The English Garden

Salvaged DREAM

Along the banks of the River Yeo, wrapped in a tapestry of walled gardens, orchards, avenues and woodland, sits a fine Jacobean manor. On a cold clear morning, frost picks out the long lines of box hedging crisscrossing the formal gardens and splinters a course across greenhouse glass. It sharpens the pleached limes, turns rosehips to sugared confectionery and rims topiary and bulrushes alike.

None of this settled beauty suggests the reality facing Newton House just a decade ago. Half a century of decline had seen its former gardens subside beneath waves of brambles and scrub until only their ivy-clad walls, crumbling outbuildings and a fragment of the former 90-foot glasshouse remained. Inside the house, dwindling family fortunes

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