The line of Scotch firs silhouetted against the sky between Kiftsgate and the Warwickshire county boundary was also due to Shenstone's imaginative foresight, as were the lime trees bordering the front drive - although the house had not been thought of then.

[4][5] An ancestor of his, Walwyn Graves (1744–1813), had built a Georgian front with a high portico on to Mickleton Manor, and it was this facade which was moved bodily up to the new site on Glyde Hill to become Kiftsgate Court.

[7] Miss Hamilton, who owned Mickleton Manor, was said to have told Mrs Muir that the sprung floor of the ballroom was one of the most expensive items in the building of Kiftsgate.

Kiftsgate remained empty until 1981 when Diana's eldest daughter Anne and her husband Jonathan undertook major modernisation of the house making their home in the central part and creating a separate flat and tea room.

[5] Many people would have thought they had achieved enough but in 1930 the steep bank was tackled, and a summer house with steps either side down to the lower garden was built.

During the war the tennis court, which required continual watering and upkeep, was allowed to become derelict and in 1955 there was a wonderful display of seedling roses and Scotch firs growing on it, which Mrs J.B. Muir was very grieved to see go, when it was resurfaced.

Kiftsgate first became well known to the gardening public after Graham Stuart Thomas's article in the Royal Horticultural Society Journal, May 1951, in which the great plantsman observed, "I regard this as the finest piece of skilled colour work that it has been my pleasure to see.

The same official website says that it would be even larger were it not cut back, and the owners fear for the integrity of the beech tree which it has colonised owing to the weight of its foliage.