Lord Heseltine, Haymarket Media Group’s founder and owner, has launched ‘Thenford: The Creation of an English Garden’ with his wife Anne Heseltine.
According to Haymarket, The Heseltines’ book is the story of one garden and one family, over a 40-year time period. In their own words, Michael and Anne Heseltine describe the ups and downs of how they set about transforming and expanding a wild, overgrown and often dilapidated woodland into the magnificent garden they have today.
Today, the garden at Thenford has an arboretum which contains more than 3,500 different species of trees and shrubs, including rare plants which were wild-collected by well-known plantsmen. It is also well-known for its sculpture garden, which has an eclectic collection of work ranging from a white marble Tazza fountain to an enormous statue of Lenin.
The book has been designed by ex-Haymarket Creative Director, Paul Harpin, and illustrated with private family images and professional photographs from Rupert Heseltine, Haymarket’s Executive Chairman.
He added: "Most gardens were created before the age of cameras but Thenford was photographed from its earliest stage."
Lady Heseltine joked that publishers Head of Zeus vetoed their original title 'Mistake by Mistake', citing a 8,000 sq m aviary in which the birds inter-bred. In the book, Lord Heseltine writes of building a 2,000 sq m greenhouse in 1979 to grow chrysanthemums to sell in Covent Garden market but that became "our greatest mistake" and he had to sell it as oil prices rose 500 per cent after the 1973 oil crisis.
