Gradually, he built up a dossier of material: htm old Country Life photographs (their gardens fundraising correspondent, H Avray fundraising Tipping, wrote glowingly about the garden in 1907), estate maps, newspaper cuttings, books by and about the Countess.After the sale of his business five years ago, Creasey persuaded Daisy's htm granddaughter to sell him another four-and-a-half fundraising acres of garden. Twenty dogs and at least as many htm cats roamed the garden in her last years, though the pet elephant that she kept at Easton Lodge in the Edwardian era had long since packed its trunk.When Creasey first took on Easton Lodge, he knew nothing about the elephant Or Daisy Or Peto. She had by then undergone a most radical change of character. She became a socialist, standing against Anthony Eden in the Warwick and Leamington by-election She was also an early champion htm of animal fundraising rights. Now he is obsessed with it.Gradually, he is picking up the pieces of Easton Lodge that were scattered after Daisy's death. The rubble came from the dairy, stables and coach houses that once fundraising stood on the site.Why did he buy it? "I like to do a deal," he said, shooting me a glance htm from piercing blue eyes.
He is trying to pretend it was a business proposition, but what he was buying was romance Slowly, he got dug into the place. In fact, he bought one-and-a-half acres of concrete rubble, for the present Easton Lodge is just part of the west wing, which was saved when the rest of the house was demolished. He has come to understand the making of money pretty well - and has now learned how to spend it, too. He was only three years old when Daisy Warwick died in 1938, but on a misty spring morning in 1971 he brought his family to see Easton Lodge, by then a much reduced, overgrown ruin The Warwicks had lost most of their fortune.
The main house had been pulled down by Daisy's son, in the Fifties Trees sprang from the balustrade round Peto's romantic pool.
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The intricate pergola had collapsed long before, under the weight of an unexpectedly heavy snowstorm.Creasey's children so hated the place, they wouldn't even get out of the car. Impenetrable brambles choked the drive, but Creasey could just make out the pattern of a complex cobbled courtyard, with stars and concentric circles of different coloured stones around a fountain.He decided to leave his home of 14 years in cosy Stevenage and buy Easton Lodge, with one-and-a-half acres of its original 35-acre garden. As for money, our only understanding of it lay in the spending, not in the making of it."This is where Brian Creasey comes in. "We would dine late and long," she wrote in a memoir, Afterthoughts, "trifle with the opera for an hour or so, or watch the ballet at the Empire, go on to as many houses as we could crowd in. He could only do one sort - Italian - but the style happened to suit the time: plenty of big seats for lazing on, the sound of water to soothe brows fevered by romance, intimate, hedged walks for privacy and long, long vistas to show off his clients' acres His gardens were about conspicuous consumption.So was Daisy. By asking Harold Peto to redesign parts of her own garden, she made sure that Easton Lodge could supply the rural equivalent.Peto, who started work there in 1903, left intact the Countess's Victorian garden, with its heart-shaped ceramic plaques dotted around fussy flowerbeds, and laid out a new Edwardian garden to the north of the house.