Two gardens, two personalities
No two gardens are the same. No two days are the same in one garden.

Hugh Johnson

This should really be two gardens, four personalities. It's not just the personalities of the gardens, but also of its owners, or perhaps six if you count the character of both countries.

Many of us have more than one garden in our lives and we experience a kind of creative schizophrenia in which we long for one when we are in the other. We imagine what is emerging from the soil of the other, what needs doing.

French colour has a certain 'Je ne sais quoi...'

 I think one of my favourite garden writers is Elsa Bakalar, an English woman who wrote about creating her garden in Massachusets in the second half of the twentieth century (whom Piers knew all his life, up until the time she died). She said – of having two gardens in one's life: 'As many of us know, “getting away from it all” can turn into “taking it all with you”'.

Finding inspiration in Margery Fish's garden

Selfishly and for a simple life I would like to do all the deciding myself. But Piers also lives with our gardens and he needs to be considered and to contribute. In reality he has better ideas than me on some aspects of gardening, and if we can pool our ideas, we shall get a more creative outcome.

The nationality of the gardens is also a deciding point. In a way the style of the English garden decides itself. To have anything other than a cottage garden to go with a Tudor cottage, that has been a working place for centuries, would seem perverse. In France, we have a different building to consider, the natural light and flora can't be denied. But here there is endless scope to look at things afresh and create something unique.