Country houses for sale with outstanding gardens

(Image credit: Jonathan Stone)

published 1 April 2017

Hampshire, offers in excess of £4 million

Six-bedroom, Grade II-listed, Tudor The Priory is positioned around an immaculate courtyard knot garden with intricate box hedging and topiary contrasting with 15th-century ruins beyond. Set discreetly off Odiham village high street, near Hook, there are nearly five acres of meticulously cared-for formal gardens, incorporating a large pond to the west with free-roaming ducks and geese and a central weeping willow. Strutt & Parker (01256 702 892)

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Oxfordshire, £850,000

A sizeable thatched house at the tip of the Cotswolds, near Banbury, Gowers Close looks out through large leaded windows onto a terrace and a landscaped south-facing garden that has featured in several magazines; the vendor is a gardening writer. It has five bedrooms, wisteria, a vine-covered pergola for alfresco dining, shrub borders, lavender, box, yew and a vegetable patch. Savills (01295 228 000)

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Northumberland, £4.5 million

The twin-turreted treehouse in the three-acre gardens at Springfield House, Corbridge, is an impressive piece of architecture by the same company that built the famous Alnwick Garden treehouse. It connects to the main house via a stone terrace. The principal gardens lie to the south at the front of the six-bedroom Victorian home, where there are open lawns, an all-weather tennis court, rhododendrons and tall evergreen trees. Sanderson Young (0191–223 3500)

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Cheshire, £3.995 million

Said to be one of the most impressive Arts-and-Crafts houses in the country, Thieves Hollow, near Prestbury, has seven bedrooms and a plant room and sits in 10 acres of beautifully landscaped grounds with southerly views. There’s also a lodge with permission for a swimming pool, gymnasium and games room. Jackson-Stops & Staff (01625 54 0340)

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Annunciata grew up in the wilds of Lancashire and now lives in Hampshire with a husband, two daughters and an awful pug called Parsley. She’s been floating round the Country Life office for more than a decade, her work winning the Property Magazine of the Year Award in 2022 (Property Press Awards). Before that, she had a two-year stint writing ‘all kinds of fiction’ for The Sunday Times Travel Magazine, worked in internal comms for Country Life’s publisher (which has had many names in recent years but was then called IPC Media), and spent another year researching for a historical biographer, whose then primary focus was Graham Greene and John Henry Newman and whose filing system was a collection of wardrobes and chests of drawers filled with torn scraps of paper. During this time, she regularly gave tours of 17th-century Milton Manor, Oxfordshire, which may or may not have been designed by Inigo Jones, and co-founded a literary, art and music festival, at which Johnny Flynn headlined. When not writing and editing for Country Life, Annunciata is also a director of TIN MAN ART, a contemporary art gallery founded in 2021 by her husband, James Elwes.