My Favourite Place: Rousham Gardens
I read about Rousham in Dan Pearson’s book Spirit: Garden Inspiration, so I decided to do a road trip. They make it seem utterly effortless to create such a wonderful place. There were monstrous longhorn cattle grazing in the park, and you catch glimpses of the Gothic-style property through windows and viewpoints all along the driveway.
At the gate, you put your entrance money into a 'Wallace and Gromit-style' machine. There’s a pint glass to take the pounds for the guide book to the house and garden and a half-pint glass to take 50p for apples, and the whole thing is dressed with a huge, Victorian-style British flag! It's completely uncommercialised.
No one is ever there and it feels like you’re the first one to discover it in a hundred or a thousand years. The house itself is quite scary; the stone is an authoritarian grey-black and it's always cold. But then you disappear beneath the trees and emerge into a magical land. An overgrown garden with statues shrouded in ivy; it’s like a lost world!
A head gardener’s job is to ensure that the spirit and character of the garden resonates from every brick, plant and corner and I think that Rousham is the best example of that around. In the walled garden the planting is fantastic; it’s wild and elegantly tumbling, yet the plants are still magically upright.
The only other place where I have found that same feeling of spirituality is in the gardens of Japan. It’s strange, as it represents two different styles, cultures and design outcomes, yet the Japanese gardeners take pride in the sense of spirituality and the emotion that they evoke, and Rousham does that to me.
The gardening is delicate and manicured, yet there’s a sense nature is starting to reclaim it. It’s said that a gardener knows that their job is done when no one knows that they’ve been there. The Rousham team do that perfectly.
■ Rousham House and Garden, Rousham, Bicester OX25 4QU; www.rousham.org.