The sharp end: Exotic birds in the garden should be celebrated 'You cannot have a terrace without peacocks," was one of Disraeli's pronouncements. From fancy chickens and fantail doves to parrots, pelicans and mandarin ducks, exotic birds have had a long association with gardens. Disraeli's peacocks roamed at Hughenden in Buckinghamshire. At Chartwell in Kent, Churchill had black swans, donated by the Premier of Western Australia, sharing his lake with the brown trout supplied by Harrods. At Hidcote, Lawrence Johnston kept hummingbirds in his heated plant house and had flamingos padding the streams and lawns. The Queen kept flamingos at Buckingham Palace, too, until 1996 when the entire flock was polished off by a fox. I don't know if Michael Heseltine still has a collection of ornamental pheasants and parrots in his arboretum near Banbury. I know he did 30 years ago because, being a keen birdman myself - as a child, I had a small aviary of finches in the garden, and spent part of my gap year working in the Bird House at Frankfurt Zoo - I applied for a holiday job looking after them. I turned up at his house without any appointment early on a Sunday morning, not even knowing who the house belonged to: the advert simply said to apply to the secretary. So, when MH opened the door in his dressing gown, we were both rather startled. The job had already gone, but, to his credit, he donned his wellies, put a coat over his pyjamas, and showed me around the garden anyway. Aviaries as well as birds can add beauty to gardens. Decorative and often elaborately large structures, filled with songbirds, parakeets and peacocks, featured in the gardens of Ancient Rome, Egypt and Persia, and again in European gardens from the Renaissance onwards. Sadly, many of ours disappeared with the formal gardens that surrounded them - victims of the swing to the English Landscape Style - but Robert Dudley's wooden aviary at Kenilworth Castle, Warwickshire, has recently been reconstructed by English Heritage, and stocked with canaries and guineafowl. Powis Castle's handsome brick aviary still stands, but being solid-roofed and rather gloomy inside is now home to plants like tender rhododendrons and giant Woodwardia ferns instead, to general avian relief. I don't suppose we are likely to see Sir William Chambers's Chinese latticework aviary of the 1760s reappearing at Kew, but in the Pleasure Grounds of Woburn Abbey a small aviary with an elegant cupola, which was part of the menagerie complex designed by Humphry Repton in 1805, has just been rebuilt. Woburn's 12th Duke of Bedford (1888-1953) was a particularly keen bird keeper, writing a book about parrots and numerous entertaining articles about the flock of budgies he let fly at semi-liberty in the garden and park - detailing their complex friendships, wife-swapping and adulteries. Descendants of these budgies now inhabit the new aviary. I encountered a similar swirling rainbow of brilliant bird colours this summer, when visiting a nurseryman in the North East, who had a group of nectar-feeding parrots (lories and lorikeets) flying free by day, returning to their aviaries to eat, sleep and nest. Unlike the ringneck parakeets, which have escaped their garden aviaries to become a pest in the Home Counties, such birds - while also equipped with speed and sharp bites to fend off birds of prey - can't find much food in the wild. Once settled in, they are reliable stayers; it is, in any case, now illegal to release alien species into the countryside. Undoubtedly, much cruelty was involved in garden birdkeeping in the past, but advances in knowledge of good husbandry and nutrition and a ban on the import of wild-caught birds have had an effect. Many species are now thoroughly domesticated, and at the rarefied end of birdkeeping, aviaries help sustain populations of birds critically endangered in the wild, such as Rothschild's white myna from Bali. This can be seen at Waddesdon Manor, Buckinghamshire, which boasts the UK's most magnificent garden aviary. Built for Baron Ferdinand Rothschild in 1889, it is a curving, compartmented pavilion in Rococo style, now splendidly repainted in the family livery of blue and gold. On my first visit in the Seventies, the livery was also displayed by a pair of macaws free-flying across the valley.