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 semi-walled 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.
