A mostly instrumental long-player record that took its inspiration from the English landscape dominated the album charts in October 1974, and in the week of the opening of the V&A's Destruction of the Country House exhibition. Hergest Ridge was Mike Oldfield's follow-up to the phenomenally successful Tubular Bells, his bestselling debut of 1973. The sleeve of Hergest Ridge featured an aerial shot of the titular landscape feature: a distinctively shaped hill outside Kington in Herefordshire, close to the Welsh border. Oldfield had retreated here, to a house called The Beacon, as a way of coping with his sudden fame and public profile as well as to draw inspiration for his music.

A mile or two from Hergest Ridge, and therefore just off the edge of the aerial photograph on the sleeve of the record, was an equally distinctive country house and garden. Hergest Croft had suffered the depredations of wartime requisition after it was converted to a boarding school for girls. Nevertheless, it had narrowly escaped a listing in the catalogue for the Destruction show, and the family had resumed residence in 1953. In a clear case of nominative determinism, the Banks family made their money in banking (as well as in industry and the law). But successive generations of the family were also keen on banking of a more physical kind: building up the embanked surroundings of their house through plantings of trees and shrubs. William Hartland Banks married Dorothy Alford, daughter of the dean of Canterbury and, like her husband, a talented natural scientist. Together they first laid out the gardens at Hergest Croft in 1895, around the time that the house had been built to a fashionable arts and crafts design. The gardens became known for their exotics and other distinctive plantings: azaleas, cedars, rhododendrons, maples, and birches. The trees planted after the war by William and Dorothy's son Dick Banks, an industrialist and director of ICI, now have national collection status.

Dick's eldest son, Lawrence, made a career in banking, but also had a passionate interest in gardening. The two sides of his life were combined when he became treasurer of the Royal Horticultural Society.