Inside 8 of the Most Breathtaking Gardens (Packed with Inspiration)

As soon as I moved out of London, I wanted to make my own garden. To live with this view that appears to be untouched by the rest of the world. To be able to sit outside and look at it is just my idea of heaven. The garden design, we work with James Hamilton, who very cleverly has designed a series of perennial beds, which closer to the house feel more manicured, but then start to bleed out into a lot of wild meadow. And then that then bleeds out further into the field and later into the forest. So it doesn't feel like we've just landed a garden into the countryside. It feels like it's part of the countryside. I don't think there's anything more beautiful than a vegetable patch. And so we decided to put that at the front of the house rather than at the back of the house hidden away. So you actually have to travel through the vegetable patch to go to our front door. We're growing all the seasonal vegetables throughout the year and eating as many of them as possible. Working at House and Garden, I'm visiting amazing gardens the whole time and also seeing beautiful photographs of beautiful gardens. We've been here about five and a half years and there was nothing here. It was it was that proverbial blank canvas. It was just literally lawn. We've got about a third of an acre, so it's not huge, but I've divided it up into little spaces. I made this big kind of curving border at the back and that was really the only kind of designed space of the garden. And I actually did a planting plan for that and really loved doing it. It's got a little bit more naturalistic, a little bit more meadowy as pastely colours, kind of quite mellow colours, but with the occasional dash of colour. The herbaceous border is the big English tradition, basically. Mine is very much a mixed border. There's structure, so we have some big shrubs in here. We've got the hydrangea, Annabelle, and I've got some box over here, some box balls. What I think is important about herbaceous border is to get the different shapes in, the shapes of the leaves, the shapes of the flowers, and so it's all that contrast that I think is more important almost than the colours of the flowers. In 82 we put this garden down, which is a rose garden, where there was nothing here at all. We've been constantly adding and improving and editing the garden since then. I lived here for 44 years and during that time it was basically a labour of love and growing confidence, so that when my son was 13 I could start on my garden design career, and when that was done I started working for Friends and it's grown and grown, which is very lucky. I like structure in gardens, I like formality around the house, and then I like to go out into the wider landscape and be more informal, so you will see that very distinctly here, but I do like informal loose planting so that everything looks natural. For me it's my number one key project is always to keep the house and the garden very natural, like it's been there for always, we didn't touch it. I asked Milan Ashinek, who's a very good landscaper in England, I didn't want to do something too French, I didn't want to have too much symmetry, I wanted to have something more English, I was always attracted by English gardens. I want a lot of flowers and I want flowers from April to really end of October as much as I can because it's so inspiring for my work. Here actually was the place where they were keeping all the wood before in the property, and I said to Milan, okay I want a table here because I want to be able to have the four squares of flowers in front of me and be able to paint them and to have a place where I could design, and also a place where we could have lunch and enjoy the view. The other side of the garden is much more English and this side is really much more French, and I wanted to keep it very simple because the house and the stone is really beautiful. We have a beautiful abbey just next door, who has the most beautiful David Austin roses, one of the unique in France who sells, we have a few of them climbing. It's quite, you know, like that, very calm and French, and suddenly they go the other side of the garden and it's completely wild and more English, and I like those places very separate and different in the garden. I really wanted to create a kind of old-fashioned cottage garden with lots of colour, lots of cutting flowers. I really do notice that summers have got hotter and we have so little shade, so we've got this wonderful umbrella this year, and then this shed has been absolutely life-changing because my boys have both just become teenagers. It's all from recycled old corrugated iron. All they want to do in the holidays is be here, they don't want to go anywhere, they don't want to go abroad, they don't do anything, they just want to be in their shed. The wonderful thing is I just love that view going up, it's called Marriage Hill, and I've walked up there thousands and thousands of times. Outside we created all of these outdoor spaces so that we could, depending on the heat or the wind, you know, we'd have somewhere to sit. In this part of the garden I wanted things to be quite low because I don't want to have the view interrupted, I wanted it to be one kind of a continuous thing. This is my little paradise. Here it's really cool, so when it's hot, you know, we have lunch here or we have coffee here. At the end of the day, in the afternoon, I just lie down here and read for hours or fall asleep, or on that bed over there. The garden has a fantastic, very simple structure in terms of the perimeter hedges. Really the colours of the picking garden do shape and inspire the collection that is expanding. I love that there's nothing too polite about them and I would love that to continue to influence the new colours that I'm constantly bringing into weaves and prints and wallpapers that we're launching going forward. I love geraniums so much, I wanted greenhouses for my geraniums and so I bought very inexpensive greenhouses and I dug them down in the ground so you don't see them from the house. I love them particularly in the big room, I especially grow this colour pink which looks lovely in the pale pink of the room. I mean there's nothing nicer than a Sunday morning fiddling in the greenhouse with the geraniums and it's a very lovely thing to do and they're very therapeutic. There wouldn't be ever a moment when I just don't love it and I've loved it so much all these years. I mean and when I think back on my life and all my career I don't think I could have the career I had unless I used to retreat here most weekends and the lovely thing about being here, I love walking so it's always about walking, always about the dog, always about having friends to stay. I've had weddings, my niece's wedding here, my parents' great birthdays here so it's been a great place of celebration for lots of occasions in my 40 years but it's also been that wonderful place of meditation, retreat and appreciation.