Musings: The Most Romantic Garden in England?

There are gardens one visits, and there are gardens one enters - as though passing through a door in time. Rousham, in Oxfordshire, is the latter. Since William Kent first laid his hand upon it in 1738, little has changed. No shop greets you at the gate. No tea room tempts you from the walk. There is only the garden itself, and its insistence that you slow down and look.

I visit on a midweek afternoon, always, an hour or so before the gates close, and find I have the place entirely to myself. It has been this way every time. There is a peace to it that borders on enchantment: as though, in stepping through the gate, one has stepped outside of time altogether. I could be standing there on any early summer afternoon within the last three hundred years. It is, I think, the most romantic garden in England. The sort of place where you half expect to glimpse lovers meeting in secret beneath the trees, or hear the sound of giggling carried on the breeze.

Kent came to Rousham to develop the more naturalistic layout begun by Charles Bridgeman, the royal gardener, and what emerged has been called the first great English landscape garden, a place where the formal and the wild were persuaded, gently, to coexist. It remains, remarkably, almost exactly as he left it. Few gardens of that age can claim such fidelity to their creator's original vision. 

What strikes one first is the sense of theatre, though nothing feels staged. Kent trained as a painter before he turned to gardens, and it shows: every path leads the eye toward something - a statue, a temple, a distant folly on the skyline drawing the whole Oxfordshire countryside into the composition.

Walk from the bowling green and you find yourself among pools and cascades in Venus's Vale, beneath the seven stone arches of the Praeneste, modelled on ruins Kent had seen in Italy. Longhorn cattle graze in the middle distance, exactly where he intended them to, as living ornament to the view.

The River Cherwell curves below the house, unhurried, and the garden seems to take its pace from the water rather than from any visitor's schedule. There is a Cold Bath, a Temple of Echo, a Gothic seat built to look, quite deliberately, like something from a medieval dream.

Beyond Kent's pleasure grounds, on the south side of the house, three seventeenth-century walled gardens hold a different register entirely, more domestic, more grounded, and no less lovely for it. On a spring visit last year, I found the old dovecote there entirely dressed in fruit tree blossom, as though it too had been dressed for the occasion.

The walled garden rewards patience of its own: deep herbaceous borders run the length of the paths, underplanted beneath promenades of trained fruit trees, and in a stone greenhouse at one end, pots are given over entirely to colour — that same spring, the tulips were something to behold, ranked in the glasshouse as though for an audience of one.

We think often, at Claverton, about what it means for a garden to endure — not simply to survive, but to be tended with such care and restraint that its essential character is never lost. Rousham offers a rare kind of proof. It has been in the same family's hands since the house was built in 1635, and that continuity of care is, perhaps, the real secret of its magic. Nothing here was made to impress quickly. Everything was made to reward a slow walk, taken more than once, in different light.

Some gardens ask to be seen. Rousham asks only to be returned to.

This is part of an ongoing series of writing about the gardens that shape Claverton's world.