Prue's rural idyll

12:29pm Wednesday 6th August 2008

Successful author, cook and businesswoman Prue Leith OBE is often happiest when up to her elbows in muck as she tends the beautiful grounds of her country home, Chastleton Glebe, near Moreton-in-Marsh.

"Gardening is a passion of mine. When I am here and it is not pouring with rain, I spend most of the day in the garden just pottering about," Prue said.

In springtime, the garden is carpeted with hundreds of crocuses and daffodils, including one variety named in Prue’s honour. Someone once looked at it and said ‘Very appropriate — tall and untidy just like you!’

"It is a bottomless pit you just throw money at and, as far as I am concerned, gardening is nearly as good as cooking," she added.

The gorgeous honey-coloured Georgian building is set in sumptuous grounds of about seven acres that are on slightly higher ground, giving panoramic views of the surrounding countryside.

The day I visited, Prue was hobbling rather than pottering - she had broken her toe by tripping up the steps the previous Sunday while hosting a lunch party for more than 30 family and friends.

She told me: "We gave everyone a straw hat and they had to go out in the garden and pick things to decorate it - and we had the most amazing bonnets as a result.

"One of my nephews had made a tent like a witch's hat out of trailing leaves. He looked like Ophelia, whereas I cheated and went right to the red geraniums," she admitted.

Strolling around Chastleton, gazing at the splashes of pink, white and purple cosmos and bell-shaped purple and creamy white Snake's Head Fritillary, it is easy to see why she loves this place so much.

It truly is a rural idyll that even has a lake, complete with tiny man-made island in the centre, as its stunning centrepiece There is a bridge, summerhouse (pictured) and even a boat for the more adventurous, all designed by Prue and her late husband, the writer Rayne Kruger. They were inspired by the famous willow pattern' design popularised by china manufacturer Thomas Minton.

"Quite often, I go and sit in the little pergola on the lake, especially in the afternoon because the sun comes streaming in there and looks so beautiful on the water," she said. "Other times, I'll go for a row on the lake and sometimes take a bottle of wine and a couple of glasses along.

"I used to do that with my husband. Now it's with Ernest," she said, referring to her significant other, pianist and entrepreneur Sir Ernest Hall.

A small wooded area sits on each side of the grounds and there's even a croquet lawn to enliven summer afternoons.

No rural estate is complete without horses and Chastleton Glebe has its own stable block and yard.

"I used to ride until a few years ago but my horse died and I haven't replaced him," Prue said. "He was a chestnut who used to buck me off frequently," she laughed.

But there are still two animals with hooves in residence, a donkey called Thomas The Tank Engine and a 30-year-old pony called Joker.

Prue, 67, has taken creative inspiration from her garden in the form of her third novel, The Gardener, in that the idea for it was sparked by tussles she had with past gardeners.

"A gardener I had when my children were young grew to be too possessive of my garden. He used to get upset when they ate peas off the vine.

"More recently, with another gardener, I would come home at weekends and we would walk around the grounds.

"Once I commented Next year we must stake the delphiniums' and he started to cry and said You come home and never notice the things I've got right, only the things I've got wrong'", she remembered.

"It started me thinking Who owns this garden? The payer or the gardener?' That was the catalyst behind the storyline for my last book," she said.

Even though she is incredibly energetic in her business and charity work, Prue has a more relaxed attitude to her garden.

"I don't bother with anything that's too difficult to grow, I like things that look after themselves," she explained.

"I have only one gardener here, apart from a chap who comes to cut the lawn."

She is also quite sanguine about the fact that in gardening terms, her plans don't always work out the way she expects. Certain plants fail to thrive while others run rampant despite her best efforts to contain them.

She shrugged "I always say that God is much better than we humans at this gardening business."

At the side of the house there is a backdrop of delicate colour, courtesy of magnolia and aubretia with its pretty pink-and-purple flowers.

Appropriately enough for a garden belonging to a well-travelled South African, there is also a hedge of rosa mundi, which translates as rose of the world', with palest-pink petals striped with darker pink.

And everywhere the eye can see, there are ornate candleholders in the shape of bird cages hanging up "I am addicted to these, I just keep buying them," she said.

In springtime, the garden is carpeted with hundreds of crocuses and daffodils, including one variety named in her honour. She joked that someone once looked at it and said Very appropriate - tall and untidy just like you!' There are also many beautiful trees spread throughout the garden, including a weeping cherry with mauve pinky primulas underneath and a majestic silver birch that is "like a Bridget Riley drawing" according to Prue who is a keen collector of art.

As you'd expect from someone famous for her cooking, there is a large vegetable garden and a mass of pots outside the kitchen door "so I can easily reach them".

She explained "When I had the restaurant, this was a full-size allotment but when I sold the business I decided to scale it back.

"I used to grow baby courgettes, Jerusalem artichokes and virtually everything but now it's pretty much just leeks and a couple of others," she said.

Pointing at the neat rows of hedges in the vegetable garden, Prue said: "I took 2,500 box hedge cuttings to grow those."

"When my husband was ill, I would sit with him and dip the ends in powder and then pot them in sand and compost "I put all these thousands of cuttings in giant plant frames and our cat thought this was the biggest and best litter tray it had ever seen," she said ruefully.

Near there is ivy sculpted into a criss-cross shape on the wall. "That is done by my gardener Bernard and it's quite tricky," Prue pointed out.

"He puts wires up to direct the growth were he wants it and then plucks away the bits that are growing where they shouldn't be.

"I have a go at it now and then too as it's very theraputic when you are having a bad day at work" she joked.

While we were standing out in the garden, Prue pointed up at a picture window at the top of the house.

"My husband used to sit up there when he was working and look out across the garden and the lake," she remembered.

Then she directed me to her Red Garden, so-called because everything in it is red in colour.

"This looks best in August because the tulips and polyanthas are out. In the late summer, we have red roses, lobelia cardinalis (fall red lobelia), dahlias, cannas and lots of red-leaved things.

"Because I am South African I am quite vulgar in that I like bright, strong colours.

"We are always trying to keep everything red in this area. We have this apartheid policy," she joked.

Her favourite area of the grounds, though, is the Pink Terrace where an ornamental sign sporting her initials PL "a friend found it in a junk yard" has pride of place "We sit out here in the evening with a drink and it's just very beautiful with the terracotta tubs with trailing pink geraniums and busy lizzies and pink roses.

"The terrace faces southwest so gets the sun right up until the end of the day and I love to watch the sun go down.

Prue regularly opens her garden to the public under the National Garden Scheme. For more information visit the NGS website at: ngs.org.uk

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