According to Minnie Aumonier, “when the world wearies and society fails to satisfy, there is always a garden”.

You can’t go to the Cotswolds in south-central England without going to Barnsley House and talking about, reading about and eating in its famous garden.

Four miles northeast of Cirencester and 100 west of London, the 1776 Georgian “William & Mary” rectory boasts the definitive British garden.

Designed in the 1950s by Rosemary Verey – who advised Britain’s Prince Charles and singer Sir Elton John on their back gardens – it’s all about long and short views, integrated tones, leafy greens, colour-coordinated vegetables, herb borders, aromatic in-fills, pea tunnels, laburnum walks, stone sculptures, frog fountains, London planes, Turkey oaks, espaliered fruit, meticulously pleated hedges and lovingly plashed trees.

Food quality is, unsurprisingly, a priority.

Wander around the knot garden. Stroll through the self-seeders and spreaders and around the seasonal containers.

Amble through flowery meads and all the companion planting, and, by the time you get to the potager with all its year-round visual and edible appeal, most of your jaded, townie senses will have been restored.

A potager is the French term for an ornamental vegetable or kitchen garden. The historical design derives from French Renaissance gardens, especially Chateau de Villandry in the Loire.

Head gardener Richard Gatenby’s iconic Barnsley House garden supplies executive chef Graham Grafton’s kitchen, as well as The Village Pub over the road.

The menus consist of Cornish scallops, Dorset dressed crab and Fowey mussels in artisanal Cotswold cider.

There can’t be many places where you can name-drop a plate of pulled pork – the meat is reared on actress Liz Hurley’s former farm – or end your meal sitting in front of a “Stinking Bishop”.

This is some Perry-soaked local cheese used to bring back Wallace from the dead in the animated film Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit.

The Stinking Bishop is often chased in the bar by mules – Moscow mule cocktails, that is.

There can’t be many places where you can name-drop a plate of pulled pork – it’s from Liz Hurley’s former farm

Ably assisted by Italian waiter Marco Dalmasso, Barnsley’s affable Polish barman Tomek Pigan conducts mixology classes in highballs and hurricanes with cocktails ranging from Rhubarb Vodka to Orange Blossom Fizz, Espresso Martini and elderflower Barnsley Refresher.

The 18-room hotel has a 30-seater cinema as well as a spa and skincare centre with an outdoor hydrotherapy pool; reviving, re-energising and mind-calming Aromatherapy Associates treatments; and an indoor herbivarium from which you emerge smelling like a sage, rather than talking like one.

The main house has attic suites and rooms have walk-in showers, side by side clawfoot rolltop baths and double vanities. One room has its own conservatory and another an en-suite discoball. You can also stay in a rustic chic and very chintz-free Potting Shed and be pampered just like the local seeds.

Barnsley House has some horticulturally inclined neighbours, too.

Barnsley House is an 18-room hotel in the Cotswolds, England. Photos: Barnsleyhouse.com

North and central Gloucestershire’s other great gardens include the grade II-listed Ampney Brook House, Beverston Castle near Tetbury, Eastleach House with its iris and peony borders, Berkeley Castle and its butterfly house, the topiary of Rodmarton Manor, Westonbirt Arboretum and Hilles House, which has planting inspired by William Morris’s Kelmscott designs.

The 19th-century arts and crafts guru described Bibury – three miles down the road – as “the most beautiful village in England”.

It is a designated “twee zone” and official “architectural conservation area” with its rubble limestone church, 17th-century weavers’ cottages, Roman villa, Jacobean Bibury court, brown trout Coln river, water meadows and Macaroni Downs where the first horse racing club held meets from 1681.

At the bottom of the lane right behind Barnsley House is the “Herbs For Healing” field nursery owned by Davina Wynne-Jones, the daughter of Rosemary Verey.

Since 2005, four years after her mother’s death, Davina has grown and sold healing plants and sharing her interest in shamanism.

She holds plant spirit gatherings and offers workshops where you can make your own herbal infusions and tinctures, geranium face cream, calendula soap and learn how wild feverfew can be used as an antihistamine and that yarrow is great for earaches.

You can also have the hands on experience of discovering the Cotswolds is good for cracked nipples. Or, at least, its homegrown potager comfrey, anyway.

www.barnsleyhouse.com