I won’t ever forget the exhilaration during my first Summer in France as I discovered the manor and its Japanese garden reached via a park which shared an overgrown boundary with the rear of our garden. I came to it unexpectedly under the huge Japanese elm at the end of three kilometers of cow paddocks and shady riverbank paths, somewhere between lazy suburbia and heaven. We sat and ate cake from an old painted cake tin and I knew there and then, I was in France. The soft shadows of the glades give way to remnants of an industrial past.
