The flat, if barren, section around the house in Matakana was more or less why Jacky and Tony Whincop bought it. The couple's enthusiasm for their B&B was wearing thin, Tony was approaching retirement, and their two hectares on a nearby hill were hardon his dodgy knees. Here were lawns that would be easy to mow, and Jacky liked that too. In her mind's eye, Jacky, English and a gardener at heart, saw the house surrounded by gardens full of flowers. But Tony can't be doing with flowers. "You go to allthis trouble to grow them, they last about a week, and then you throw them out," he says. Jacky's mind's eye is pretty much where the gardens stayed, until her mum stepped in. Keen to get her daughter home for a decent length of time, she arranged for the Whincops to spend six months working for Lord and Lady Faringdon at Buscot Park in Oxfordshire, the sort of stately pile in which a single painting, dashed off by Rembrandt, is worth 90 million dollar.
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