Broughton Grange sits quietly in the hills above Banbury, its 130 acres of contemporary planting a world away from the classic Cotswold manor garden. The centrepiece, Tom Stuart-Smith's three-tiered walled garden, is one of those places that rearranges your sense of what English gardens can be.
What strikes you first is the scale. The walled garden alone drops through three broad terraces, each one planted with a kind of controlled wildness: loose drifts of perennials, ornamental grasses catching the light, sculptural shapes that shift with the seasons. Stuart-Smith designed it in 2001, and it has only deepened with age. In high summer the colour is extraordinary; in autumn the seedheads and structure hold their own. It feels less like a garden tour and more like a slow walk through a living painting.
Beyond the walled enclosure, the grounds open into parkland, meadows, and a knot garden with its own quieter character. There's a good nursery for buying plants to take home, and the whole place is rarely crowded, even on open days. From the cottage it's roughly half an hour by car, an easy afternoon trip that pairs well with a stop in Banbury or a loop through the lanes around Hook Norton.
“The walled garden at Broughton Grange is the best piece of contemporary planting I've seen in Oxfordshire. Worth every minute of the drive.”
All of this on the doorstep, and your own thatched cottage to come home to. Sleeps seven, less than a mile from Soho Farmhouse.