Amid Somerset’s rolling valleys, The Newt and its estate constitute a hallowed tract of earth on which visionary gardeners have left their mark over centuries. Margaret Hobhouse instilled the Victorian ideal, with colour, a greenhouse and beech, oak, pine, walnut and cedar trees. Penelope Hobhouse gave the land a new life in the 1970s, followed by Nori and Sandra Pope, maestros of exuberant hues. The 2013 arrival of current owners Karen Roos and Koos Bekker – creators of Babylonstoren in South Africa – heralded a five-year era of landscaping under French designer Patrice Taravella. So much is folded into their vaulting vision: aside from the garden restaurant and three museums (including a replica Romano-British villa), there is a working farm, a no-dig kitchen garden, orchards, a stag-filled wood- land, pastures for British White cows, an apple-tree maze and abundant ornamental planting. The great outdoors pair with faultless, design-forward interiors in rooms that are divided between the 17th-century Hadspen House, stables and outbuildings, and The Farmyard, a far-flung converted dairy. The D-shaped, walled Parabola garden is an ode to apples; its outside is coated with fanned trellises of plums, figs, crab apples and jostaberries. The free-flow Arts and Crafts-y Cottage Garden ripples with chocolate cosmos in high summer, its dinky thatched cottage packed with sprays; the Victorian Terrace is a colour-coordinated structured feast. The “gourd caterpillar tunnel” peaks in the warmer months, when it’s a riot of tromboncino, bottleneck, speckled swan and rainbow ornamentals, every inch bursting with luscious droopiness. Lydia Bell
Price: Doubles from £520
Website: thenewtinsomerset.com
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