Country Life

Crikey, what crocus!

IF you’re an Englishwoman at 50, you either get God or gardening—I got gardening’ is Patricia Elkington’s characteristically self-deprecating explanation for the garden she has created over the past four decades. Yet behind the breezy humour lies a story that mixes chance and good fortune, as well as the development of a particular talent common to so many British women gardeners. Mrs Elkington creates gentle, understated and inherently domestic gardens, where plants are the personalities and encouraged to give of their best and in which everything is included, from the

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