Sheer BRILLIANCE

MOST NOTABLE GARDENS ARE developed over a lifetime, or at least a few decades, but very few evolve as rapidly as the flower gardens at Malverleys in Hampshire. In just eight years, head gardener Mat Reese has orchestrated a series of borders that deliver an extraordinary sensory overload, peaking in spectacular style in high summer.

The Italianate, pale-brick Victorian house, ten-acre garden and the 19th-century parkland that surrounds it, sit on the edge of the North Wessex Downs, south of Newbury. When its owners bought it in 2010 they hired Mat, who had worked at Kew, Wisley, and with Christopher