happy place

With help from her friend landscape designer Miranda Brooks, novelist Plum Sykes creates a flower-filled oasis in the Cotswolds

- PLUM SYKES

It was the ultimate gift: A few weeks before I got married in 2005, Miranda Brooks offered to design my garden as a wedding present. Miranda needs little introduction: She is one of the world's leading landscape designers and, luckily for me, she was my colleague at Vogue, where we collaborated on many stories for the magazine and had become great friends. I was thrilled, but there was a hitch-I didn't have a garden for Miranda to design. The pressie was put on hold.

Around 2011, after I'd had two children, Ursula and Tess, and having bounced back and forth between New York, London, and a rented farmhouse in Gloucestershire, England, my then husband and I bought a tumbledown farm high on the Cotswold Hills, about 10 miles from the storied spa town of Cheltenham. In terms of a house, there was a semi-derelict shepherd's cottage that had an ugly 1960s extension plonked on one end. But the position, on the edge of a sweeping valley with uninterrupted 30-mile views, was breathtaking. So rare was such a dramatic location that we bought the property, planning to build there. Except for a small patch of lawn and a wonky concrete terrace at the back of the cottage, there was little garden to speak of, and the house was surrounded by steep paddocks and various agricultural buildings.

The moment we started planning the build, Miranda began designing the garden, imagining the levels, lawns, beds, and trees when there was nothing. Over 18 months, while we were building a new south front for the house, which evoked the look of an old Cotswold-stone manor, replacing the ugly '60s extension that was demolished, Miranda and I went back and forth discussing the garden that would one day exist.