Changes

|title=Christopher Lloyd: His Life at Great Dixter

|author=Stephen Anderton

|reviewer=Sue Magee

|buy=Yes

|borrow=Yes

|pages=256

|publisher=Pimlico

|date=March 2011

|isbn=978-1845950965

}}

When I first had a garden I did what I always do with a new project: I turned to books to see what help I could find. There were any number which told me how to do the basics and what I needed to know to make the right decisions. It was rather like cooking only with a few more uncertainties thrown in. Then there were the books which didn't really bother about the basics but provided limitless inspiration. At the head of these writers, if not way out in front, was Christopher Lloyd who gardened throughout his life at Great Dixter, producing colour combinations which stunned and probably one of the greatest gardens of the twentieth century.

Initially I wondered if I would warm to the book as the first half of the book is essentially about Great Dixter and Christo Lloyd under the influence of his mother, Daisy Lloyd, but it would be impossible to understand anything about Lloyd if you knew nothing of his mother. She brought him in to gardening and taught him the basics – and then manipulated his life along with those of his four brothers and one sister until her death in 1972. Lloyd undoubtedly had a great influence on the garden at Dixter – but it was perhaps his great good fortune that his father bought the property in 1910 - and then hired Edward Lutyens to renovate and extend the gardens.

The biography is affectionate but certainly not sycophantic and it brings to life the shy genius who contributed so much to twentieth century gardening. I knew how it all ended – but it was still a difficult book to put down.

You can find out more about Lutyens and his work [[The Memorial to the Missing of the Somme by Gavin Stamp|here]]. For another biography of a twentieth century icon we can recommend [[The Surprising Life of Constance Spry by Sue Shephard]].

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