Romancing The Stone

The thoughtful work being done at this Cotswold garden is bringing in more visitors without sacrificing its idyllic atmosphere.

- Non Morris

THERE have been gardens and pleasure grounds at Miserden in the Cotswolds for nearly four centuries. The 3,000-acre estate —including the handsome, late-17th-century gabled manor house that looks down over its own richly wooded parkland in the Golden Valley—has been in the family since 1913. It is now run by Nicholas Wills, who, after reading agriculture at Newcastle University and serving for a decade with the Coldstream Guards, took over from his father, Maj Tom Wills, in 2016.

‘Every aspect of the estate has been up for review,’ says Nicholas. As well as continuing to energise the farm and the mostly familyowned village of Miserden, he has had to think carefully about the direction of the garden. His long-term goal is to ‘create a lifetime plan of things I would like to do and to slowly implement it over my time here. I don’t want to ruin the atmosphere of the garden, but, at the same time, I feel it’s got to adapt and change’.

When his great-grandparents arrived here, they began laying out the 11-acre garden in the fashionable Arts-and-Crafts style of the day, creating outdoor rooms divided by stone steps and yew hedges and adding a glorious range of greenhouses to the extensive kitchen garden.

After a substantial house fire in 1919, Edwin Lutyens was invited to redesign the east wing, adding an elegant loggia with arched bays (based on the Villa Medici in Fiesole, near Florence in Tuscany), which leads out onto the spacious terrace.

Lutyens became a frequent visitor to Miserden, designing the village war memorial, among other elements, and it was almost definitely his idea to shape the now maturing 100-yard double hedge of yew so that it echoes the rounded openings of the loggia.