Taking on the mantle of Peto

I FIRST visited the Grade I-listed garden at Iford Manor, Wiltshire, 25 years ago, when I travelled from Sissinghurst in Kent to Bath to buy a Morris Minor. I was instantly captivated, not because of the horticultural excellence, nor even its design—strangely for a garden best known as the masterpiece of Edwardian architect and garden designer Harold Peto. Rather, it was something intangible: the embedded sense of place that turns the ordinary into the extraordinary.

Tucked away at