idea was that the visitor would come across the potager unexpectedly and it would be a delightful surprise.

CHESSMANN Consulting of Cardiff is masterminding the construction of a pounds 2.5m spa and garden at one of Englands most luxurious hotels. The firm will be working at Barnsley House, near Cirencester, Gloucestershire the former home of the gardener, designer and writer Rosemary Verey. GRAND SETTING Tim Haigh of Barnsley House, left, and Ashley Boon of Chessmann Consulting at the hotel By David Williamson

- Rosemary Verey's Garden Plans, by Rosemary Verey, Frances Lincoln Publishers, 144 pages, $34 Featuring 25 of her garden designs, Verey provides examples of almost every type of garden available. There are large formal gardens, herb, vegetable, cutting gardens and many more.

Set over three acres around her house in the village of Barnsley, near Cirencester, the garden was laid out by Verey herself, with the exception of a cluster of mid-19th century trees. In 1996 she presented the BBC2 series [Rosemary Verey] on Gardening from its grounds, and during the last 20 years of her life she wrote 17 horticulture books. As befits a queen, Verey had a flair for royalty. She designed the cottage garden at Highgrove for Prince Charles (he has been to Barnsley six times, including a poignant visit after Verey's funeral last year). She also helped King Hussein create a replica in Jordan. Rock royalty sought her advice too: the garden at Woodside, Sir Elton John's Windsor home, is modelled on her work. At one time Verey employed six full-time staff at Barnsley. \"My mother used this garden as a laboratory, always changing things and wanting to experiment with new ideas from outside. It was a magical experience to see how it altered every year,\" says her son [Charles Verey], who is selling the house after 50 years at Barnsley.

Such is the tone of this hot pink, trend-starting how-to, which relies on the experiences of the authors as well as interviews with other newlyweds who dared to dream outside the traditional taffeta and toasts - brides who know that nowadays bridesmaids dresses have to take into account tattoos and/or piercings. Chances are your garden will never look like Elton John's or any other of the 25 gardens profiled here, designed by British gardening expert [Rosemary Verey] for the famous or aristocratic. But oh, it is to dream. One can, with this sumptuously photographed, marvellously illustrated jewel box of a book. Verey's perennially excellent eye for colour and interest is apparent in each diverse plan, from Elton's three gardens, to a raised bed for Princess Michael of Kent to a herb, bee and butterfly garden for the Montreal Botanic Garden.