An extract from garden writer Clare Coulson’s new book ‘Wonderlands: British Garden Designers at Home’, which showcases the private gardens of 18 leading landscape architects and garden designers. Miranda Brooks, one of the designers featured, will join Clare in conversation on Tuesday 15 April: book tickets
It’s hard to know where to look, as I am whisked up to the first-floor dressing room of Miranda Brooks’ exquisitely decorated 17th-century farmhouse on the edge of the Slad Valley in Gloucestershire. Inside there are mesmerising details in all directions, but outside the land is calling.
To the east, a velvety lawn sweeps out below us, bordered by long meadow grass, enclosed by hedges of cloud-pruned yew and dissected with an avenue of box-pleached limes. As the lawn slopes away, yew obelisks add another punctuation point, a gateway leading the eye out into the distance. All around are adolescent trees (Miranda has planted thousands) that one day will spread out and ground this young landscape.
On the opposite side of the house to the west, a courtyard, boundaried by mellow stone barns, is dotted with clipped yew topiary, roses, a quartet of pollarded mulberries and two low ovals of osmanthus. Along a gravelled path there are silvery Mediterranean plants and figs in a nod to Miranda’s French architect husband, Bastien Halard.
Through a scallop-topped gate made, like so many things here, by Bastien (‘he can build anything’, she says), there’s an immaculate kitchen garden, arranged with cut-flower beds edged with woven hazel and frothing over with dahlias in coral, scarlet and rich dark reds, anenomes and chocolate cosmos, with clipped beech topiaries standing sentinel in each corner. And on the opposite side, beds of deep green kale, cabbages, beans, carrots and herbs. Beyond it all there are tantalising views of the distant valley.
Although relatively new, this is a garden full of transporting views. But when they arrived here from Brooklyn with their two daughters in the winter of 2019, there was nothing of note in the garden. The land, hard grazed for decades as a dairy farm, was a blank canvas, and so too was the house, which had no architectural details or ‘good rooms’. Bastien masterminded its renovation, with tactile surfaces and beautifully conceived and crafted details at every turn. ‘After hundreds of years of being a very hardworking farmhouse, the house began to feel sort of pretty’, says Miranda. ‘There’s a language here that we’re both trying to find all the time.’ That consideration of materials, textures and how everything feels extends outside too, so that each bench, weathered gate or stone step is carefully considered within the context of this landscape.
Their search for the house was exhaustive – and exhausting. For years holidays were spent scouring England for a suitable project before a friend, the artist Dan Chadwick, sent a blurry photo of the farmhouse that could soon be up for sale. On a walk with the writer Plum Sykes, she managed to take a sneak peak. ‘There was masses of barbed wire, and all the tractors were parked on the side, and I saw into the courtyard, that was just concrete and bales of straw and machinery. But it was magic.’ Back home in New York she wrote to the owners but never heard anything back.
Two years later – and on the verge of giving up – she was visiting Sykes, who asked what had happened with the farm, and then persuaded her that they should go to the house right away. The owners remembered Miranda’s letter but it hadn’t been the right time to sell. Now things had changed. The following day they went back and shook on a deal in the field.
The tractors remain in the farmyard (collecting them is an obsession for Bastien) along with a collection of animals, including five horses, a flock of Bantam hens, Indian Runner ducks, two fluffy cats, and three dogs including the impossibly beautiful slate-grey whippet, Cuckoo.
Miranda, who is also a contributing editor at American Vogue, is something of an enigma. She is jaw-droppingly elegant (she is rarely out of her signature corduroy jodhpurs that are as practical for riding as they are for gardening) and has a cool English reserve. She grew up on a small farm in Hertfordshire, where her American mother who, determined that she’d never have to visit a shop, ensured they were self-sufficient. ‘I don’t know how she did it, but it was always our own bread, our own butter, and we ate our own meat and and we were organic.’ Gardening was sometimes administered as a punishment – but plants were also a refuge. By the time she was studying art history at the Courtauld Institute in London, she would visit nurseries to decompress: ‘I never connected that until so much later. It actually just made me feel good being around plants.’
On holiday one summer in the south of France she met David Chipperfield who dispensed with any notion she had of training as an architect (like her father, John Sergeant) and instead proposed that she design landscapes. As part of her postgraduate degree in landscape architecture at Birmingham she apprenticed with Arabella Lennox-Boyd.
In the early 90s as a newly trained designer, she moved to New York with her first husband, Christopher Brooks, and set up her own studio. There she found making gardens was a very different ballgame, but she got her first break creating a garden for Anna Wintour in the West Village, which was followed by the scheme for Wintour’s expansive country estate on Long Island.
Miranda’s gardens are distinctive yet completely timeless. With their focus on evergreen structure, meadows and mown paths, tumbling roses and pretty plant palettes, her designs have a deep sense of the pastoral and an intense connectivity to nature. It’s a style that she thinks emerged in some part due to her homesickness living as an expat in New York. ‘I actually always wanted to be back’, she says. ‘So I was trying to create something that felt softer and romantic and looser than you would typically see in America.’
Being based in New York came with its own challenges of a more limited plant palette and demanding climate, but it also put her at a distance from her design peers so that in many ways she was liberated to create her own aesthetic. Despite relocating to England, her business is still based in New York and her worklife is spent on Zoom calls to her studio and clients and on trips back to oversee projects.
And there are still many more plans for her own 36 acres. But this is also a shared endeavour for the couple, both of them are hands on and practical, sculpting this land into a future idyll. For Bastien, who grew up in a botanical garden outside Paris and spent holidays in his grandparents’ home, Châteaurenaud, in the middle of France, planting trees and working the land on tractors is a passion. He comes from a long, storied line of designers and decorators. ‘But none of this did I really know’, reveals Miranda, ‘when I met a 24-year-old Frenchman in New York.’ In 2023 the couple launched their own collection of outdoor fabrics, Catswood.
As you’d expect in a household of designers, there are creative differences too. They’ve fought over the immaculate osmanthus ovals that bring graphic structure to the inner courtyard (‘he thinks the courtyard should be empty’), and the proximity of a beguiling walled garden of single yellow roses, clematis, scabious, geraniums, selenium, Alchemilla mollis and Valeriana officinalis to the front of the house – named the granny garden for its pastel palette. The colour-themed gardens, including a pretty red terrace close to the kitchen, are inspired by the chakras, and all of the land here is managed biodynamically.
To the south of the house Miranda has added a calm and soothing garden in memory of her friend Stella Tennant, with multistem trees, clipped beech topiary and a curving landform surrounding a circular pool, designed to reflect the night sky. Soon after moving in, the couple installed a small lake high above the house, and they are currently grappling with the flow of water through the land – wherever they dig they seem to hit a natural spring. ‘I’ve got this very misguided idea that we’re in the hardest phase, because everything’s young’, adds Miranda. ‘And that once the wildflowers are more established, and once the trees aren’t needing to be watered so much, it’s going to become easier.’ Like all of her projects, she is guided here by the spirit of the place and how the land speaks to her. ‘Because I only want to be right for the place, I’m not going in with an ego.’
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Clare Coulson and Miranda Brooks will be in conversation on Tuesday 15 April at 7pm discussing Miranda’s career in landscape and her latest project developing the gardens and landscape at her home in Gloucestershire: book tickets
Wonderlands: British Garden Designers at Home will be available for purchase at the event.