But although the owner of Architectural Heritage Adrian Puddy admits that he caters for a niche market he

But although the owner of Architectural Heritage, Adrian Puddy, admits that he caters for a niche market, he points out that the huge interest in gardens is not only at what he describes as the Groundforce end of the scale.Successful garden art depends on what you do with your object once you have got it, and that has nothing to do with the amount of money you spend.Cotswold Decorative Ironwork is at the top end of the market, with items in its catalogue like a stone lion more suitable for the grounds of a stately home than a suburban semi. The price of their reproductions is about 10 per cent of the cost of an original, a consideration when you might have to pay up to pounds 60,000 for the original itself. They were attracted by the art they saw, and wanted copies for their estates. It is those copies – of sphinxes, for instance – that are now being copied again and sold by companies like Architectural Heritage.

Which is a shame, because it’s quite easy to discover eccentric and stylish objects with which to transform a dull corner of your garden, if you are prepared to look for them.The idea of garden art came about as people began to travel abroad, especially on the Grand Tour. The idea steals into your mind that you have stumbled on an enormous car boot sale where the god of merchandising rules, unbothered by any notions of quality control. At Chelsea Flower Show this year, you could buy antique French decoy ducks on poles to stick in your own borders. Henry might have approved, though it’s difficult to imagine what he would make of the arty objects on sale at the current Hampton Court Flower Show.
Beyond the designer gardens and the tents for specialist growers, a band thumps out a medley of songs from The Sound of Music, as you walk past acres of stalls selling everything from bent cutlery windchimes to miniature wooden wheelbarrows, nodding millennium bugs and gigantic plastic chess pieces. Its mass of fact, figures and references will provide a splendid basis for discussion.`A Question of Balance’: the Game Conservancy Trust, Fordingbridge, Hants SP6 1EF (pounds 25, inc p&p). WHEN HENRY VIII redesigned the gardens of Hampton Court in the mid-16th century, his flowerbeds were filled with figures – not flamingos, but creatures with more royal connections, such as griffins, antelope and tigers – all attached to poles and stuck into the soil. Now, with the geese protected by law, the population has rocketed out of hand: on Islay alone, more than 30,000 geese are destroying the pastures every winter by grazing and plastering the fields with droppings, and various statutory bodies are compensating the farmers to the tune of pounds 400,000 a year.This, surely, is conservation gone mad – yet the trust makes only the mildest suggestion: that if numbers continue to rise, and the cost of compensation become “unacceptably high”, future measures “might include allowing the species to be shot, with appropriate safeguards”.The advantage of such restraint is that it encourages debate – and that, I suspect, is what the book is designed to do.

It merely gives numbers and facts, and states that “statutory conservation agencies” must recognise the need for continuing control, at least at present levels, because: “There could be a loss of species diversity if fox numbers are allowed to increase unchecked.”Sometimes the massed scientists are a bit too guarded – as when they discuss the barnacle geese now infesting Hebridean islands.In the old days, landowners used to get together every year and decide how many birds to shoot. Nor does it point out that, for all the fuss made about traditional hunts, they play a relatively insignificant part in keeping the population down. If the population remains stable, as apparently it is at the moment, it follows that 425,000 foxes must therefore die every year. Gamekeepers probably kill 70,000-80,000, and fox hunts a further 16,000.The inevitable conclusion is that by far the greatest killers of foxes are road vehicles – but the book does not condemn drivers or call for lower speed limits.

This estimates the spring population at 240,000 adults, and the annual production of cubs at 425,000. It maintains that there is no sense in letting one species flourish at the expense of several others: everywhere, it says, the aim should be to create and maintain a sustainable equilibrium.The even-handed nature of the book is particularly evident in the section on foxes. Whatever the setting, their efforts benefit other wildlife besides game.Unlike many conservation bodies, the trust is uncompromising on the need to cull predators. In the lowlands, shooting men plant woods, spinneys and hedges for sporting purposes; on upland moors, they spend fortunes maintaining the heather and preventing encroachment by bracken or coarse grass so that grouse can flourish.

Since the trust acquired the property in 1992 there have been spectacular increases in the numbers not only of wild pheasants and hares but also of songbirds such as thrushes, blackbirds, dunnocks and chaffinches.Agricultural output, far from suffering, has also increased and the land itself has been given a far more attractive aspect by the creation of smaller fields and the introduction of varied crops.The message is the same for many different types of terrain: management for game enhances the countryside. It also urged farmers to leave more nesting cover in the form of wider hedges with grass verges alongside, rather than try to cultivate every square yard of their fields.At the same time, it advocated the culling of predators, principally foxes, stoats, rats, crows and magpies – especially in spring when game birds are breeding.These pioneering policies have now been widely adopted but nowhere are the results of them more striking than on the trust’s own experimental farm at Loddington, in Leicestershire. In the early 1950s the introduction of chemical herbicides eliminated many of the weeds on which insects live, and so removed about three quarters of the partridges’ potential food supply.To give the birds a better chance, the trust developed the concept of “conservation headlands” – strips round the edges of arable fields which are left unsprayed, or selectively sprayed, so that harmless weeds and insects can flourish. Much of the trust’s early work focused on the grey partridge, which has been in serious decline for the past 40 years. Research revealed that in the first weeks of life, grey partridge chicks depend almost exclusively on insects to obtain the protein which they need for rapid growth.