The countryside just inland from the Moray Firth is an entirely rural landscape of big skies, gently rolling hills and few people. On the cold late spring day when I visited it seemed not at all the sort of place in which to find — as I'd been told Ishould — an extensive recently-created garden. Even more surprisingly, one largely Italian-ate and formal and made by an actual Italian, an architect with two consuming private passions: embroidery in winter and gardening in summer. But then, one of the products of her embroidery winters which Rora Paglieri proudly showed me was a sampler which in honour of the years she had spent in Kenya included the Swahili phrase mimi muniewe. 'It has two meanings,' she explained with a chuckle. 'It means both "Iam my own self" and "I am the boss".' Clearly, this is a woman who 'does things her way'. And over the twenty years since she first saw Carestown Steading — which happened entirely by chance when she was on holiday in the area in 1987 — she has created, completely from scratch, not just the five-acre garden but the house: in effect, a whole intensely personal world.
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