The garden at Cogshall Grange: 'A modern work of art, combining shapeliness and serenity'

Several Roman roads cross the Cheshire Plain, then an important region for harvesting salt, a valuable commodity. Indeed, much earlier, salt attracted Bronze Age traders who extracted it from the low-lying plain’s briny springs. From medieval times, the clay-based ground was exploited both for brickmaking and extracting marl, used for centuries to fertilise poor farmland. These local industries left behind thousands of pits that steadily filled with water to become irregular field ponds, still a distinctive feature of the area.

You may not be aware of any of this when driving through the county, for it conceals such secrets behind impenetrable hawthorn hedgerows that border the quiet, slender lanes with cascades of white blossoms in spring. They wind between traditional villages and hamlets, where dwellings are composed of timbers sawn from mighty oaks of centuries past and the famous russet clay bricks dug from the ground. You will, however, sense that this is ancient, pastoral land, still largely peaceful in character, composed of small-scale farms and grand estates, many with renowned gardens, including those at Arley Hall, Cholmondeley Castle and Tatton Park.

Cogshall Grange, set back from one of those pretty lanes, is a much more recent addition to Cheshire’s distinguished horticultural scene, having an intimate, early-21st-century garden of rare quality. Comprising an imposing, late-Georgian lodge and ancillary, connected buildings, the Grange sits near ‘the big house’ of Cogshall Hall, of similar age.

The gardens of both the Hall and the Grange were originally designed as one, by the studio of landscape architect Tom Stuart-Smith, before the properties were separated and sold off individually a few years ago by the previous owner. Nevertheless, they are dramatically different from each other. Whereas the gardens of the Hall are more formal and open in nature, leading seamlessly into substantial parkland, Cogshall Grange has complete possession of the old walled garden, as well as several acres of surrounding park and meadow. In earlier times, the walled garden’s role was traditional, providing year-round food for the Hall. Today, it is a modern work of art, combining shapeliness and serenity, with the emphasis shifting in defined ways through the seasons.

From whichever direction you enter the walled garden, located immediately west of the Grange itself, its compelling eye-catcher is a splendid avenue of cloud-pruned hornbeams, clipped in the Japanese manner known as niwaki. They are lined up alongside the garden room, a modern, glass and bronze-clad extension of the house. Kept shapely by hand-trimming three times a year, the hornbeams line a crisp, flagstone path, the first of several parallel paths that define the main north/south axis, the centrepiece of which is a long, rectangular waterlily pool. Converted from an old swimming pool, its updated role is reflective, mirroring the sculptural hornbeams along one side.

On the other side, the pool’s reflections highlight choice small trees, such as Oriental dogwoods, the stag’s horn sumach Rhus typhina ‘Dissecta’ and the smoke bush Cotinus coggygria, which rise above seas of prairie-style herbaceous perennials and grasses. This west side of the garden builds up steam through summer and autumn, but in spring its gravelled beds are lively with lemon-and-lime eruptions of self-sown euphorbias, scarlet-orange ‘Ballerina’ tulips and violet-blue spires of camassia.

Spring is a special time for the garden, with multiple foliar effects. The pruned hornbeams, for example, wear their ‘clouds’ with all the bright, lime-green freshness that explodes from their newly opened leaves. Forming a carpet beneath them, the underplantings are complementary, with bold groups of bronze-leaved Rodgersia podophylla, coppery-leaved barrenworts — Epimedium x versicolor and Epimedium x rubrum — and unfurling, emerald scrolls of Hosta ‘Devon Green’. They all look splendidly comfortable together.

Between the hornbeams and the pool is another long, rectangular bed, this one simply planted with a sheet of purple moor grass, Molinia caerulea ‘Poul Petersen’. Its calm, summer-meadow effect of gently swaying sheaves is preceded in spring by bright jewels of colourful tulips, erupting out of the new season’s grasses, before they have grown tall. This wonderfully adaptive Molinia tolerates a wide range of soils, from somewhat dry to heavy and damp, but it is all cut back to base by hand at winter’s end. The tulips in this section are reliable Darwin Hybrid and lily-flowered types, in rich colours of mauve, magenta, orange-scarlet and deep plum. Their flowers, on long stems, seem to float in an ethereal layer above the young grass, reflecting prettily in the lily pool.

All of the above areas can be viewed in a continuous scene from a very generous terrace at the garden’s north end. Looking southwards across rippling grasses and watery reflections, this is the place for sun loungers, family dining, entertaining or simply sitting and contemplating the garden’s engagingly calm nature.

Despite its suntrap location, the terrace also provides the option to dine in deep shade, within an abstract, bronze pavilion by the celebrated architect Jamie Fobert. The pavilion reveals its interesting geometry to those who venture inside. Here, you discover its ceiling of colliding triangular planes, like a magnificent, unfolding work of origami cast in sheets of bronze.

‘I have been known to lie on the table to look up into its roof and appreciate all the geometry going on,’ says Julia Kirkham, who has lived at Cogshall Grange for the past four years. A life-long and very knowledgeable gardener and sometime designer and florist, Mrs Kirkham continues to develop the gardens and put her own stamp on the seasonal plantings, always continuing, she says, to appreciate and enhance the walled garden’s tranquil atmosphere.

In particular, she has a special fondness for the summer and autumn flowers and grasses of the New Perennial style, that were a key feature of her former garden for some 24 years, the celebrated Crockmore House, at Henley-on-Thames in Oxfordshire. At Cogshall Grange, she is ‘planting a lot of my tried and trusted favourites — the echinaceas, rudbeckias, asters such as A. x frikartii ‘Mönch’ and ‘Little Carlow’.

Some seven acres of park, meadow and orchard surround the walled garden. Mrs Kirkham has transformed one area near the house into an engaging, hedge-enclosed garden containing a fine greenhouse and raised beds for growing edibles, roses and cutting flowers. ‘This area feels completely different,’ she says. ‘It’s lovely to sit out here in summer with a cup of coffee and feel as if you’re in France; its gravelled ground is a bit like a boules court and it’s a relaxing place to be.’

The park has many beautiful trees and a substantial natural pond near the drive. Did its original excavation provide the clay for the russet bricks of Georgian Cogshall Hall and Grange? That is unconfirmed, but it seems very possible, in this interesting region that is so closely connected with its ground.

This feature originally appeared in the March 18, 2026 issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.