Great Gardens of Southern England - Horticulture historical and contemporary

The coach leaves central London at 10.00am. Hampton Court Palace is a peerless early-Tudor, late-Stuart royal residence which is surrounded by some exceptional historical gardens: the formal canals dating to 1670, the Privy Garden recreated in its 1701 iteration with evergreen cones and spheres and seasonal flowers, colourful sunken gardens with ponds, extensive rose garden, even larger kitchen garden and the world’s largest vine. Continue to the outskirts of Winchester where two nights are spent.

Two gardens today with collections of international importance. Drive through the New Forest to Exbury Gardens, the creation from 1919 of Lionel Rothschild, ‘banker by hobby but gardener by profession’. The scale is astonishing, with 200 acres of rare and magnificent trees, but it is for the rhododendrons and azaleas that it is famous. The walled gardens of Mottisfont Abbey shelter the national collection of Old English roses, for which Graham Stuart Thomas scoured the country in the decades after the War.

Medieval and Victorian, Arundel Castle is an impressive backdrop to lawns, sylvan groves and formal gardens. The Collector Earl’s Garden designed in 2008 by Isabel and Julien Bannerman is a witty interpretation of a what might have been created by the 17th-cent. connoisseur Earl, with waterworks and Italianate architecture. Parham House is a privately owned Elizabethan mansion with horticultural delights of the highest order in a sequence of walled gardens. First of five nights in Tunbridge Wells.

In Charleston Farmhouse almost every surface is decorated by Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, whose country residence it was. The garden was redesigned in 1918 by their close friend and art critic, Roger Fry. The Stephenson Clarke family has lived at Borde Hill since 1893 and continues to tend and develop an exquisite series of garden rooms, periodically bringing in leading designers. Beguilingly beautiful rose garden by Robin Williams, well named Paradise Walk, peaceful Italian Garden, dells with exotica, all loosely linked by lawns and woodland walks.

At Scotney Castle, the theorist of the Picturesque, William Sawrey Gilpin, melded the medieval ruins, Jacobean mansion, quarry, pond and planting into a truly Romantic vision. Largely the creation of garden writer Christopher Lloyd, Great Dixter is a bewitchingly original and abundant horticultural phenomenon. The shrill juxtapositions of hues are particularly memorable and the density of planting is extraordinary, bulging to block paths and rising to overtop the tallest visitor.

Hever Castle was home to two of Henry VIII’s wives, while the gardens were made for William Waldorf Astor from 1903. The scale is breathtaking: a thousand men laboured for four years to create a 35-acre lake, 4-acre Italian Garden, topiary, valley garden, Tudor garden and to plant numerous noble trees. Dating to 1560, the enchanting series of walled gardens at Penshurst Place have great historical importance, while the modern iteration has a variety of characters and moods.

Not particularly large, Pashley Manor nevertheless has rich variety of terrain, layout and planting, with inspired juxtapositions of flowers and colours. An utter delight. Created by Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West after 1930, Sissinghurst is the most famous of all English gardens. Embodying ‘the strictest formality of design with the maximum informality of planting’, brick walls and yew hedges create a series of sharply differentiated compartments, none more lovely (or renowned) than the White Garden.

Ludwig Messel bought Nymans in 1890 and with head gardener James Comber created one of the great gardens of the world. Wonder follows wonder, surprise succeeds surprise, from the pinetum to the rose garden, sumptuous borders of annuals to rock and heath gardens. The tour finishes before 3.00pm at Gatwick Airport Railway Station from where there are frequent trains to several stations in London (30–40 mins) and elsewhere.

Note that appointments for some visits cannot be confirmed until January 2026.