Richard Gatenby, head gardener at Barnsley House near Cirencester, took his audience on a pictorial ramble through the gardens created by Rosemary Verey, at The Pound. The charm of the gardens, as Mr Gatenby illustrated, was that they had evolved from 17th-century rectory gardens into the showpiece they are today. There was no formal plan. Mrs Verey was an amateur gardener, he said, in the sense that she had no horticultural training and was therefore unfettered by rules. She’d try something and sometimes the idea worked, sometimes it didn’t. Friends gave her plants and she found space for them – much like the rest of us. Mr Gatenby’s pictures meandered through the seasons in no order and information about the plants was dropped in rather too fast to make satisfactory notes. But his enthusiasm was infectious. Jo Bayne
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