"When I began making a garden at our barn home in Hertfordshire fourteen years ago, the site was completely bare, with not a single shrub or tree on the place. This was a daunting void - but also a wonderful opportunity to make sense of a blank. I planted a framework of hedges in hornbeam, box and yew which interlock and partially enclose a number of interconnecting spaces."

"As winter’s chilly embrace beckons, the balance in the garden and landscape has changed. We now see more bark and branch, more underlying structure and less froth. At home, the hedges loom large. They become like the walls of rooms where the party is over and the space is now populated with more or less graceful decay."

"I have had a thing about big plants ever since I can remember. When I was small (although I never seem to have been that small), my brothers, sisters and I were regularly sent down to pick fruit or vegetables in the market garden run by my mother. I liked picking the tomatoes, because of their heady smell, viscid foliage and the sensation of being enveloped in a jungle where large red fruits hung down waiting to explode across T-shirts."