Best English Gardens to Visit

Best English Gardens to Visit

 visit to an English Garden is one of the highlights of any trip to the UK. English garden traditions go back to the botanist explorers, botanical collectors, landscape artists and horticulturalists of the 18th and 19th centuries. Today interest in English gardens crosses all age and social boundaries. The English love a good garden and there are loads of beautiful gardens to visit in England.

1. Hidcote Manor Garden

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Hidcote Manor is an Arts & Crafts masterpiece hidden down a series of twisting country lanes in the Cotswolds. It was designed and developed by Maj. Lawrence Johnston, a wealthy and well educated American, scion of a Baltimore stockbroking family, who became a naturalised British subject and fought with the British Army in the Boer and First World Wars. Johnston was an avid plant collector and horticulturalist who sponsored and participated in plant hunting expeditions around the world to secure rare and exotic species for this extremely pretty garden.

2. RHS Garden Wisley

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The Royal Horticultural Society's Wisley Garden is where keen English gardeners go to be inspired to create their own gardens. Its world famous collection of plants has been developing for more than 100 years and there is always something new to see, any time of year.

Spread out over 240 acres in Woking, Surrey, about an hour's drive from Central London, Wisley is open every day of the year and full of practical garden design ideas and cultivation techniques. Visitors interested in the latest and the best in gardenening should make a beeline for Wisley.

 

 

 

3. Sissinghurst Castle Garden

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Sissinghurst is one of the most romantic of English country gardens. Created by 1920s writer Vita Sackville-West and her husband Sir Harold Nicolson, it is divided into intimate garden "rooms" that offer an array of color all year round. The White Garden is world famous. Sissinghurst Castle Garden is the most visited garden in England. Plan your visit in the afternoon when it is quieter. What you will see is a series of enclosed spaces or garden rooms each styled and planted in a different way but all giving an overwhelming impression of abundance and romanticism. Rare plants mingle with traditional English cottage garden flowers. Surprising views of small hidden spaces and long vistas open up at every turn.

 

 

 

4. Stowe Landscape Gardens

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Stowe Landscape Gardens covers 750 acres and includes 40 listed historic monuments and temples. It is considered one of the most important English landscape gardens and the greatest names in English garden design were involved in its creation. Begun in the 1710s by garden designer Charles Bridgeman, architect John Vanbrugh and garden designers William Kent and James Gibbs participated in shaping it. Between 1741 and 1751, Lancelot "Capability" Brown, was head gardener. A visitor attraction from as early as the mid 18th century, it even inspired a poem by Alexander Pope.

 

 

 

5. Fountains Abbey and Studley Royal Water Garden

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Fountains Abbey and Studley Royal Water Garden together make up one of North Yorkshire's most rewarding visitor attractions. The nearly 900-year-old Cistercian abbey is Britain's largest monastic ruin and Yorkshire's only UNESCO World Heritage site. Studley Royal Water Garden was the life's work of one man, John Aislabie who, after being expelled from Parliament, devoted his last 21 years to creating it. This English garden and the ruins were joined when Aislabie's son bought the monastery to create a picturesque "folly" for the gardens.

 

 

 

6. Nymans Garden

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Nymans Garden in West Sussex is known for its collection of rare plants and its many surprises and delights. One of the first English gardens to be bequeathed to the National Trust in the 1950s, it was created and sustained by three generations of the Messel family, including the famous theatrical designer and rival to Cecil Beaton,Oliver Messel. The design sensibility and talents displayed in this colorful garden, seem to run in the family. Messel's nephew is photographer Lord Snowdon, once the Queen's brother-in-law, and his grand nephew is furniture designer Viscount Linley, Princess Margaret's son.

 

 

 

7. Trelissick Garden, Cornwall

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At this unusual National Trust managed garden in Feock, Cornwall, tender subtropical plants thrive in sheltered glades, cedars and cypress trees tower over immaculate lawns and that otherwise everyday plant, the hydrangea, is cultivated here in some of its rarest varieties. Located at the head of the Fal Estuary, the tiered garden takes full advantage of stunning views of Falmouth Harbor and the wide waterway known as the Carrick Road.

After a visit to the garden, stop to admire the work of Cornwall artists and craftspeople at Trelissick's galleries, or take the guided tour of the Copeland China Collection, the private collection of Trelissick House's owners who are associated with Spode China.

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