A river runs through it

DURING Rupert and Elizabeth Nabarro’s first year at Bere Mill, a nightingale would sing in what is now the Wisteria Garden, an area of water meadow just across the River Test from the house and the rest of the garden.

There was barely any garden to speak of when they moved here 28 years ago, only an abandoned orchard below a handsome Hampshire wall and a derelict walled garden. The famous chalk river, where it was diverted through the watermill, had become a muddy stream with the unprepossessing remnants of a fish farm at the far end of the property. Yet the location, upstream of Whitchurch in the bottom of the wooded Hampshire basin, was idyllic. From the beginning,