Kiftsgate Court Gardens
A wild, romantic hillside garden next to Hidcote, shaped over three generations by instinct rather than diagram.
A wild, romantic hillside garden next to Hidcote, shaped over three generations by instinct rather than diagram.
Most visitors to this corner of the north Cotswolds head straight for Hidcote, and it is wonderful, but Kiftsgate next door is the one we find ourselves returning to. The garden sits high on a hillside just outside Mickleton, three miles north east of Chipping Campden, and it tumbles down the slope in a series of terraces, each one a different world. Formal borders give way to a semi-wild lower garden with views out across the Vale of Evesham that stop you mid-sentence. It is the kind of place where you keep rounding corners and finding something unexpected. A half-moon swimming pool garden. A collection of old roses so vigorous they have swallowed entire walls. The famous Kiftsgate rose itself, a rambling filipes that has grown into what is often called the largest rose in England.
What makes Kiftsgate special is that it is still very much a private family garden. Heather Muir planted it in the 1920s, her daughter Diany Binny continued the work, and today her granddaughter Anne Chambers tends it with the same adventurous eye. You feel that continuity in every border. Nothing is over-managed or museum-like; plants are allowed to seed, lean and sprawl. From the cottage it is a run of roughly forty minutes up towards Chipping Campden, and because Hidcote sits directly opposite, the obvious plan is to do both in a single outing and make a proper day of it.
Kiftsgate is ticketed and, being a family-run garden, it opens only on selected days across a short season, so it pays to plan around the calendar rather than turn up on spec.
We treat Kiftsgate as half of a day rather than the whole of it. If you are visiting Hidcote, and you should, the two are a short step apart, and together they make one of the great garden days in England: Hidcote clipped and composed, Kiftsgate looser and more alive. Give the morning to one and the afternoon to the other, with the tea room to break the day in the middle. Bring a hat and comfortable shoes, because the hillside is steep and the lower garden involves a proper walk down and back. Late spring and early summer are the moments to catch it, when the great Kiftsgate rose is in full flood and the borders are at their most generous, though the water garden and the views hold up right through the season.
For lunch or an early dinner on the way home, a couple of our favourite pubs sit within easy reach of both gardens. The Ebrington Arms is a short drive towards Chipping Campden and brews its own beer; The Howard Arms at Ilmington is a handsome old inn on the green, ideal after a morning on your feet. For the full picture of the area, our guide to things to do and see runs from gardens and manor houses to walks and market towns.
“Kiftsgate is the one I'd choose if I could only visit one garden in the Cotswolds. Less polished than Hidcote, more alive. Go on a weekday morning and you'll have it almost to yourself.”
All of this on the doorstep, and your own thatched cottage to come home to. Sleeps seven, less than a mile from Soho Farmhouse.