Luxury garden holidays

Luxury isn't bound by bricks and mortar, and while velvet sofas and chandeliers make for a certain dose of enchantment, it's the landscape which really sets our souls on fire. Think dancing swags of purple wisteria, topiary mazes that might have been lifted from Alice in Wonderland, and age-old stone walls hiding behind scented roses that fill our noses with thoughts of summertime. Our luxury garden holidays celebrate the perfectly pruned and the deliberately rewilded. They pop a hot tub here, a maze there, and often a heated pool for good measure. These are paradisiacal lands where scrambling clematis reaches skyward and al fresco living is the name of the game.

These secret garden escapes are fit to be pulled from the imagination of Frances Hodgson Burnett herself. We’ve scoured the courtyards and stately grounds of sweet sleep-two cottages and large, luxury country homes all around the nation to find secret boltholes where the emphasis is on green… and pink, and yellow, and blue. Imagine walking barefoot across a dewy lawn with the morning paper and a basket of croissants, sipping a frothy coffee in the dappled light of your own private apple orchard. Or sending all the children (and the dogs, too) out to take turns on the wooden garden swing or get lost in a game of hide-and-seek among the topiaries. The secret's out.