wide circle around the house there are oranges (Citrus aurantium) and mandarins (C.reticulata). Camellias are slowly opening dark glossy leaves before the wall spaces. Beside the stone flagged path bordered with box (Buxus sempervirens), that leads from gate to door, there are fragrant shrubs, diosma (Coleonema pulchrum), lemon verbena (Lippia citriodora), lavenders (Lavandula spp.).' Wilson planned his gardens with layouts of an easy, but nevertheless rigorously applied formal geometry, which owes little to colonial or contemporary English garden design (to which Wilson makes no reference in any of his writings). They are unmistakably gardens designed by an architect who, though admiring the architectural work of Lutyens, probably knew little of current English gardens. This geometry ... reached its extreme in his own house, Purulia, where the rectangular bungalow is centred in a circle of citrus trees, a conceit which can only be appreciated fully in plan form. Upon this circle Wilson playfully constructs an elaborate network of arcing and radial paths, cross paths and further circles. The geometry is complex but not forced and the architectural detailing is deliberately simple - flagged paths and summer houses with columns of whitewashed tree trunks. Behind the house an apsidal planting of fruiting olives surrounds a sundial on the central axis and screens a semi-annular kitchen and fruit garden. The positioning of the summer house at Purulia, on the cross-axis of the central path and diagonally to the right of the front door, is similar to the positioning of the more sophisticated one at Eryldene. The simple stone-flagged central path is common to all the gardens, yet it is a cottage detail, not found in the old colonial gardens of the County of Cumberland which Wilson knew. The garden has some fine trees planted by Wilson - ginkgos, weeping elms and maples, copper beeches, dogwoods and citrus trees. House Designed for servantless living, the house was a simple rectangle in plan with plain plastered walls painted white, a low-pitched roof covered in multi-coloured shingle tiles and with boxed eaves. The windows, simple rectangles with Georgian sashes and louvered shutters, were protected by striped canvas awnings. (Wilson) wrote: 'It is a rectangular cottage covered with an unbroken hipped roof. As the walls arose square, bleak and factory like, consternation filled the souls of neighbours dwelling in multi-angular villas. By the time the brickwork was finished their indignation could not be contained. I found an