Great Dixter British Gardens in Time

Four iconic English gardens.

Each is the product of one moment in history

and each gives us a fascinating window into the century

in which they were made and the people who created them.

Much more than just a history of gardening,

these are extraordinary tales of escape,

social ambition,

heartbreak,

downfall and disaster.

In unravelling these remarkable stories, we reach back over

the centuries to see these four great gardens through fresh eyes

and gain a greater understanding of their real significance.

Beautiful,

overpowering,

provocative,

extravagant,

theatrical and even controversial.

Nestled in the West Sussex countryside is one of the most

celebrated English Gardens of the 20th century - Great Dixter.

Created at the beginning of the century,

it was the final flowering of a movement

that looked back to the past to escape industrial Britain.

It's another world taking inspiration from the past,

right back to medieval styles.

Moving utterly away from industrialised England at the time

and moving towards something very beautiful,

very natural, very simple.

Great Dixter was made famous by Christopher Lloyd, the celebrated

plantsman and writer, who used this garden as a living laboratory.

No plant is out of bounds,

that's Christopher's great lesson and great motto.

It doesn't matter whether it's a dahlia or whether it's a parsnip,

everything has relevance if, aesthetically,

it creates that dance in the border that you strive for.

The garden at Great Dixter contrasts rigid formality

with wild exuberance.

It's a garden that thrives on contradiction.

Traditional but experimental, rooted in the past

but reaching to the future.

It's an absolutely spectacular garden

and it's one of those very unique places,

which combines the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries.

It brings everything together so it doesn't feel mummified.

It feels as if it's completely alive still.

Christopher Lloyd died in 2006, but his garden continues

thanks to Great Dixter's head gardener, Fergus Garrett,

who has taken on the daunting challenge

of keeping Christo's legacy alive.

See, that's just a stunning combination.

Alliums and ladybird poppy.

Look at this for a tree lupin, a naturally occurring hybrid.

Fergus came to work at Great Dixter 21 years ago in 1993.

He oversees every aspect of the garden,

from designing the planting schemes for each area

to directing his team of fulltime staff and students...

Any spare time, let's get the tulips out of those pots...

..and organising the nitty-gritty of Dixter's busy social calendar.

Yeah, Erin?

Yes, for both of those, that'd be good.

Well, I've got Lady Mary King coming.

Well, why not? Yes, why not? Why don't you do that, Erin?

I did bring some old fish soup.

It's just the place, where it's just flowing with ideas, you know?

And if you take our bedding combinations,

we never, ever repeat a bedding combination

so people feel that sense of freedom there,

and the same with these plantings, you know.

Otherwise I could just open up one of Christo's books

and copy what he did one year or another year, but that's the way...

..that's the way gardens go stale and become static,

and we're not that sort of place.

Christopher Lloyd made Great Dixter world famous

but this unique garden was created a decade before he was born.

And it was shaped and inspired by a remarkable group of men and women.

Christopher's father, Nathaniel, who built the family fortune

and Great Dixter by pioneering colour printing.

His driven mother, Daisy, who proudly claimed descent

from Oliver Cromwell, and brought that same zeal

to everything she grew.

A visionary writer called William Robinson,

whose revolutionary ideas let nature loose in the garden.

And a short-sighted Victorian spinster called Gertrude Jekyll,

whose radical sense of colour transformed the English flowerbed.

At the centre of the garden is an extraordinary house.

In part dating back to the 15th century, it's a classic example

of the Arts and Crafts movement, which celebrated the skills

and materials that had been swept aside by the Industrial Revolution.

Just like the garden, the house bears the mark of the Lloyd family.

Nathaniel and Daisy arrived from London in 1910

with the dream of creating a unique home for them and their family.

But the house and garden that's here today is very different

from what Nathaniel and Daisy saw when they first came to Dixter.

What they started with was a dilapidated medieval hall,

with 450 acres of farmland that was called simply Dixter.

To help them transform it into the home of their dreams,

Nathaniel's masterstroke was to employ

the brilliant architect Edwin Lutyens.

He was famous for his sympathetic restoration of medieval houses

and as the champion of the Arts and Crafts style.

Alan Power, the head gardener at Stourhead,

is trying to discover how a run-down farmhouse was transformed

into the centrepiece of one of England's most brilliant gardens.

The house at Dixter looks as if it's been here for centuries

but in fact when the Lloyds first turned up,

this was all that was here -

the medieval hall that dates back to the 1450s.

Then, in the early 1900s, Lutyens designed this section of the house.

But they seamlessly work together,

the whole thing looks as if it's sat here for centuries.

And there's a third element to the house that was added

and that's around the corner in the other part of the garden.

You can still see the Lutyens' work on this side of the house

but what you really start to notice is the third element.

This section of the house was actually an old yeoman's hall.

It was derelict and it was being used as a barn at the time

and Nathaniel bought it, had it dismantled

transported across the county and re-assembled it here at Great Dixter

and integrated it beautifully in with the other two elements.

So why did the Lloyds choose to settle here?

Having made his fortune as a lithographic printer,

Nathaniel was ready to abandon London for a life in the country

where he could spend his time on his great passions

of golf and photography.

But he was also searching for an outlet

for his other great obsession - medieval architecture -

and Dixter was the perfect project.

Daisy, 14 years younger than her husband, came from a family

immersed in horticulture and literature.

She had always envisaged a large family

and wanted to create the perfect rural idyll.

Nathaniel and Daisy Lloyd's dream was to keep the harsh realities

of a new century outside their garden gate.

But in the real world, a terrible conflict was brewing.

Historian and writer Andrea Wulf has been searching through

the family archives to try and discover how their new refuge,

Great Dixter, would face up to the challenge of a world war.

When the war starts in 1914, they've only lived here very briefly because

they buy it in 1910 and then they have to re-model it and build it.

So they've just moved in here. And what I have here is

a photograph of the great hall during World War I

when it was turned into a Red Cross hospital.

So you see this room, but it's filled with beds.

It looks very strange to see the timber frame building with

then very modern-looking hospital beds.

And then there's another photograph which shows the entire staff

and you see all the nurses in their beautifully starched uniforms.

The beds are in the great hall but also in the solar,

so their two big, important reception rooms are taken away from them.

They live here while you have all the nurses and doctors running

around and patients -

which must have been quite intrusive to their family life.

One of my favourite, favourite letters in this whole collection

is a letter written clearly by the manager

of the Red Cross hospital here, writing to Daisy,

and it says, "Dear Mrs Lloyd, would you please suggest where we are

"to keep the umbrellas belonging to the staff in future?

"We've kept them in the porch ever since the hospital was opened

"and no complaints have been made.

"Now they are hurled into the ward by your orders, I suppose.

"It's quite impossible to keep them

"in the ward with all the surgical cases."

You can imagine that Daisy didn't like the idea

that someone else was in charge of her house.

You can just imagine her walking past seeing this

mess of umbrellas and, you know, hurling them into the ward.

There are patients lying in bed here.

Daisy was perfectly suited to the role of family matriarch.

She relished the responsibility

and power that came with being a wife and mother, writing,

"When I was 12 or 13, I conceived a secret ambition to be

"the best mother in the world and have the most beautiful children.

"If I hadn't married I would have been a schoolmarm.

"Instead I had a class of six."

And, in an age when the battle for sexual equality was just brewing,

Daisy stood toe to toe with her older successful husband.

She's very much equal to Nathaniel.

For example, when they marry, one condition

from her side is that they're going to spend, each year, a month apart,

where each partner is allowed to do whatever they like to do.

So, Nathaniel goes off golfing and she goes off and sees her friends

in Europe, with the kids, but that's a condition when they marry in 1905.

You know, it's quite something.

Daisy was the mistress of a remarkable home.

Ideally, an Arts and Crafts house and garden were designed

by the same person and Dixter's architect, Edwin Lutyens,

managed seamlessly to integrate the two into a single entity.

To try and understand how he achieved this, garden designer

Chris Beardshaw has got his hands on Lutyens' original designs.

There's no doubt that the garden, the success of the garden today,

is totally reliant on the structure that Lutyens originally imposed.

The house sits within the six-acre site,

and then, off the house,

come a series of compartments, a series of enclosures

each with its own little narrative suggestion.

There's a stone paved area, flower borders, long borders.

So, he's allowing the spatial arrangement of the property

to then move outside into the landscape.

So to the rear of the property,

Lutyens has it as a series of straight-line paths linking -

visually linking - one section of the garden with the next,

the borders with the loggia, which was the old rose garden.

A very formal line of trees

disappearing down towards the lower moat.

Lutyens' garden wraps itself around the old manor house,

embracing the sloping terrain and the old buildings.

At the centre of the front garden

is an entrance path and small meadow.

To the right, there are two walled rooms,

and, to the left, there's a series of stepped compartments

with yew hedges.

All these spaces are secluded and look inwards

but never lose touch with the house.

At the back and outside of these formal rooms

is one of Dixter's most famous features -

the celebrated long border,

which runs almost the entire width of the garden.

Below, there are rolling meadows and orchards that open up the garden

to the countryside,

a walled rose garden and a topiary lawn.

Lutyens didn't actually prescribe much detail for these spaces,

but he didn't need to.

His brilliant design gave the garden its bone structure

and the Lloyds a perfect canvas to express their personality and ideas.

Alan Power has been examining the role

that yew hedges play in the garden.

These hedges, these yew hedges at Dixter really form

the bone structure of the garden.

Up close, they're fine, beautiful foliage, really delicate,

but actually from a distance it just blends into this dark green

backdrop that complements the colour of the perennials

in the garden brilliantly.

You have this lovely relationship between plants and backdrop.

But their function goes much, much further.

They actually separate every garden room at Dixter.

You walk from room to room, experience to experience

and it's separated and controlled by these yew hedges.

It's quite a moment when you come round the corner there

and there's this dramatic level change and, you know,

I had to take a breath before I stepped through the gap, just

to prepare myself for the next step, the next compartment, the next room.

It makes you feel as if you're standing on the stage yourself.

You emerge from the walls, you emerge from the yew hedges.

Standing on the stage, you view it as if you're the director and then you

descend right into the garden and you're utterly immersed yourself.

Walking through this garden

is like attending an extraordinary performance.

The yew hedges can seem overpowering,

directing where you go and what you see.

But in high summer even they struggle to contain

the exuberant planting and colours that flood through Great Dixter,

as Chris Beardshaw has been discovering.

This isn't a garden for anybody who has a fear of confined spaces.

There's plants just tumbling over one another and in many cases

it's not even clear if the path is for a gardener or a visitor.

It's almost as if it's just a little river, a stream

which has carved a passage through.

In a garden with this sort of intensity and density of planting,

the intensity has to be balanced by space, by openness,

by the meadows and the distant views of the landscape.

You need that contrast in order to just catch your breath,

otherwise the whole thing would just become far too intense.

Stepping out of the high garden is like coming up for air.

For the first time, you can see open sky

and the rolling countryside that surrounds Great Dixter.

You're suddenly in a different world dominated by one of the most

beautiful and unique features - the wild meadows.

Unrestrained and overflowing with wild flowers and insects,

the meadows are a perfect counterpoint

to the claustrophobia of the upper gardens.

And now we're taking the hay and the seed from here

and spreading it onto the various fields that we've got,

and then our neighbours are doing the same so meadows are starting

to spread out into the landscape from here.

And that's pretty important for many reasons,

because they are a thing of the past.

98% of these species-rich meadows, lowland meadows,

have disappeared in this country since the Second World War.

The meadows were created by Daisy Lloyd, who rejected

the formality of Lutyens' plans for traditional lawns

in favour of something wilder and less conventional.

Daisy spent her life gathering wild flowers

to make her meadows richer and more beautiful.

But her inspiration came from a hugely influential gardener

and writer called William Robinson.

Born in Ireland in 1838, Robinson moved to London

as a young man, quickly earning a reputation

as a brilliant botanist and gardener.

By his mid-20s he'd been on expeditions to the American prairies

and the Alps, studying plants in the wild

and was corresponding with Charles Darwin.

Outspoken, opinionated and fiercely energetic,

by the age of 30, he was publishing his own gardening magazine,

which he followed with his first book, The Wild Garden.

The Wild Garden became a best seller,

helping Robinson earn enough money to buy a country house

in West Sussex called Gravetye Manor.

In the opening chapter, he set out his stall.

"The gardener must follow the true artist, however modestly,

"in his respect for things as they are,

"in delight of natural form and beauty of flower and tree,

"if we are to be free from barren geometry,

"if our gardens are for ever to be true pictures."

He spent the next 40 years transforming the grounds and gardens

into a living illustration of his ideas.

At Gravetye, Robinson encouraged untidy edges,

to allow the garden to blend into the larger landscape.

He grew wild meadows where the garden

appeared to merge into the surrounding woodland and lake.

Robinson was a fierce critic of carpet bedding,

a flamboyant, high Victorian style of gardening,

which was typified by densely packed,

brightly coloured planting set in geometric patterns.

In stark contrast, in his garden, he used hardy perennial plants

which were encouraged to express their true nature and personality

but under the subtle and almost invisible hand of the gardener.

His book's popularity was largely due to Robinson's promise

that wild gardening could be easy and beautiful,

and that it followed nature,

which he considered the source of all true design.

Robinson's philosophy really struck a chord with Daisy Lloyd,

and at Great Dixter the influence of his radical ideas

is still very clear.

There's a wonderful informality of that landscape

sweeping into the garden without any obstacle -

no fence, no ha-ha, no barrier.

The meadows sweep straight into the herbaceous borders.

Yes, absolutely and for some people that doesn't work

cos they want this wild area to be behind a fence,

you know, behind the garden wall.

Because that's the countryside and this should be a garden

and this should be a formal lawn with formal avenues and trees,

and I think they're absolutely wrong

because this creates a certain atmosphere where the countryside

wallops in and the whole thing floats in all of this.

The wild meadows are Daisy Lloyd's greatest legacy at Dixter.

Her husband, Nathaniel, was drawn to something

much more structured and architectural.

His great passion was box hedging and topiary.

Nathaniel filled the garden with his obsession,

creating some of its most distinctive characters

and even writing a book about it that's still in print today.

I really do love topiary. It's very entertaining in a garden.

And it's like in the gardens of the 18th century

when you'd see statues as you walk around the garden,

in the garden here you come across topiary.

And topiary in its essence is a very simple way

of creating structure within a garden.

It's not a magnificent marble statue,

it's soft, it's gentle, it's very, very playful.

You can see a little bit of the sense of humour,

you can see a little bit of the person behind the place, as well.

You can see the skills of a gardener.

The practical, functional skills of getting it right.

I've got a picture of this area in the garden from not long after

the garden was created and you've got the yews,

the shape of the yew just establishing itself,

and you can see on a couple of them that the tip of the plant has been

allowed to come up and the foliage on the top has just been teased out.

That's when the fun starts, really, and that's the point

at which you decide, what am I going to have on top of my topiary?

Is it going to be a peacock? Is it going to be a canary?

You know, what are you going to have?

There was a medley of birds on top of these,

which would have been really lovely.

This remarkable garden had been taking shape for ten years

by the time that Christopher Lloyd was born in 1921.

Christo, as he became known, was the sixth and last child of Daisy

and Nathaniel, and he would make Great Dixter world famous.

His first sight of what would become his life's greatest work

was from the crawling window in the nursery.

This has been specially designed by Edwin Lutyens to allow

the Lloyd infants to look out on the garden as soon as they could crawl.

Right from the start Daisy seemed intent on sharing her passion

for gardening with her youngest son.

I was the only one who really took any interest in the garden,

but I did right from the start,

so it must have been in my blood.

And I used to devil for her - if you know that expression?

I used to stand near her when she was pricking plants out

on the potting bench and pretend to be helping.

Of course, like all children, I think I was lazy,

but I was definitely interested.

Daisy Lloyd taught her son embroidery and letter writing

but, more importantly, she taught him the language of plants.

Under her loving gaze he began a lifelong study of their colours,

shapes and textures.

Their habits, likes and dislikes.

Andrea Wulf has been searching through the Great Dixter archives

to discover more about this formative relationship

between Christopher and his mother.

There are hundreds and hundreds of letters within the family

and there's a huge pile between Christopher and his mother,

and they start very early on and they write letters

to each other almost daily, sometimes she writes twice a day to him.

Most of it is about gardening from a very early age on.

So, for example, here's one letter.

It's not dated, but you can tell from the handwriting

that Christopher can't be older than six, I would say.

And he writes, "My dear Mummy,

"I was the first to see the Rhododendron out.

"I was the first to see the Spiderwort.

"My lily is 12 inch.

"I was the first to see the Dutch iris..."

And it kind of goes on like this.

And it has all around it Xs for kisses

and lots and lots of suns.

So clearly, as a young child he's already

unbelievably passionate about his garden.

In later life, when Christo became a celebrated writer,

he would credit letter writing and his mother

for giving him his gift for words.

But from the very beginning,

Daisy built a remarkably close bond with her younger son.

There is one letter from March 1929, and she writes,

"My own darling, beloved, precious lambikin birthday child!"

So "lambikin" is what she calls him

and then she describes this scene where she's in a car

and the car's standing outside a house in a village.

And then she says, "And Daddy is inside taking photographs,"

because he was a passionate amateur photographer, and then she writes,

"And there are hundreds of snowdrops..."

She also calls them "Schneeglockchen" which is the German word for it.

"..in the front garden and I am longing..."

underline, "..longing to pick them."

And then in brackets,

"So now you know where a certain person get his flower greed from!"

She writes to him already relating to him

as, you know, the two of us, we're the same.

We're both passionate about our garden

and talks about this flower greed.

What I find extraordinary about this is that it creates this bond.

But also when you read her letters to him she writes to him

as if she was writing to another adult gardener,

but she's doing that with an eight-year-old,

nine-year-old, ten-year-old.

And he replies almost as an adult gardener would reply.

At the age of nine, Christo was sent away to prep school,

and for the next 70 years,

he remembered that day as one of the most traumatic in his life.

Christo may have been out of Daisy's sight,

but their daily correspondence made certain

that she and Great Dixter were never far from his mind.

And then when you go on, this is in 1931

and he's writing from boarding school.

"Thank you, Mummy, so much for the flowers.

"Please carry on sending me as big a box as you did this week

"and please go on picking my daisies and French pansies

"like you must have picked the daisies when you sent them to me."

She's clearly sending him flower boxes now,

and he's also giving her instructions,

what to do with his flowers here at Great Dixter.

This little boy's instructions to his mother

hint at the powerful gardener Christopher would eventually become,

but he would struggle for decades to make the garden his own.

After school, Christo studied modern languages at Cambridge,

but World War II intervened.

Christo was sent to Africa and India

while his beloved Great Dixter became home for evacuee children.

After an uneventful war, he finished his degree and came home.

By now in his mid-20s, Christo was struggling to come to terms

with his sexuality.

Homosexual in orientation, he lived in an age when same-sex

relationships were not just a social taboo - they were illegal.

He was equally unsure about his path in life.

To a young upper middle class man,

gardening was not considered a proper profession.

But Christo decided to abandon propriety and try and make a career

from the one thing he was genuinely passionate about.

By his late 20s, he'd got a degree in horticulture from Wye College.

Christopher was ready to begin transforming Great Dixter

and the world of gardening.

But first he would have to wrest control of the garden

from the most powerful figure in his life.

He said to me that she could be infuriating and,

and there were often power struggles between her and him in the garden.

But later on as, as he became more experienced and of course

he took that formal training at Wye College and had the confidence

of that formal training, he had the upper hand over his mother.

And there was, he made it clear that there was

a bit of a power struggle there,

but he suddenly became the person who ruled the garden.

But they gardened together side by side.

And not just gardened together -

they read together, they did needlework together,

all of those things, and so they were extremely close.

Christo's first great battle ground was the famous long border.

Dividing the upper garden from the meadows below,

it ran almost the entire width of the garden.

Under Daisy's iron rule it had become of the garden's

most celebrated features.

It drew its inspiration from one of greatest gardeners of all time,

Gertrude Jekyll.

Jekyll's impressionistic use of colour and texture

revolutionised garden design,

as seen here in her garden at Munstead Wood.

By studying in great detail the shapes and forms of plants,

she began to combine them in subtle new ways, breaking away from

the brashness and rigidity of the popular Victorian planting style.

She was a prolific writer, contributing to Country Life

and writing a hugely influential chapter on colour

in William Robinson's bestseller The Wild Garden.

She commissioned the architect Edwin Lutyens

to design a home for her garden at Munstead Wood.

It began a collaboration that produced some of the most

famous houses and gardens of the time.

Jekyll's philosophy shaped Lutyens and his designs

and she created planting schemes

for many of his most famous commissions.

But not Great Dixter.

It seems that Daisy Lloyd wanted to put her own stamp on the garden,

so Jekyll was never actively involved, though the Lloyds

bought plants from her and drew inspiration from her ideas.

However, by the time that Christopher came into his own,

a rebellion was brewing.

One of the principle points of deviation from Gertrude Jekyll

is the way in which the plants were encouraged to migrate

towards the front of the garden.

In a Jekyll border, it would be unusual to find something as

majestic as the purple fennel here right on the edge of the border.

We'd anticipate it being further back.

There was a polite choreography to her designs

which allowed sufficient space for the large specimens at the back

and then gentle tiering and weaving until we have something like

the salvia tickling our ankles as we walk along the pathway here.

But what Christopher Lloyd was able to do

was to bring these plants to the fore

so we start to peer behind them and around them.

As we look through, we get just glimpses of the roses,

the cannas and the teasels beyond.

So in design terms it's a veil which just serves to entice

and create an air of mystery and encourage that sense of exploration.

Christopher's designs still had a direct relationship with Jekyll,

but he moved them on to a new level.

Yet what Christopher Lloyd did is to then take that principle

of looking at detail and explode it up into,

not just a more grand scale, but be much more just ambitious,

less concerned about shocking the viewer

and more interested in creating, in a way, the view of spontaneity.

So a rudbeckia here, the flower form and its wonderful

sunflower-like structure with black centres -

suddenly when we look back into the border we see an inula

with exactly the same shape and form,

and then forward again to a helianthus.

Three plants of different flower colours, different structures,

but there's enough harmony between the three to create

that wonderful bounce, and it's about getting the eye to move.

If we can allow the eye to move through a garden

then the feet of the viewer will follow.

This adventurous approach to combining plants is largely

what has made Christopher Lloyd and Great Dixter famous.

Look what I found.

Salvia splendens Red Arrow.

Today, Fergus encourages his team to have that same analytical eye

and apply that spirit of experiment throughout the garden.

They're quite tall, salvias,

they're splendens types so they could come in useful.

Sounds nice.

One of Dixter's most famous features that provides the perfect

opportunity to hone those skills is the pot displays.

At the front of the house, two of Fergus's team,

Rachael and Yannick,

are remodelling the display around the medieval porch.

-Do you want to have the iris in the back?

-Yes.

Show gardening and bedding displays is a bit similar,

but this is even more instant.

You wait until the plants are looking good or just about

to look good and then play with them,

so it's quite fun. It's quite fun.

And it's nice that they change regularly because

it really frees you up to try things out.

There's so much colour and excitement coming on

into these and it's great to use.

-You see we've got that blue over there.

-Yeah.

Shall we stick a bit more blue with it?

A lot of the fun we have here is about contrasting plants.

Whether that's through their form, their texture, their colour,

and that's how we do our pot displays, as well.

I mean, sometimes they harmonise and that can be nice,

but more often than not we try and put things next to each other,

which excite the eye so your eye sort of...

It's made to work your eye.

Your eye is constantly made to work.

It makes you question things.

Why is this working? Because they're not always complementary colours.

No, that's too far.

Some white over here would be good.

OK, well, we've got the grass here.

-More calendulas there?

-Yes, let's try them.

This doesn't really work, does it?

Not yet.

Christo's growing mastery of colour gave him the confidence

to step out of his predecessor's shadow

and begin to reshape the garden to his own tastes.

The neatly clipped putting lawn and topiary at the back of the house

had always epitomised his father, Nathaniel.

Christo decided to convert the lawn into a wild meadow

transforming this part of the garden by counterpointing

his father's traditional formality with a new freedom.

As he grew even bolder and more confident,

Christo took on other parts of his father's legacy.

In 1921, Christopher's father, Nathaniel,

created his own signature section of the garden.

On Lutyens' plans this area was set out

as a simple rectangular croquet lawn.

But drawing on his design experience and passion for architecture,

Nathaniel created what became known as the sunk garden.

This had been softened by Daisy,

but it was Christo who really transformed this part of the garden.

Today it vividly illustrates a century of the garden's evolution.

This is the sunken garden and it's perhaps one of those areas

which best describes the layers of history of this garden,

and the way that the design and the plantsmanship has changed over time.

Lutyens had this down just as a simple green space

with a path all the way around the edge and enclosed by,

not just the barns, but also a yew hedge.

And then Nathaniel's version which came a little later.

He modified the paths, he made them much more intimate

and intricate, he changed the topography, imposed the pond,

and as soon as Christopher gets involved,

well, that's when the explosion really starts to happen.

The plants loom overhead, they bounce out of the ground,

they're hugely excitable,

the colour combinations are wild and enthusiastic.

As Great Dixter and Christo went from strength to strength,

word of his growing virtuosity spread fast.

Christo had always been comfortable with pen and paper

so when the magazine Country Life approached him

to write a weekly article, he didn't hesitate.

With Great Dixter as his muse and laboratory,

it was the beginning of a brilliant new career.

It was 42 years ago that I started writing

every week for Country Life.

So that's half my life.

Once I'm confident about my subject and have mapped out

what I want to say, I can get it down very quickly.

"If a plant bores you, something must be done about it.

"The simplest course, if it belongs to you, is to throw it out.

"If it is someone else's, look the other way.

"If it belongs to someone you rather dislike anyway,

"don't be ashamed to let it confirm you in an inclusive repulsion."

Christopher's writing raised his profile and brought him

to the attention of some of the most brilliant gardeners around.

By the time he wrote his classic book, The Well Tempered Garden,

Beth Chatto had already carved a reputation for herself

as a designer and writer, but his words made a remarkable impression.

I was absolutely bowled over by it,

I'd never read a book, a gardening book, so personal, so...

and so entertaining,

but also so stimulating, you know.

I mean, he made outrageous remarks and, erm...

Well, I took pen to paper for the first time ever to an author

and wrote to him, and while I admired it and said why,

I said, "But I can't agree with you over begonias."

Certainly Christopher couldn't stand them, and I can't do without them,

so I wrote and told him so.

He wrote back, "Come to lunch," so I did.

Beth's personality and garden couldn't have been more different

from those of Christopher and Dixter.

Unlike him, she hadn't inherited a garden

but created it from scratch just a decade before they first met.

Inspired by environmental ideas

and her husband's botanical expertise,

she transformed a couple of fields on the family fruit farm

into one of the most unique and innovative gardens in the world.

Working with difficult terrain and land that was too dry to farm,

she used her brilliant knowledge of plants to create a garden

that required no watering and very little maintenance.

Called the dry garden, it became famous all over the world

and over the next decade she extended her garden to include

a range of innovative and environmentally sensitive designs.

Our styles of gardening, yes, they are very different,

and now and again he'd get fed up with me, you know,

"Oh, for goodness' sake, do stop talking about ecology!"

In sharp contrast to Christo and Dixter,

Beth Chatto's gardens are serene and delicately composed

but, despite the contrast - or maybe because of it -

they became firm friends.

I regularly stayed with him and we did lectures together.

We went to Australia, New Zealand, America and various places,

and of course we were obviously connected up to be shown off

to other people's gardens, and these people were all expecting,

you know, Chatto and Christopher to arrive, and...

And then Christopher would make some outrageous remark

by going round a corner and saying,

"What are you thinking of doing with this?"

And the poor woman would literally blanch in front of you, you know,

and I would pull his coat tails, tell him off afterwards.

In 1972, Christopher's mother, Daisy, died at the age of 91.

Daisy always had always maintained

that people made too much of money and death,

so there was no funeral,

and the day after she passed away, Christopher drove up to Scotland

to give a lecture on hardy perennials.

For more than half a century she had dominated his world,

so it must have been a huge loss.

But, for the first time in his life,

Christopher was truly the master of his own destiny.

I'll take a different approach to stirring.

He often talked about the past and he would tell you what

a terribly shy person he was when he was younger, and that was in some

ways difficult to believe because he was so outgoing

and so forthright and so much could be the life and soul of the party.

I think before his mother died, his life was with her,

and afterwards it was like discovering...

I suppose, in a way, it was like a young person

discovering new things about life, so he discovered friends,

he discovered wine, champagne, whisky, the good things in life.

I think having the house full brought him to life.

And he'd have these parties and they grew until he...

I think Christo started

to get confident in himself.

I think the weekend visit here that took me most by surprise and

sticks in the mind is when he said, "We've got Paul McCartney coming,"

and I went quiet.

He said, "You know those, the pop combo, the Beatles?"

The gist of it was, a group of people would get together,

so you could find yourself spending the weekend literally

with a bookbinder, an opera singer,

a cellist, a gardener,

an embroiderer, and a glazier,

a basket maker, a potter,

a carpenter, a bricklayer, another gardener.

Brilliant! You know, that was Christo.

'Humour was the thing that really sparked.'

He had this wonderful laugh that would just fill the room

and you might say something to him

and you thought, "Oh, I've gone a bit too far here."

And he'd sort of look down and look over his glasses,

and then he'd erupt into laughter.

But do you remember

when he started putting plants out on the porch,

someone sidled up to him and said

"Do you realise to grow cannabis is illegal?"

"What?" "It's illegal, Mr Lloyd."

"That's a very good foliage plant."

"All the same, Mr Lloyd, I think you ought to..."

And it is a good foliage plant!

He was so forthright in what he said but that was,

it was a sort of a challenge, everything you said was questioned

and it was just a wonderful sort of, you know, exchange.

I sort of think of it, in a way, a bit like a boxing match, you know.

'But, oh, some of the happiest memories.

'One evening Christopher and his young friend,'

they were playing Brahms duets, and I sat by the fire,

and there was no light except the standard lamp

which stood by the piano, but I was sitting at the other end of the room

by the fire, and all the sparks kept going up in the darkness, you see,

and that's remained with me for a long, long time.

That's what, in some ways, Dixter was to me -

the sparks...coming off from everywhere,

the garden, the house, the people.

You're not living in a vacuum, and I think people are -

although it sounds extraordinary -

I think people are more important than plants.

And I never forget that.

Added to his hectic social life, Christopher continued to write books

and articles as well as lecturing all over the world.

Great Dixter continued to be a source of inspiration.

But by the time Christopher reached his 70s, the relentless

intensity of the Dixter style of gardening

was beginning to exhaust even him.

He and the garden needed fresh blood.

At this stage, you look at this and say, well, actually,

I should have another dollop of red the other side, at the far end.

I should have a bigger dollop of magenta here,

maybe carry another blue over to there.

Maybe have another one of those grasses,

those Spanish oat grasses here, so that you look through it like that.

This is when you do your adjustments,

and they all go into a notebook

and you make those adjustments over the winter

and then next year, you've got something, a better picture.

In 1993, Christo invited a brilliant young gardener

called Fergus Garrett to come to work at Great Dixter.

Their extraordinary collaboration would raise the garden

to new heights, freeing Christo to express his talent

in a way that had never been possible.

I'll take this baby up. Wah!

'Fergus brought a new vitality.

'He gave Christopher that tremendous passion,'

and, I mean, I'm sure Christopher had it already,

but no, something changed.

They certainly blossomed enormously.

With his new protege, Fergus, by his side,

Christopher was ready to finally break free from the past.

He began by turning his gaze to one of the most

traditional parts of the garden.

This is the exotic garden, or tropical garden,

or sub-tropical garden.

Some people call it the old rose garden, it used to be a rose garden

and was for many decades, until I think it was 1993

when Christopher thought that he should get rid of the roses.

He decided to have an idea of just creating another world,

if you like, so we'd been seeing a lot of tropical planting around

so we decided to do something that mimicked the jungle.

For 80 years, the old rose garden

had been a celebrated feature in Great Dixter.

Designed by Lutyens and surrounded by Nathaniel's yew hedges,

its ten beds filled with Daisy's favourite roses,

the Rose Garden epitomised the people

that shaped Christo and Dixter.

With the help of his new partner in crime, he ripped it out.

Christo described the moment in Country Life.

"The rending noise of huge old roots reminded me

"of a hyena devouring a plank of wood."

There was a big hoo-hah, how could he destroy

an old rose garden, and so on, and people jumped on the bandwagon

of saying, "Well, Lloyd's gone mad."

Suddenly he's ripping out the whole of Dixter

and all this stuff was written,

and he enjoyed that, and wrote about it

and sort of poked fun at those people.

'Christopher was like a small boy running away with an idea,

'and he's been encouraged with that'

by Fergus, and Fergus, the young man, the energy -

it was a wonderful combination.

Each year since then the exotic garden is replanted.

I want something that's going to stop your eye.

I'm thinking I've got a tall yucca

that'll paint the sky, as Beth Chatto calls it.

Maggie, can you just right it?

Just push it back a bit.

No, just tilt it back, Maggie.

Yeah, I like it there.

'One of the things he did teach me was to use my eyes, to analyse,

'and see things through his eyes'

of how and why things work or don't work.

But also he wanted me to be my own person, as well,

and gardening in a way became easy, very easy,

because you gardened as if it was your own garden.

So I'd say to him, "You know, Christo, I don't think that works,"

and he'd say, "I think it does work," and so there would be the discussion.

why do you think pink and orange work?

What about the different tones? What about the amount of green there?

And all those sorts of things.

So he sort of fine-tuned me and developed me,

and then towards the end of his time here

he just sort of let me get on with it, you know?

He had that confidence in me,

but I never forgot that it was his garden.

And he was such a magician, you know, he would do the unpredictable,

as well, so I made sure that he was in on every decision towards

the end because he could add that sparkle and magic to it.

We've got very nice groups of a big-leaved colocasia

and a dark-leaved dahlia with white flowers twining.

And then we'll have the contrast of the grey leaves around the donax.

There's a wonderful thing over there

you know, this cryptomeria, yeah, look.

Look at that, it's extraordinary.

You know, if that wasn't a conifer people would be raving about it.

I think it's just a wonderful plant, I wish I could have a grove of these,

because it works so well with the grasses that are here with it,

You've got a stiff canna in front of it, you see.

Here we've got dahlias to give us colour,

a variegated grass to give us a different shape

and here the tree of heaven that's been cut back

to give us those long pinnate leaves.

And that wonderful body,

this lovely texture of this gingko up against a palm tree.

So that's what we're using, we're using them as objects.

As long as it will grow here, we'll play around with it.

He is brilliant, he is very creative in so many ways,

and he's so much better than I am at so many things.

Well, we are just as good friends as we could be.

We had great fun doing this,

and I've got really fond memories of our moments in here

because I used to get here really early in the morning

and Christopher would be up and having a shave in his bathroom

over there and he'd always open the window and shout out

to see if I was here, and I'd answer back, and then he'd come down

in his dressing gown with a cup of tea or something like that.

That's five o'clock, six o'clock in the morning,

and we'd discuss a few things, he'd go back and finish

getting ready, have his breakfast, come out here

and we'd rope it off like we've done today, and we'd put a bed together.

Then he'd go off and write or make bread or have guests or whatever.

And we had this very sort of intense four or five days here of putting

this garden together, and every year it was different.

And so, although he's no longer here, I always feel him close to me

when I'm doing this, especially early in the mornings.

For over a decade, Fergus and Christo worked together

to make Great Dixter into the most breathtaking

and exciting garden in England.

Their remarkable collaboration ended in 2006

when Christo died at the age of 84 after a short illness.

Great Dixter is now managed by a charitable trust,

and under Fergus's creative leadership

the garden grows more vibrant and beautiful every year.

Christo's signature act of rebellion,

the exotic garden, epitomises the spirit of adventure

that still pulses through Great Dixter.

The feel is meant to be sub-tropical, or other-worldly,

so that leaves it open to use anything

that has got a strong character.

Do you feel now that you're gardening in the style

of Christopher, or do you feel as though you are your own gardener?

I don't think about him when I'm putting plants together.

I'm not thinking, well, would Christo approve of that?

Or, I must do something that Christo would approve of.

I'm just doing what I feel is right for that space,

and I bounce ideas off other people.

But undoubtedly I wouldn't be gardening in this style

if it wasn't for Christopher.

It's recognising what the strengths of a place like this is,

and it's protecting those strengths and being free to develop

other parts of it, in the free way that Christo did, as well.

He was very good about recognising what made this place what it is.

And so, in years to come, we may stand here and there may no longer

be an exotic garden here, it may be something completely different.

Would that be a bad change for Dixter?

No, because Dixter's always done that.

I think the thing is freedom of self-expression.

Be yourself, don't worry about what other people think.

Next time, one of the grandest landscape gardens - Stowe.

Radical, provocative, monumental, it broke free

from centuries of formality and put English gardens centre stage.

This is a really significant turning point.

It is the catalyst for the most important change

in British landscape design.