40 years on, Raymond Blanc’s Oxford playground keeps the green dream alive

Even with its four-decade run, Le Manoir aux Quat’Saisons can still wander through your mind like yesterday’s daydream. Kettle grills are stationed next to patches of lavender that fragrance the grounds with the delicate, sweet smell of the purple shrub. There are greenhouses and tunnel cloches, and the vegetable garden has rows of climbing French beans and celeriac, rhubarb chard and beet varietals, thick stalks of little gem, and towers of sweetcorn that ripen in mid-summer. Bee villages provide honey for the hotel and restaurant kitchen, and a wildflower meadow offers respite from your work phone. A landscaped gulley at the northernmost point of the terrain breeds parcels of wild mushrooms. The heritage orchards – thick with more than 2,000 trees – bear apples that have pedigree in places such as Normandy, Minnesota, and the Czech Republic; the Egremont russet and Ribston pippin are great for morning juice, the Chivers delight and Lord Lambourne are perfect for filling tarts. Life here has a storybook quality.

The main entryway into the grounds, where guests walk down a small avenue of lavender patches.

In many ways, the property’s custodian, Raymond Blanc, though raised in a small village in eastern France, belongs firmly on the Mount Rushmore of English cooking. He is broadly accepted as the first in the country to successfully fuse luxury cooking with premium accommodation, a winning mix that is seen at destinations such as Simon Rogan’s three-starred L’Enclume, in Cumbria, and The Pig at Combe, as well as places further afield – Brae, the Australian restaurant that revolves around an organic farm and olive grove, is perhaps the most famous of the lot.

For four decades, chef Raymond Blanc has been teaching the UK how to dine well and sleep well.

Before its fashionability, Blanc was an early adopter of sustainability and organic produce and living off the land, the never-fading principal spirit that runs throughout the property’s 27 acres. He understood that vegetables – like wine – have bad years as well as good ones. He was the one to lean towards freshness and locavorism, the one who knew the fisherman who caught the turbot, the one scattering seeds across the soil, the one pulling up parsnips and carrots at the right time, handling them like delicate porcelain when taking them straight to the kitchen before slicing them up, cooking them and serving them to diners that day. He nurtured the idea that food was celebratory and that people would invest whole paycheques on memorable evenings of great eating. Certain gifted young chefs – Marco Pierre White and Michael Caines among them – studied on his line before becoming names in their own right. During his childhood, Blanc and his siblings would garden and cook and locate partridge eggs and collect buckets of wildflowers and berries while friends played football.

Should you find yourself behind the wheel, cruising through Great Milton – a small village east of Oxford that’s rich with springs – and are flush with a day or so of an empty schedule, you could do worse than pull up to Le Manoir’s cast-iron gates and book yourself a key to one of the guest rooms stationed throughout the hotel, the footprint of which the grounds convene around and which also has use as a cookery and gardening school. The Botticelli room is green and naturalistic and features a spiral staircase linking bedroom and bathroom. You can temporarily reside in a restored 15th-century dovecote. L’Orangerie has a private garden entrance and a château feel. And the bay windows within the Lavande Suite – you really should go for this room – face out on to a lavender path. All options, rather sweetly, come with a welcome gift of lemon cake, a creation of rich, concentrated citrus.

Afternoons here might be spent appreciating the sculptures fashioned by Lloyd Le Blanc and Judith Holmes Drewry, which are located across the grounds, or looking at the pens of future-rare-breed livestock that are raised on the land. And, at dinner, you will encounter a display of special-occasion-meal earmarks – a plump segment of Loch Duart salmon sweetened with the flavours of elderflower and yuzu; three or four tiny parcels of agnolotti stuffed with honey and ricotta and paired with a miniature garden of vegetables and basil; and one night there may be a considerable cut of roasted lobster with a precise arrangement of gelled mango, lime and cardamom.

Depending on the time of year, there could also be new-season Cornish lamb – a composition of the crimsoned meat that’s picked up the flavours of the fantastic pastures on which the animal lived, and made with courgette purée and a spoon of ratatouille.

The Lavande Suite

The configuration of the dining-room’s fronds and trees, natural light and deeply cushioned seating seems as if it could be a West Coast dining room, and it certainly helps ease you into the dormant state that the kitchen is lulling you into. A sweet course featuring chocolate and coconut may give way to a pan-fried apricot, wild strawberries, a splash of kirsch and some meringue poached in vanilla. End the night with a few substantial slices and smears of spreadable British and French cheeses, and then it’s time to heave yourself into bed, if you manage to make it past your living-room sofa.

This, if you hadn’t picked up, is an easy place to like.

In the morning, a breakfast of eggs and fruit, a walk around the herb harden and pear wall, a game or two of pétanque and croquet and one final glimpse at the apricot trees on the Oxford-stone walls should set you well on your way for a departure you wish would never come.

Departing Le Manoir, in many ways, can feel like leaving grandma’s after a long weekend of care and nurturing. Oh to be a beet planted firmly into the garden floor.

• Church Road, Great Milton, Oxford, OX44 7PD, belmond.com

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