A glut of gardens dominates my Cotswolds weekend

Windy Ridge (aka "the summer house") requires a three night booking during opera season.  Meanwhile, we've had the best summer weather in the UK in a decade.  Thus, even though I'd hardly shaken the American vacation dust off my heels, I was back in holiday sightseeing mode.

The Cotswolds are a tourism paradise, combining chocolate-box villages with exquisite landscape, significant country houses and some of the world's best gardens.  I focused on the last over my long weekend.  My own perennials are flourishing under the sustained sunshine and I was keen to see how the big, famous places were doing.

Hidcote first, of course.  This is one of the finest gardens in England, if not in the whole world, and keen gardeners travel here from all over.  You see them wandering about with cameras and notebooks, studying intently to figure out what they could bring home to their own patch.  I always get a little thrill remembering that this wonderful place, which really introduced the concept of garden "rooms" which Sissinghurst and other gardens would make the norm for the 20th century, was the brainchild of an American who settled in England.  I walk with the spirit of Lawrence Johnston whenever I'm here.

The famous red border, designed to be at its peak in high summer, was indeed looking good.  The

Mediterranean-inspired rooms appear more comfortable this summer than usual.  Spires of delphinium around the circular pool are an impossible blue.

But I was most impressed by the northern side of the garden, which has seen a lot of additions in recent years.  Not content to freeze Hidcote in time, the National Trust is enhancing areas that were outside Johnston's main focus.  Thus the long border here has some fresh planting, surrounded by a new greenhouse and lilly pool, with vegetable plots now managed for viewing and education.  I resisted buying plants in the excellent shop here, but did get the inspiration for what needed to happen in my own garden next.  (A large pot of lythrums sitting on one of the pedestals in the lower pond.)

On the way back to Windy Ridge from Hidcote I stumbled on Bourton House, one of the many smaller Cotswolds attractions with limited opening hours.  (Wed - Fri in the summer).  That's because this is still a private home; albeit a very impressive one.  The garden as we see it now dates back about 15 years, planted on four terraces cut out of a gentle slope overlooking a valley with hills beyond.  There's some exceptional work with topiary to form edging and parterres, beautiful borders and attractive modern sculpture in the water features.  You enter through a medieval tithe barn that's been restored to a high standard and is clearly a fabulous party venue.  But mostly I admired the view, the way the house nestled in the landscape, the labour of the three full-time gardeners who maintained the place ... and marvelled that this is really just a family home.

Another lesser-known, infrequently-open gem is Sezincote, a neighbouring estate to Windy Ridge.  English eccentricity brought to life in architecture and garden design, it was built in the early 19th century by two brothers who'd both done service with the East India Company.  They wanted to recapture the exotic glories of their time in India, thus they planted a Moghul palace on a hill in this most English of landscapes, complete with onion domes, scalloped arches, stone fretwork and minarets.    Arcades stretch away from the house in both directions, one leading to a pavilion kitted out in Indian/Arabic fusion as a posh traveller's tent, the other a conservatory serving teas with a blockbuster view on open days.

The main garden is a pleasant hillside of water features fed by a local spring, surrounded by naturalistic planting.  Like the house, what makes this exceptional is the Indian styling.  There's a Hindu temple anchoring the top pond, a rather bizarre pillar of sacred cobras spiralling up from the middle one, and a bridge decorated with sacred bulls in the centre.  This remains much as designed by Humphrey Repton in the Regency period.  Over in front of the Orangery, the current generation has reworked an uninspiring lawn after a visit to the Taj Mahal to evoke a Persian water garden, with a central rill full of water lilies, ending with sculptures of two cheerful elephants raising their trunks to form an arch through which you see a grassy hillside atop which there's a wildflower meadow and the equally fanciful farm buildings.

The interiors continue the Asian influence, but within a more restrained Regency setting.  (Restored and re-interpreted by John Colfax, of Colfax and Fowler fame, in the 1980s.)  There's a sitting room with some fantastical curtains that are masterpieces of the art of drapery:  exquisite silks, contrasting linings, detailed patissimenterie, all hanging from the original cornices that feature golden panther's heads clasping the curtains in their mouths.  A neighbouring bedroom has a jaw-dropping Chinese-style canopied bed and a modern mural in one corner that carries the view of the orangery out the window inside.  Downstairs there's my perfect dining room, the Regency mahogany table encircled by walls with hand-painted scenic wallpaper showing idealised landscapes of India.  Out the windows, the Persian garden, the orangery, the hillside and those cheery elephants.

It comes as no surprise ... though it's a little known fact ... that the Prince Regent visited the newly-completed Sezincote when he was in the early stages of building his little beach house at Brighton.  He was so inspired by what he saw in the Cotswolds that he changed direction on his own place, giving us the crazy quilt of Chinese and Indian we see at Brighton Pavilion today.

My own bolt of Cotswolds inspiration was more humble.  I needed to find an eye-catching pot to carry off my vision for my pond.  Those "in the know" make straight for Whichford Pottery, outside Banbury.  Established in the 1970s to revive an English tradition of hand-scupted, terra cotta works of art (one that had survived in Italy), the pottery is a frequent exhibitor at the big flower shows.  Their

more impressive pieces become focal points for grand new gardens, or replace worn out masterpieces of bygone ages.  Because each piece is hand thrown, all the decorative bits shaped and placed, or incised, by the local sculptors before firing, prices can be steep.  Smaller and less decorated pots are more affordable, of course.  But you don't come here for the basics.  This is eye catching stuff.  And made to a thickness and quality to allow them to offer guarantees of frost proofing that will let their pots weather many winters.  (There is sculpted terra cotta in Medici gardens, after all, that has withstood centuries.)

Because my pot would stand permanently in an inch of water, I didn't go for any of the highly decorated options.  I was after an unusual shape.  And this I got with a high oval tub, twice as long as it is wide.  While shopping here, you can also enjoy their demonstration gardens.  All planted in pots, of course, they give you an idea of just how impressive container gardening can be.

The ladies at Whichford steered me to my last garden of the weekend, a private treasure open only a few times a year for charity through the National Gardens Scheme.  At Boughton House, former Royal Bank of Scotland chief Stephen Hester has created a modern garden that will, I suspect, be as famous as Hidcote or Sissinghurst in generations to come.  Whatever you think of the banker's bonuses, the man ... who's also on the board of Kew Gardens ... has been a gift to the world of horticulture.

The house itself sits about 3/4 of the way down another of those long, deep Cotswold hills.  The garden here works in terraces cut into that hillside, but such big ones that at first you don't realise the scope.

Up top there's a grassy paddock and some woodland walks.  A large greenhouse and vine-covered walkways create a transition to a more formal area, where loose, mediterranean-style planting surrounds a channel of water that cascades into a big, rectangular reflecting pool filled with fish and lilies.  From the edge of this section you can look down on modern parterres, the box arranged in the pattern of the cell structures of local trees and filled with interesting perennials.  Other steps down give you garden rooms with leafy walls, a pool and pavilion with interesting borders, a fern-planted stumpery and a bog garden at the bottom of it all.  Off to one side, meandering paths are mown into golden wheat fields leading to the arboretum.  On the other, light woodland surrounds the house, offering shady walks before opening up again to formal borders in front and to one side of the building, offering views of the bottom of the valley.

The design is innovative, the plants interesting, and the fact that it's all been created in the past 15 years is both unbelievable and inspiring.  It reminds you that all the great gardens of the world were once just fields, hills or forests, waiting for their touch of genius.  Hester's garden team are enthusiastic, clearly loving what they do and eager to welcome the public in on their open days.  They sell their extras in a walled bit by the paddock, proceeds to charity.  I came away with three unusual specimens to nestle into my own borders.

I'll never have the money, time or space to garden on a grand scale, but each of the places above gave me ideas for my own little patch of paradise.  A late-summer photo blog of how things are developing is coming soon.