A HUGHENDEN vicar is preparing to leave behind his family and his parish for a very different kind of ministry looking after a water lily garden made famous by the painter Monet.

The Rev Charles Overton, Priest in Charge of Hughenden St Michael & All Angels church, is to leave on March 1 to take charge of the renowned Etablissements Botaniques Latour-Marliac farm, immortalised in the work of 19th century French painter Claude Monet.

Mr Overton, 49, a renowned expert on water lilies and a friend of the garden's owner, Ray Davis, said: "Ray wanted someone to go and look after the site, but more important than that was the fact that he wanted someone who would really care about it."

Mr Overton is not committed to stay in the post for more than this year and may return to his ministry.

"Whether I shall move back into parish ministry in a few years or not remains to be seen. My going to France is a kind of sabbatical and this opportunity came up totally out of the blue."

The job is a dream come true for Mr Overton, who built his first garden when he was 13 and has been growing water lilies ever since.

He said: "I first became interested in plants and ponds as an eight or nine year-old boy.

"Ponds are generally very exciting things and my favourite part of gardening is digging up potatoes because you never know what will be underneath.

"Ponds are very similar and they have an element of mystery about them.

"You have to peer into the pond to see what is underneath the surface."

"Water lilies are the most majestic of things that grow in ponds."

He will be in place to reopen the nursery on March 15, and is very much looking forward to the challenge.

He added: "I really will need to get up to speed with the whole operation before we open after the winter break."

His wife Lesley will stay behind in Wycombe with the couple's four children, aged 16, 15, 13 and 11.

He said: "My wife and children will stay here and Lesley will be able to hop on a plane and come and join me for weekends.

"They will all come out during the school holidays and I will be back in High Wycombe in October when the nursery shuts down for its annual winter break."

He believes the Latour-Marliac nursery is a very important part of French national heritage, even though the garden is not particularly big by today's standards.

One of the largest water lily growing centres in Stapley Water Gardens in Cheshire, but Mr Overton considers that Latour-Marliac's associations with Monet make it one of the most important gardens of its kind in the world.

The garden was built up in the 1870s by Joseph Bory Latour-Maliac, who gathered together a wide range of native water lilies from all corners of the world, and began his ground-breaking hybridisation work.

It is the oldest water lily nursery in the world, and has introduced a staggering 90 per cent of all the hardy water lily varieties available in the world today.

It is believed that Monet first saw the water lilies that would form such an important element of his works on a river near the Trocadero at the Exposition Universelle de Paris in 1889.

Joseph Latour-Marliac was at the show to demonstrate his hybridisation work, and Monet to exhibit three of his paintings.

Facts about Monet

1 Claude Monet was born in Paris on November 14, 1840

2 As a child he was thought by his parent and teachers to be undisciplined and therefore unlikely to make a success of his life. The only subject that sparked his interest was painting

3 He was one of the impressionist school of painters along with others such as Renoir

4 He was at first frowned on by conservative art critics for his habit of painting outdoors

5 One of his paintings Women in the Garden took a very long time because Monet would only paint when the light was falling correctly on every aspect of the painting's subject-matter. In order to complete the top of his canvas, Monet dug himself a ditch so that he could continue to paint th e scene from the same perspective (other painters simply stood upon a ladder). The painting was rejected by the famous Salon in France.

6 Among his last works were his famous murals of water lilies