A garden dies with its owner, they say. I have a picture of something turning black-and-white, like a computer being shut down, and fading away. All that personality, all that attention to detail gone; just a bunch of lonely plants left blinking, hoping for better things. “What now?” The usual answer is that the place is sold off, and the gardening is lost with the garden. Fin.

But what if that garden is an international icon such as Great Dixter, home of the late Christopher Lloyd – Christo, to his friends – and a shrine for gardeners the world over? There’d be many a rich celebrity keen to snap up an idyllic house like Dixter – a silver isle set in an emerald sea. Get the public out, do it up, bring the plumbing and the kitchen into the 21st century, put in a pool, electric gates… And it might be none the worse for that: it’s a private house, after all, and a big house needs a fortune spent on it every 100 years or so to keep it healthy. (An heiress never comes amiss, but then Christo had no wife.) The house and garden are listed, which would save them from destructive developments, but would it matter that you and I could no longer visit it? Well, the Heritage Lottery Fund has come to the rescue with £4 million and Dixter can stay open. It won’t disappear into private hands.

It’s the right decision for the Heritage Lottery Fund to have reached. Dixter is a gem of a house, at the centre of its garden. It was created in 1910 for Christo’s parents by the architect Edwin Lutyens (while he was starting work on New Delhi), seamlessly welding together two ancient timber-frame houses with a new service wing of his own, and setting out a strong-boned garden that was seriously gardened by Christo from when he was a plant-obsessed toddler. Dixter is one of Lutyens’s sweetest creations and one of only two to have remained in private hands until today (the other, Le Bois des Moutiers, is in Upper Normandy in France).

When I first knew Christo, in the Eighties, he was convinced that what happened to Dixter after his death was somebody else’s affair, his descendants’ business. Individualist that he was, he was determined it should not “fall into the dead hands of the National Trust or English Heritage”, but be a canvas upon which someone else could make their mark. Only in his last years (he died in 2006) did he set up the Great Dixter Charitable Trust, realising that to wash his hands of Dixter was actually to leave a pile of administrative dung for other people to clear up.

But life is not so simple. Christo owned only 40 per cent of Dixter. After the timely and sometimes untimely deaths of his five siblings, a controlling 60 per cent belonged to his niece. He could only leave his 40 per cent to the Trust, which meant that the long-term future of Dixter as a place open to the public was still not secure and might, in fact, never be so. Would his niece move in? To whom might she sell her share which, for all her lifetime, had brought her no reward? What might her descendants do with it? Fortunately, she was prepared to sell to the Trust at a generous price, thereby securing Dixter for public enjoyment. A close shave, and a wonderful result for us.

But without Christo there to guide the gardening, has the trust acquired a dead garden? Is it still actually his garden? Surely his real legacy is his profusion of books, journalism and letters (Dixter is arguably the best-documented and photographed garden to have existed). Well, Christo’s manner of gardening, at least, looks set to continue. For the last 13 years of his life, he was lucky enough to find a best friend and head gardener in Fergus Garrett, now the torch-bearer of gardening, Dixter-style. Is that long enough at the master’s knee for such a role? It was a quarter of Christo’s serious, postwar gardening life, so yes: plenty.

During those 13 years the garden shone as never before. Anything was possible with Christo’s beloved Garrett to hand. A prairie garden appeared, formal lawns became orchid meadows, the old rose garden was infamously turned into an exotic garden, the art of multilayered planting and successional bedding was explored as nowhere else, and baroque tumuli of pots rose up in every available space. At the age of 80, Christo travelled the world to tell people about Dixter, and books poured from him.

What Garrett carries forward now is that pace of gardening; that can-do, let’s-change-it-for-something-better attitude which is so rare in gardens and, let’s face it, so expensive. Garrett works absurdly long hours and his young family must despair of seeing him, but he and his team get brilliant results. “When I see a visitor looking at a planting combination,” he whispers to me over lunch, “and they say, ‘F*** me, look at that!’, then I say: ‘Fantastic!’” That’s Garrett all over. Gardening with panache, with guts.

The Lottery provides match funding only, and to earn that £4 million, Dixter has to raise another £3 million over the next five years. It still needs everybody’s help to raise funds, but the returns will be great: not just the house and garden secured and opened con brio, but places and accommodation for student gardeners, study days and symposiums, exhibitions in the restored barns, an education officer and an archivist for Christo’s papers, a proper car park and gardeners’ yard… All the infrastructure, in fact, which allows a garden to live at the Lloyd-Garrett pace and not look back. A nostalgic interviewer in New Zealand once suggested to Christo that “nothing had changed at Dixter since the 15th century, just a couple of new wings and mod cons”. Sweet, isn’t it? If only she knew.

www.greatdixter.co.uk. Contact the fundraising campaign office on 01797 254048 or friends@greatdixter.co.uk. Stephen Anderton’s biography of Christopher Lloyd will be published next year

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