Kiftsgate sits just next door to Hidcote, but where Hidcote feels orderly and composed, Kiftsgate is wilder, more personal, more romantic. Three generations of women have shaped this hillside garden, and the result is a place that feels planted by instinct rather than diagram.
Most visitors to this corner of the north Cotswolds head straight for Hidcote, and it's wonderful, but Kiftsgate next door is the one we find ourselves returning to. The garden tumbles down a steep hillside in a series of terraces, each one a different world: formal borders giving way to a semi-wild lower garden with views out across the Vale of Evesham that stop you mid-sentence. It's 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've swallowed entire walls. The famous Kiftsgate rose itself, a filosa that has grown into what may be the largest rose in England.
What makes Kiftsgate special is that it's still very much a 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. If you're visiting Hidcote (and you should), do both in the same morning. They're a two-minute walk apart, and together they make one of the great garden days in England. Open from May to July, with limited openings in April and September.
“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.