Bold and beautiful

The gardens at Broughton Grange, Oxfordshire The home of Sir Stephen and Lady Hester An arboretum, woodland garden, stumpery and heather garden all planted for artistic effect are among the many features that mark out this exciting garden, says Charles Quest-Ritson

A LITTLE more than 20 years ago, the garden at Broughton Grange was praised by horticultural journalists and widely admired by visitors. Tom Stuart-Smith had designed a semiwalled garden on three levels, with strictly geometrical rills and pools, and filled it with groups of herbaceous plants that quickly came together, creating a mass of colour to give pleasure all through the year. But the fame of the walled garden obscured the fact that the rest of the garden had been begun several years earlier and was developing both fast and well.

Broughton is a 400-acre estate on the southern edge of Banbury in Oxfordshire. The house is approached through handsome old oak trees down a drive, 300 yards long. It sits on a south-facing slope, halfway up the hillside with fine views across the valley of the Sor, a tributary of the Cherwell whose waters meet the Thames just south of Oxford. Broughton's only previous claim to fame was that it had once belonged to Lady Ottoline Morrell. Then Stephen Hester bought it in 1992 and the garden today is the story of his personal development as a gardener over the past 30 years.

Sir Stephen (he was knighted this year) is a successful banker and businessman-a selfconfessed alpha male-from an academic family: his father was professor of Chemistry at the University of York and his mother a psychotherapist. When he started to develop the garden at Broughton, he brought exceptional intelligence and determination to the task and began by visiting a host of gardens in search of style and inspiration. The Château de Villandry on the Loire in France supplied the inspiration for his first essay-the parterre around which he planted his rose garden in 1998. It remains one of the most charming and successful parts of the garden today.