The World in a Walled Garden: Global Influences on the Cotswold Landscape

By Chris Peake, Director at CJP Cotswold Tours

The Cotswolds has always looked outward. Along its quietly tended borders is a story of restless curiosity; of plant hunters, collectors, visionaries and artists who brought the world home and planted it amidst the rolling hills. Here lies an invitation for you to explore a region shaped as much by India, China, Italy, America and Japan as by the fields that surround it.

Batsford Arboretum — The Far East in the Cotswold Hills

 

Created in the late nineteenth century by Algernon Freeman-Mitford, a diplomat, traveller and passionate Japanophile, following his years spent living in Tokyo, the arboretum reflects his deep admiration for the landscapes of the Far East. Japanese maples, bamboo groves and a series of bronze statues sourced during his travels sit amongst one of the largest private collections of trees in the country. Walk through Batsford in spring to see the magnolias open, the Japanese cherries shimmer, and the extraordinary Davidia, or pocket handkerchief tree, unfurl. As the season deepens, rarer specimens come into their own: Dawn Redwood, the Maidenhair Tree, and wildflower glades bursting with foxgloves and orchids. 

 

Cotswold Sculpture Park — A Global Art Conversation 

Set within ten acres of gardens near Stroud, the Cotswold Sculpture Park is celebrating its tenth anniversary in 2026, so it feels a fitting moment to reflect on what makes it so distinctive. Each season, over 200 works are carefully curated from artists across the UK and internationally, bringing together a genuinely global mix of styles, materials and perspectives. 

In spirit, the park belongs to a tradition pioneered in America, where vast open landscapes became the setting for serious sculpture, freeing art from the gallery wall and inviting visitors to encounter it on their own terms. Think Storm King in the Hudson Valley or the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas: places that proved monumental art and open countryside were made for one another. Here, that same democratic generosity applies: all works are available to purchase, creating a quiet but meaningful connection between artists, collectors and the countryside itself. An unexpected world-class experience.

 

Painswick Rococo Garden — Flamboyant and Frivolous

 

Squeezed into a Gloucestershire valley and peppered with follies, deceptive vistas and serpentine paths, it was conceived in the 1740s as an elaborate playground — a place to entertain, to surprise and to delight. The Rococo style it embodies was a brief, exuberant moment in English garden history, drawing on French and Italian influences before fashion moved on. 

What makes Painswick extraordinary is not just what it is, but how it came back. By 1980 it had been abandoned for decades and swallowed by jungle. It was a single painting, Thomas Robins' meticulous 1748 record of the garden in its pomp, that provided the blueprint for one of the most remarkable restoration projects in English horticultural history. The result is the only surviving Rococo garden in the country, and one of the most joyful places in the Cotswolds to spend an afternoon.

 

Hidcote Manor Gardens — Lawrence Johnston's Mediterranean Dream 

Lawrence Johnston was American-born, French-educated, and possessed of a vision for gardening that was entirely his own. At Hidcote, he created something that had never quite existed before: a garden of rooms, each with its own mood and palette, drawing on the clipped formality of Italian and French design while remaining unmistakably rooted in the English countryside. The Mediterranean influence is felt most strongly in the stillness of the enclosed spaces, the use of topiary as architecture, and in borders where colour and form are controlled. 

Hidcote is, in every sense, a world garden, and a firm favourite for our guests during our Cotswold Garden Tours. 

 

Kiftsgate Court Gardens — China Comes to the Cotswolds 

Perched on the same escarpment as Hidcote, Kiftsgate is perhaps best known for the Rosa filipes 'Kiftsgate': a climbing rose of extraordinary vigour that has become one of the most planted in the world. Its origins are Chinese, brought to England from western China in the early twentieth century as part of the great wave of plant hunting that transformed British horticulture. That a cutting taken from this garden should now grow in gardens across the globe feels entirely in keeping with a place of such unassuming ambition. 

What gives Kiftsgate its particular character, though, is the story of the women who made it. Heather Muir created the garden from 1920 onwards, choosing to let it develop organically rather than from the drawing board, giving it a distinctly personal and feminine quality. Her daughter Diany Binny and granddaughter Anne Chambers have each continued that vision in their own way, three generations of women quietly shaping one of the most loved gardens in England. 

 

Snowshill Manor — The World in One Room (After Another) 

Charles Paget Wade was, by any measure, one of the great collectors. Over the course of his lifetime, he filled Snowshill Manor with an astonishing and entirely personal assembly of objects gathered from across the world: Japanese samurai armour, Tibetan monks' robes, Flemish tapestries, musical instruments, toys, bicycles, farm tools. The National Trust has preserved it precisely as he left it. Visit and step inside the mind of a man for whom the entire world was a cabinet of wonders. Set just below the village, a wooded path from the visitor centre weaves towards the manor sitting within the heart of Snowshill. Outside, the terraced gardens with their still pond, walled kitchen garden, espaliered fruit trees, offer a silence that feels almost deliberate after the glorious excess within. 

 

Sezincote 

Of course, no exploration of global garden influence in the Cotswolds is complete without a nod to Sezincote — that extraordinary Mughal fantasy where India arrived in the Gloucestershire countryside and never quite left. You'll find it featured in its own right elsewhere in these pages. 

Discover our Cotswold Garden Tours at www.cotswold-tours.com. To make an enquiry, email chris@cotswold-tours.com or call 01386 833 365.