06 Aug Visit Plum Sykes’s Flower-Filled Cotswolds Oasis
It was the ultimate gift: A few weeks before I got married in 2005, Miranda Brooks offered to design my garden as a wedding present. Miranda needs little introduction: She is one of the world’s leading landscape designers and, luckily for me, she was my colleague at Vogue, where we collaborated on many stories for the magazine and had become great friends. I was thrilled, but there was a hitch—I didn’t have a garden for Miranda to design. The pressie was put on hold.
Around 2011, after I’d had two children, Ursula and Tess, and having bounced back and forth between New York, London, and a rented farmhouse in Gloucestershire, England, my then husband and I bought a tumbledown farm high on the Cotswold Hills, about 10 miles from the storied spa town of Cheltenham. In terms of a house, there was a semi-derelict shepherd’s cottage that had an ugly 1960s extension plonked on one end. But the position, on the edge of a sweeping valley with uninterrupted 30-mile views, was breathtaking. So rare was such a dramatic location that we bought the property, planning to build there. Except for a small patch of lawn and a wonky concrete terrace at the back of the cottage, there was little garden to speak of, and the house was surrounded by steep paddocks and various agricultural buildings.
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The moment we started planning the build, Miranda began designing the garden, imagining the levels, lawns, beds, and trees when there was nothing. Over 18 months, while we were building a new south front for the house, which evoked the look of an old Cotswold-stone manor, replacing the ugly ’60s extension that was demolished, Miranda and I went back and forth discussing the garden that would one day exist.
“You were very into pink,” Miranda, who now lives a mile from me, reminded me a few days ago. “But we knew you were never going to have a formal garden because of the extreme weather on the edge of the valley.” This suited my aesthetic: I grew up on my grandmother’s farm, with horses, cows, and chickens, and I hankered for anything that reminded me of that time. My grandmother’s garden was a romantic, rambling series of lawns and beds reminiscent of the style of Gertrude Jekyll and the gardens at Charleston. The Tale of Peter Rabbit, a book I read over and over again as a child, transfixed by Beatrix Potter’s soft watercolors, has been indelibly marked on my mind ever since. A garden that evoked those images was my dream (but minus a vegetable garden, which I recognized early on I would not have time to look after.) As soon as the house was completed, work started on the garden, and I remember looking out of the kitchen window for several months and seeing a sludgy mountain of topsoil. The children, then ages three and six, have never had such fun in the garden as they did then, when they used to scramble up the soil pile and roll down it, then dash into the house covered in mud.