To boldly go...
THIRTY years ago, the designer Anthony Paul created a pond and bridge for a client in Sussex and planted it with bold exotics, such as gunnera and yucca, adding strong colour punches with 10ft stands of bright yellow inula and the smaller yellow heart-leaved ox-eye daisy, Telekia speciosa. It was a striking installation, designed to be viewed across the lawn from the front of the house.
The years passed as Mr Paul built a career from his home in Dorking, Surrey, designing gardens across the world from France and Switzerland to Australia and America and gaining a reputation as someone with an artist’s eye who understood plants. These he used to paint the landscape with sweeping blocks of single plantings, working with an eye), he evoked the local lavender fields by planting symmetrical rows of evergreens inside the garden. In a garden he made in his native New Zealand, the use of aloes and succulents planted into gravel echoed the wild flora.
