A garden of the imagination

Timothy Mowl celebrates what may be the most atmospheric, the most beautiful and the most intellectual garden in the country, Rousham in Oxfordshire

- Timothy Mowl

RARE, if not unique, in houses and gardens open to the public, Rousham proudly presents itself as ‘completely unspoilt and uncommercialised—no tea room and no shop—just glorious gardens to explore at your leisure’. How many other venues encourage you to ‘bring a picnic and comfortable shoes and it is yours for the day’? Rousham, perhaps the most beautiful, the most intellectual and certainly the most atmospheric garden in this country, remains resolutely individual. An honesty ticket machine under the stables, rather than an entrance kiosk, reinforces its relaxed approach. It is as if the visitor is here to enjoy a private tour of a private estate, with the prospect of seeing the owners, Charles and Angela Cottrell-Dormer, working away in the flower borders. Scurrying about in welcome on the front lawn are featherybooted mille fleur barbu d’uccle bantams and, on the other side of the ha-ha skirting the house, ferociously primeval long-horned cattle can be glimpsed grazing in the paddock, as they have done since the early 18th century.

Doubling as Alconleigh in the BBC’s adaptation of Nancy Mitford’s