Inspiration of French Gardens

When fashion consultant Laura Burlington left London for Derbyshire just before the first Covid lockdown in March 2020, she took a pot of planted tulips with her – a reminder that despite the painful uncertainties to come, the natural world would go on uninterrupted. The house she headed for, with her husband and three young children, was no ordinary place. Over 300 metres above sea level, Park Farm is on the edge of the Chatsworth Estate, to which her husband, William, Earl of Burlington, is the heir. Chatsworth’s pristine historic gardens, spread over 105 acres and dating back 500 years in parts, could not be more removed from the wild moorland surrounding the farmhouse. ‘I didn’t know the Derbyshire landscape well then,’ recalls Laura. But four years later, you can hear in her voice how much the remote stone farmhouse, high above the treeline, means to her.