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"A New Book Celebrates the Beauty of Contemporary English Gardens\nMitchell Owens on The New English Garden and the growing movement to reimagine classic garden design\nAt Armscote Manor in Warwickshire, England, garden designer Dan Pearson carved a hedge into an undulating eyecatcher that adds a note of modernity to Deborah and Roy Williams's Jacobean house.\nCreated for entrepreneur Chris Blundell, designer Tom Stuart-Smith's lush mosaic plantings at Mount St. John in Yorkshire descend a gently terraced hillside, leading the eye into surrounding woodlands and farmland beyond. Boardwalks and gravel paths wind through the display, which is further divided by buffed sandstone retaining walls; at center is a discreet swimming pool. \"The result,\" writes author Tim Richardson, \"is big, bold, and operatic in scale, with the visitor sitting by the pool experiencing the horticultural equivalent of a seat in the stalls at Covent Garden or Glyndebourne.\"\nFor the National Trust's Packwood House, a picturesque Tudor-meets-Arts-and-Crafts residence in Warwickshire, Mick Evans reimagined the existing sunken garden as a modern xeriscape. The surrounding beds were filled with gravel and planted with flowering species that thrive in low-water conditions, such as euphorbias and the succulent Echeveria.\nRibbons of molinia grass make a curvaceous statement at Scampston Hall in North Yorkshire, which was opened to the public in 2004. Renowned plantsman and garden designer Piet Oudolf was the estate's aesthetic maestro, commissioned by baronet Charles Legard and his wife, Caroline, to transform a 4.5-acre walled garden long used for growing Christmas trees into a contemporary setting. Robinia trees shade the blocky seats at the center of the space.\nAn artificial hillock crowned by Prunus trees and surrounded by a canal is one of the striking features that Jacques and Peter Wirtz incorporated into the Lynn Garden at Ascott, the 40,000-acre Buckinghamshire home of Sir Evelyn de Rothschild and his American wife, Lynn Forester de Rothschild.\nThough one of the leaders of the New Perennial movement of naturalism in the garden, the late Henk Gerritsen, was also a master of highly artful interventions. At Waltham Place in Berkshire\u2014the home of Orcillia and Nicholas F. Oppenheimer, chairman of the De Beers diamond-mining company\u2014magnificent horseshoe-shaped hedges made of beech add rhythm to the Long Border. Each is accented by panaches of Stipa arundinacea grass, while connecting beds brashly combine interesting weeds (burdock, bindweed) with somewhat more conventional greenery (buddleia, euphorbia). Flanking the 280-foot-long display are massive yews pruned to resemble clouds.\nSeveral garden designers of note have shaped the landscape of Highgrove, the Gloucestershire country house of the Prince of Wales and his wife, the Duchess of Cornwall. The prince, however, can take credit for the designing and planting of Thyme Walk. Creeping varieties of the fragrant herb flourish between paving stones, their scent released when visitors walk over them. The golden-yew topiaries were untended blobs when the heir to the British throne acquired the property in 1980 but have since been clipped into whimsical shapes recalling fancy 19th-century desserts. The handmade benches are a collaboration between the prince, designer Stephen Florence, and architect L\u00E9on Krier.\nDesigner Tom Stuart-Smith was commissioned to revive the ten-acre Victorian parterre at Trentham, a former ducal estate in Staffordshire. His stroke of brilliance was to modernistically evoke the long-gone Italianate theme commissioned in the 19th century by the second duke of Sutherland. He filled the boxwood-bordered sections with fountainlike grasses, miscanthus, and pennisetum, then added dramatic columnar yews. As the designer recalls observing in the early days of the project, \"If we replant the garden as it was [with thousands of annuals], people will just yawn and go away. I want to add more detail but retain the overall sweep and grandeur.\"\nA silvery 100-foot-long canal slices the main garden at Gloucestershire's Temple Guiting, a 14th-century estate turned self-catering luxury retreat. Garden designer Jinny Blom handled the grounds, at the request of owners Steven and Jane Collins. She created a roomlike setting for the canal, walling it with pleached hornbeam trees underplanted with agapanthus, foxgloves, dianthus, irises, peonies, roses, and more, in white, pink, and mauve. At the end of the canal stands a Tudor-era dovecote.\nGarden designer George Carter established an imperial all\u00E9e for clients at Tilbury Hall, a historic residence at the border of Suffolk and Essex. The stone pedestals are topped with grandiose bronze horns, creating a sweeping walk that leads to a swimming pool accented by giant urns and enclosed by yew hedges.\nArabella Lennox-Boyd, one of England's leading garden designers, has established a multitude of inspiring spaces at Gresgarth, the Lancashire home she shares with her husband, former politician Sir Mark Lennox-Boyd. One area (shown frosted by winter) features a swirling pavement of pebbles dappled with stone stars and zodiacal signs (not shown) relating to the Lennox-Boyd family; Maggy Howarth, a mosaic artist, did the honors."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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