A casual observer might think that, as the son of a Midlands-based tile merchant, I simply do not have the qualifications to advise an aristocratic landowner on what trees to plant on the 27 acres of windswept downland he has recently purchased on a Wiltshire hilltop. Properties like this are rarer than hen’s teeth. You see it’s big but not ‘flash’. No footballer or city slicker would give it a second look. It has been pre-loved by two generations of well-educated folk with good taste – not a leylandii or a laburnum in sight. Secluded, and yet if you were to forget horseradish sauce for the Sunday roast, you could nip to Waitrose and back in the time it takes to down a Bloody Mary. The symmetrical flint house resembles a Dickensian doll’s house, its front framed by evergreens and mature beeches, the tapering branches of which caress the Georgian...
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