An English Arcadia

- Plum Sykes

The cucumber sandwiches are arranged in perfect circles. The scones, jam, and clotted cream are piled in pyramids. Tea flows from gleaming silver pots. A gaggle of children and four fluffy Chihuahuas frolic on the lawn, while the grown-ups sit contentedly on wicker chairs in the “tea circle”—a small ring of mown grass set inside a loop of topiary beech trees.

“I’m a scene setter, not a plant collector,” explains Claudia Rothermere, the creator of this very British tableau, as she sips Earl Grey from a rose-strewn Wedgwood teacup. “I’m trying to entice you, to stop you thinking about your day-to-day worries.” She gestures to the west, toward meadows teeming with yellow rattle, cowslips, and wild orchids. To the east, there is a glimpse of the house she built here, Ferne Park. Stone steps lead from its south terrace between beds planted with spiraling lonicera nitida and large domes of yew. Below, a formal parterre draws the eye toward a double avenue of 400 linden trees. Beyond this, Cranborne Chase, the hills that inspired Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles, looms. This is a garden of dramas—of shape, form, textures, and tension. Geometry, not ornament, is its theme. “Gardens,” Claudia adds wistfully, “can induce these feelings that are sometimes very hard to get into contact with.”

Rothermere is the epitome of the modern Englishwoman. She reads (this ex–Oxford woman dissects books with academic scrutiny); she mothers (there are five children with her husband, Jonathan, aged eight to 24, and one much-loved 30-year-old stepson); she entertains—dinner parties at her London house, hunting and shooting weekends here in the country (at which her exquisite table settings are legendary); she devours opera, theater, politics. The family businesses, of which the most high-profile is the