This summer we visited the gardens at Levens Hall in Cumbria, and I couldn’t resist doing this little canvas. Topiary gardens are serene and surreal, quintessentially English, and about as timeless as anywhere you can imagine – this garden is largely unchanged in more than 400 years.

The subject is actually not quite the radical departure for me that it may first appear - I painted a series of topiary gardens back in the 1980s after seeing David Inshaw’s ‘The Badminton Game’ in the Tate Gallery, and I briefly revisited the theme in the 90s. There could well be more to follow!