Cottesbrooke Hall and Gardens

About the garden

Owned by

Alastair Macdonald-Buchanan

The remarkable 18th-century landscaping of the park, with its vistas and lakes, provides the backdrop to the hall. The renowned gardens are of great variety with many specimen trees.     

In the tranquil Wild Garden, designed around a stream, visitors will enjoy an array of spring flowers, specimen acers and gunneras. The more formal gardens surrounding the hall are laid out as a series of individually planted ‘rooms’. There are pergolas, statues and rose borders, double herbaceous borders, pools and, on the south front, the formal parterre, designed by Geoffrey Jellicoe. The gardens run to almost 13 acres in total. A number of distinguished designers have been involved in the development of the gardens: Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe and Dame Sylvia Crowe in the middle of the 20th century and more recently, James Alexander Sinclair and Arne Maynard. In May, a profusion of white bracts on Cornus kousa provide a dramatic display while wisterias draping the garden walls burst into flower above abundant borders packed with alliums, aquilegias, campanulas and geraniums.  

In June visitors can admire the profusion of roses trained in spirals and organic shapes on walls and in borders providing colour, beauty and intoxicating scent. Wander through our garden rooms, each with its own distinct style and colourful border displays of iris, lupins, delphiniums and suchlike. Late summer at Cottesbrooke sees dahlias, salvias and agapanthus flourish in the borders, which take over and provide interest right through till the gardens close at the end of September. In the Wild Garden, the giant gunneras, rodgersias and persicarias are at their peak providing a lush, shady escape from the heat of summer.