YOU could, perhaps, be in France. An elegant grey-pink façade and a fleet of white-painted garden furniture look down over gracious sloping lawns studded with perfectly spaced topiary and early-18th-century urns. The lawns lead down steadily beyond the fine Jan van Nost Mercury and arrive at the Great Basin, a generous spreading pool with its shimmering reflections of cloud-pruned yew and a celebrated wrought-iron arbour, The Birdcage.
The gardens at Melbourne Hall, with their tree-lined allées, carefully framed vistas and cleverly positioned ponds and fountains, are regarded as the best surviving example of the early-18th-century Anglo-French Baroque style, a rare chance to see a surviving garden of this period, when designs were directly influenced by formal French gardens, such as Versailles. Melbourne is uplifting, too, because, as well
