At first glance, Fittleworth House might appear to be quite a traditional sort of garden. But dig a little deeper and you’ll discover that it has been quietly shrugging off convention under the care of its head gardener, Mark Saunders, for the past quarter of a century.
The grand Georgian manor house – home to the Braham family for the past 60 years – is set on three acres of West Sussex downland. Built in the 1720s from locally quarried stone, it gazes through a curtain of wisteria across a tightly clipped croquet lawn, out and down over a gentle eastward-sloping sward to the distant walled gardens below. The house and lawns are overlooked on the outer fringes by two towering sentinels – a glorious 100-foot-tall cedar of
