Orpheus meets Escher

The landscape architect Kim Wilkie grew up in a house on the edge of the Malaysian jungle. ‘Things decayed as fast as they grew.’ Leather shoes would fur over with mould within hours if left outside. His father was posted to Iraq next. ‘Everything was brown.’ But stare long enough at the sand and you would see a coin, or a shard of ancient glass. Back home his parents bought the ancient flint and brick farm in Hampshire with which this book ends. Longhorn cattle graze beside the spiral grass mounds which are his best known signature as a designer of parks and gardens.

In the last year of a history degree at Oxford Wilkie discovered that there was such a thing as ‘landscape architecture’. ‘I could hardly believe that everything I loved could be wrapped in one profession: people, land, biology and drawing.’ For this book he has picked 20 design projects, from the restoration of Harold Acton’s Renaissance garden at La Pietra to the elliptical pool cut laser-sharp into the courtyard of the V&A.

The single best-known of his country house schemes is Heveningham Hall in Suffolk, where a scheme plotted by Capability Brown was unexecuted at his death in 1783. JCBs dug the lake Brown plotted on a ten-foot length of paper, while up against the high neo-classical facade Wilkie replaced a Victorian parterre with a grass amphitheatre shaded by holm oaks. (The last credit is to ‘Colin, the genius digger-driver’, whose JCB I imagine pirouetting across the landscape like a cheerful yellow ballerina).

More recently, at Boughton in Northamptonshire, the Duke of Buccleuch took Wilkie up the grass pyramid which is the centrepiece of the half-mile Baroque landscape scored out by Charles Bridgeman in the 1720s but never finished.