Views and Vistas

Come and walk around my parents garden, overflowing with David Hicks's passion and a secret garden he created for my sister and me to get engaged in...hhhmmmmm

The Grove, my parents home, where my mother lives quietly and my father had dedicated himself to the grounds’ design for the last nineteen years of his life.  It was here that he applied the principles of interior design to the outdoors, pushing back the boundaries of gardening on a grand scale.

It’s fascinating that his passion for design developed to focus on the garden, but then he always said that gardens are organic spaces, maturing and ripening once you have laid them out.  They are much more interesting than rooms, which usually do not age quite as well.  And by this time in his life, my father was perhaps beginning to realise that he wasn’t immortal and that what he was creating in Oxfordshire would easily outlive him.

He alternated his interior design commissions with the relief of coming home to plant and refine, develop, rip out, and replace until he had the garden at the Grove just as he wanted.  It is a garden full of surprises and complexity, with doors in walls that open onto secret spaces, a bridge over a moat, pyramid-topped gateposts, allées of stilted hornbeam trees with hornbeam hedges beneath them, and broad sweeps of manicured lawn, turning the old farmhouse garden into a dazzling display of imagination. If you have a few minutes come and walk around the garden with me…