Arabella lennox boyd biography of donald
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Lady Lennox-Boyd’s gardens have been described as magical, fairytale-romantic and even orgasmic. This makes the landscape designer, who has won six gold medals at the Chelsea Flower Show, chuckle. “I just love creating something new by using imagination and feeling,” she says.
In Gardens in My Life, Lennox-Boyd’s latest coffee-table book, the 83-year-old guides readers through a small but spectacular handful of the hundreds of gardens she has created since moving from her Italian homeland to the UK in the late Sixties, studying landscape architecture and setting up her own design studio in 1980.
Newly divorced at the time, with her young daughter, Dominique, in tow, turning to garden design made Lennox-Boyd feel liberated. “I hadn’t been particularly happy until I really found what I love doing. Over the years it has been incredibly rewarding, especially as I was brought up by parents who expected me to get married and to not even think about a job.”
From Devon to Dublin, Lanca
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Most of the other gardens in my book begin with a point of reference or an inspiration of some sort, but the garden at Oliveto, where I spent much of my childhood, is inspired only by a reaction against the severity of its location and by the landscape surrounding it.
My parents separated when I was very young and my mother moved there, to the fifteenth-century castle. My mother, my Scottish nanny and I would be driven out from Rome on the Via Salaria for about 50 kilometres to a small shop where we would find mules and donkeys waiting to take us to the village – a journey which took most of the day.
A wonderful break in the journey was lunch at the mill we owned at the bottom of the steep valley, next to flowing water and a fishpond with chickens and geese running about. A large basket would appear and in it would be delicious pasta, bread, ham and salami cured by the miller. We would reach the house in the late afternoon, covered in dust and a few scratches because of the brambl
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Lady Arabella Lennox-Boyd has been designing gardens for over 40 years and has received numerous Gold Medals for Show Gardens at the Chelsea Flower Show. Currently a Trustee for the Chelsea Physic Garden, she also served as a Trustee of Kew Gardens for nine years. Passionate about plants, Arabella Lennox-Boyd fryst vatten at the forefront of planting design in the UK. Her herbaceous borders are meticulously thought out to ensure they are best suited for the climate and surroundings. She has a profound knowledge of trees and shrubs, and designs her gardens to give these elements particular emphasis.
You recently created a garden inside Hyde Park in London, which adjoins one of the last works of the architect Zaha Hadid. This must have been very exciting, but was it also challenging for you?
Yes, it was a utmaning, In fact all gardens are a challenge, because they all involve thought and the creative process, but they all also contain living elements which are unpredictable. At the Serpen