Trug of love

The Romans had it right, didn't they? Dotted all over Gloucestershire are the remains of their mosaic-floored villas, equipped with fancy bathing facilities. On a blazing April day, looking out over just-ploughed fields, with verges of delicate cowslips and cow parsley, you can understand exactly why the Romans settled for the glorious beauty of the Cotswolds.

I spent a spring weekend in Bruern, which is actually in Oxfordshire, and would happily have moved in for the whole summer. In the grounds of an exquisite English country house, former stables, mills, and wood stores have been converted into 12 luxury holiday cottages, each surrounded by enough garden to sustain the impression of privacy. It's beside a river, a perfect place to unwind, watch birds making nests, and read a book. Garden guides are provided in a handy trug, along with thick gloves in case you get weeding withdrawal. And it only takes a minute to throw yourself into confusion: go out, and see some of England's best gardens? Or stay in, and enjoy the illusion that this one is all your own?

You could follow the classic Cotswold itinerary, heading straight for Hidcote, the National Trust's most visited garden. 129,000 other people want to go there too, so try and get there early - it opens at 10am. However I'd be inclined to go for a slightly different tactic, particularly if you're with a non-gardener. Cotswold Wildlife Park's deliciously tropical landscape is in the hands of head gardener Tim Miles, who came to Burford via the Lost Gardens of Heligan and London Zoo. In the last nine years he has transformed the park - which is home to zebras and rhinos, as well as meerkats and sloths - into a lushly Edenic scene. Miles's planting has real physical appeal - two baseball-hatted boys bend their hands to cup the splayed white tulips.

Many of the tenderest plants remain under cover till May, like huge aeoniums. In the meantime there is still lots to see: frothy fronds of bronze fennel and spikey agaves cut fine silhouettes against the spring sky. As do those cute little meerkats, who sit on their log watching a group of fighter jets from RAF Brize Norton in deep concentration. You can gawp at the planting while the rest of your party watches the animals, which makes for a fairly perfect day out.

My boyfriend and I also spent a sunny hour visiting a garden that no longer exists. If that sounds weird, here's how it works: Chipping Campden was the site of a grand Jacobean house that burnt down in 1645. The owner, Sir Baptist Hicks, was an ambitious haberdasher who wanted a proper title. Viewed from the lower churchyard today, you can see the fancy park lodges and banqueting houses, all that now remains of his elaborate scheme.

It requires more concentration to imagine the splendid hillside gardens which once spread across this steep field. According to the illustrations, Sir Baptist was an early exponent of gardens-for- peerages, sucking up to the King with a double parterre in the shape of the new Union Jack. As James had been responsible for the Act of Union in 1607, this was horticulture at its oiliest. But the gesture seems to have done the trick, for Sir Baptist became a Viscount. Beautiful drawings of the gardens, and a good explanation of how they worked, appear in Timothy Mowl's Historic Gardens of Gloucestershire, Tempus, [pound]17.99. (If only Chipping Campden had marked the anniversary by putting the parterres back for summer...)

Most perfect Cotswold garden of all, in my opinion, is Rodmarton Manor. Opening for the NGS, the stableyard echoed with the quiet chat of people enjoying tea and cakes out of a rather 1950s outbuilding. The old-fashioned spell was completed by a Spitfire turning slow loops overhead.

Rodmarton is still used by a family and is gardened with a slightly neglectful love, but the detail is compelling. Tiny violas creeping round lichened stone steps, pollarded hornbeams framing the field views beyond, and asparagus spears pushing through in the kitchen garden. The herbaceous borders are spectacular. I like a garden with character, where you can feel one mind at work behind it all, directing and shaping, and possibly doing all the weeding too - I guess it's garden auteur theory. Rodmarton is strongly individual, with its stone troughs and proto-peacocks emerging out of the box, waiting for their tails to grow.

If you are feeling very lazy, you could enjoy garden delights just staying in Bruern itself. It has lovely borders of its own, as well as a gorgeous cutting garden. One of the greatest pleasures of our stay was pretending we had our very own Cotswold home (particularly after inspecting prices in the local estate agents). I stepped into the morning air to trail my fingers through beds filled with the snowflake, leucojum, the blue spikes of camassias, and luscious pink tulips. I felt distinctly proprietorial. It must be even more beautiful in rose season, for the beds are stuffed with the new shoots of 130 different cultivars.