THE NURTURING GARDEN

You’d expect a botanical artist to feel the need to be surrounded by nature, and that’s exactly what drew Gael Sellwood and her husband, Michael, to this house and garden in rural Hertfordshire. ‘We weren’t even looking to move,’ says Gael, who first came here on a dull, dark, late-November day in 2007. ‘We were in a very lovely thatched cottage nearby but as soon as we saw this place, with the house at the centre of its plot and surrounded by fields and woodlands, we just fell in love with it.’ An imposing holly