The elephant in the garden room
LIKE a glimpse of 18th-century whimsy —a cartouche painted on a Meissen coffee pot or a vignette from an exotic scenic wallpaper—an elephant stands ankle deep in flowers in a corner of an English garden; fringed by fading daffodils, with crows on its back, in a Dorset meadow; or by a lake in Wiltshire, for all the world as if drinking from a distant waterhole.
The first elephant belongs to Rupert, 7th Baron Carrington, the second to distinguished interior designer Annabel Elliot and the last to Emily Hambro. Amid low, blue-flecked tussocks of brunnera, skirted by forget-me-nots and framed by stands of cow parsley, in a sculpture garden designed for his parents 30 years ago by landscape architect Robert Adam, Lord Carrington’s elephant is, he says, a ‘spectacular sight, when you turn the corner and there he is, doing his thing’. Mrs Elliot believes her elephant is majestic, ‘happy in English pastures’, and
