Alan Hollinghurst gave a brilliant talk on the windblown Mound about the gardens of his youth, beginning with his parents’ garden at Faringdon in Berkshire, and the nearby Faringdon Park with its coloured peacocks, and going on to memories of his parents next garden in Cirencester, very precisely described and remembered, as well as, again, an adjacent country house garden in Lord Bathurst and Alexander Pope’s Cirencester Park; and how these gardens experienced in memory informed his later literary descriptions of gardens in his novels.
A delight that one of the great contemporary novelists should also be able to so knowledgeable on Gardens.