Henry Avray Tipping (22 August 1855 – 16 November 1933) was a French-born British writer on country houses and gardens, a garden designer, and Architectural Editor of Country Life magazine for 17 years. Early life Tipping was born in the Château de Ville-d'Avray near Versailles, while his parents were living in France before moving into Brasted Place in Brasted, Kent, where he grew up. He belonged to a Quaker Christian family of businessmen, who had prospered in the corn trade in Liverpool. His father, William Tipping (1816–1897), was a railway company owner and amateur archaeologist and artist, who served as the Conservative Member of Parliament for Stockport between 1868–74 and 1885–86. His mother Maria (née Walker, 1822–1911) was the daughter of a flax mill owner from Leeds. Henry Avray Tipping was educated in France and Middlesex before reading modern history at Christ Church, Oxford, where he was a member of the Oxford University Dramatic Society. He worked briefly as a university lecturer before joining the staff of the Dictionary of National Biography, where he concentrated on genealogical research. He also wrote musical comedies, performed locally in Kent, and became an expert on wood carving, particularly the work of Grinling Gibbons. Career However, his main interest was gardening and garden design. In the 1880s, he lived at The Quarry, a house at Brasted (built on the Brasted Place estate for him as a bachelor house in 1874) where he designed his first garden. The house is built of ragstone from the former quarry in the grounds. The deep and rather damp quarry provided scope for creation of a fashionable fern garden with a series of ponds (fed by water from a rainwater cistern under the house), paths and bridges. Around the house extensive gardens were created including rose gardens, lawns and some specimen trees. 'Quarry', renamed 'Badgers' in 1971 and since extended, is built with an upstairs studio overlooking the grounds, to serve his needs as study for writing. Brasted Place survives and was eventually converted to apartments in the 1990s. Tipping later moved to a cottage at Ramsbury in Wiltshire in 1890. He also began writing articles for The Garden, a magazine which had been founded by William Robinson in 1871; and between 1904 and 1909 he also edited the three-volume work In English Homes, a largely photographic survey of English domestic architecture. After The Garden became absorbed by Country