Jade Holland Cooper and Julian Dunkerton first met eight years ago at a hotel bar in Cheltenham.

She’s the founder of the Princess of Wales’s favourite heritage brand Holland Cooper, and he’s the millionaire co-owner of the clothing label Superdry. So, naturally, he owned the bar. They fell in love and moved in together, settling down in Grade-II listed Dowdeswell Court, an 1830s manor that he’d been restoring nearby.

What he hadn’t yet touched was the garden. The 80-acre parkland had been the site of a former nursing home and needed serious pruning and primping. 

In came designers Lulu Urquhart and Adam Hunt to run the rule over the  remnants of an Italian pleasure garden, envisaging instead a series of elegant lawns, beds and ponds that would sweep from the house to the brook and two lakes at the bottom of the hill below. After that came Holland Cooper’s mother, landscape and garden designer Miranda Holland,and the four gardeners they employ, to manage the project.

‘We didn’t want to formalise too much,’ says Holland Cooper. ‘Although the house from the outside is quite formal, the garden is relaxed.’ The result is a bucolic landscape bursting with colour. 

Pink ‘Gertrude Jekyll’ roses ramble through the beds. Yellow laburnums grow like sunbeams while vines and peach trees that have been trained to form a screen fill the oak-framed glasshouse.

The key to a big garden, says Holland Cooper, is to have anchor points: arresting ‘moments’ at which the eye pauses while it makes its way around the garden.

Bay trees rise among geraniums, delphiniums, French lavender and martagon lilies

In the summer, drooping purple martagon lilies nestle among the lavender-blue nepetas and towering eight-foot delphiniums around the lily pond by the house. Then there’s the olive terrace, where ancient olive trees from Saint Tropez overlook the lakes. 

The children’s garden – for Saphaïa, three, and Jamie, 15 months – surrounded by crocuses and fritillaries, is where the chickens are kept.

‘Gardens are different to the retail business,’ says Holland Cooper. ‘They’re much more forgiving, they’re slow and not to be rushed.’ One of her favourite spots is the Wedding Walk, a boulevard of lime trees. When she and Dunkerton tied the knot in 2018, every guest gifted the couple a lime tree (Craig David sang and Idris Elba DJd). In the spring, 250,000 ‘Thalia’ daffodils, 60,000 snowdrops and 10,000 small irises burst from the ground.

Roses ramble up a wall by an Italian urn reflected in the swimming pool;

Martagon lilies, which grow wild from Portugal to Mongolia, have been cultivated in the UK for centuries

 Geranium pratense ‘Mrs Kendall Clark’ has a delicate vein pattern

There have been setbacks. As well as lime trees, they have lemon trees. But lemon trees don’t cope well with the winter weather, so they lost a few. They now store 20 in a glass-fronted garage from October to around April, and move them back  out into the garden after the last frost.

A modern sculpture tops an old sundial base

Then there was the ecological survey that revealed the grounds were home to five species on the International Union for Conservation of Nature Red List of Threatened Species – three species of bat, great crested newts and, in the lakes, white-clawed crayfish – so the masterplan needed to make provisions for all of these (they set up newt and bat houses, as well as 20 hedgehog and owl boxes, which are tended by Holland Cooper’s father and her daughter Saphaïa).

There are also the waterways, which must be kept healthy. UV light and aerator systems ensure the water is clean and healthy for the fish and other species living in the ponds.

It was all worth it. The bottom of the garden, where the trees frame the valley beyond, is Holland Cooper’s happy place, especially at sunrise or sunset.

‘Sitting there, surrounded by wildflowers, wild garlic, bluebells and weeping willows that hang out over the lake, you don’t feel like you’re in a garden at all.’

Wisteria coats a historic balustrade

Cornus and cistus thrive by the steps to the pool