fertile ground; Visionary sixties decorator David Hicks created landscaping majesty from humble Oxfordshire farmland.

Byline: Ashley Hicks

The first time I took Allegra to the Grove, my parents' home in Oxfordshire, was not entirely successful. She was instantly seduced, as is everyone, by the splendor of the garden that my father had spent the previous ten years creating, but the intense Englishness of the place did feel rather alien to my lovely Italian girlfriend. I did not help by reading to her, as we lay in the shade of the chestnut trees, Nancy Mitford's Love in a Cold Climate, whose frigid beauty and arch humor are so quintessentially English.

My father's voice was growling and his vocabulary Victorian, so that while Allegra spoke perfect English, communication at lunch was not easy. He kept talking about when he would "go upstairs," meaning to heaven and not, as she thought, up to his bedroom. Asking her if she liked gardens, he was alarmed by her reply that she had a "brown thumb" rather than green fingers. Who, then, would look after his creation when he did finally go upstairs? It took all her Italian charm (and a judicious mixture of tactical flattery and wry teasing) to get him smiling again.

My parents had moved here in 1979 from Britwell, a larger house nearby that my father had spent nineteen years decorating and having

published in magazines and his own books. Faced here with so few rooms to decorate inside the former farmhouse, he had worked more on the garden, creating a series of "green rooms" outside. He had formed carefully composed views from the windows of each of the principal rooms, perspectival vistas that led the eye out to a grander space beyond the glass. No color but green was allowed to be seen from the windows; flowers were hidden behind walls and hedges.

The garden was my father's greatest work, on which he lavished every moment he could. When he was away traveling, in an airplane or a hotel room, he sketched new layouts; when he was at home, at night, he pored over garden books and ordered exotic black tulips or little-known tree peonies from catalogs; but most of all he worked outside, pruning and weeding, wrestling with his thorny roses, returning bloodstained and exhausted. As time passed, the garden's fame grew, and he took huge pleasure in showing it off to gardening groups from Argentina or Arkansas.

Nine years ago, Allegra, a designer in her own right, and I