I first visited Longstock Park Water Garden more than 30 years ago and, as with so many garden visits, was amazed at what I found: a garden created around a seemingly completely natural landscape of streams and channels flowing between wider expanses of lake. Details, planting in particular, have inevitably changed since then, but the garden’s raison d’etre remains unchanged: the seemingly limitless quantities of water around which the whole garden has always been planned.
There are a number of great gardens around the world where water is an integral feature, but a true water garden is one where an abundance of water is the primary feature around which everything else revolves. These are rarities: the mind turns to a
