The garden at Friar Park in Henley-on-Thames — the Oxfordshire home of the late Beatle George Harrison and his wife Olivia — is breathtaking. The ‘Gardening Beatle’ did a spectacular job of reviving an historic alpine garden in the shadow of the ‘Henley Matterhorn’, and Olivia has enhanced what was Britain’s largest rock garden with her exceptional and imaginative planting schemes. Charles Quest-Ritson reports; photographs by Clive Nichols and Sue Flood.
When George Harrison bought Friar Park in January 1970, there was grass growing up through the floorboards. ‘My God! What’s he done?..
. look at it!’ his sister-in-law Irene exclaimed. As for the garden, she later observed that ‘you didn’t go for a walk without a machete in your hand to cut your way through’.
Few properties can have had so many advantages and disadvantages as this house on a hill above Henley-on-Thames in Oxfordshire. On the plus side, the former Beatle had found an estate of 30 acres, close to the town, but completely protected from it. It was a place of privacy where he could concentrate on his career as a solo musician — the first thing he did was to build himself a recording studio.
On the minus side was a crazy Gothic monster of a house, surrounded by a jungle of tree seedlings and brambles and an abandoned walled garden thick with glass from all the collapsed greenhouses. The house — which captivated and amused Harrison — would require years to repair. The garden needed co.