Natural polish

The Old Vicarage, Warwickshire For her family home, designer Angel Collins has created a relaxed country garden with a smart, contemporary edge. Non Morris pays a visit

- Non Morris

IT is the middle of May, in the middle of England. The sky is a simple blue and the fields are edged with ridiculously radiant clouds of hawthorn. As the road with its story-book cottages approaches the handsome, early-12th-century church, a flash of bobbing tulip heads in the long grass catches the eye. Beyond is the house, a pretty, late-18th-century vicarage with a Gothic porch, gabled dormer windows and welcoming cinnamon-coloured render. Most importantly, there is a 2½-acre garden with views out onto the Dassett Hills and, on a day like this, to the Malvern Hills beyond. This is the home of Ben and Angel Collins.

Garden designer Angel Collins has been creating generous, comfortable gardens for 25 years. COUNTRY LIFE’s list of the Best Garden Designers in Britain (March 4) praises her ‘billowing and romantic borders… punctuated by strong, architectural planting’. Mrs Collins had already made an idyllic garden of her own at her childhood home in Mixbury, Oxfordshire, a garden renowned for its mix of roses, sky-rocketing Eremurus and lawns edged with rosebay willowherb. Eight years ago, however, she found herself in a new house, with a new garden (‘it was mostly paddock when we arrived’), and had to dig deep to find the heart to start again on a family garden.